Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century | 
My 2021 Reading Roundup:
23 titles total
3 e-books
1 borrowed/returned
1 read/gifted
My Top Six:
1. Gods of the Upper Air by #CharlesKing (tagged)
2. The House in the Cerulean Sea by #TJKlune
3. The Death and Life of the Great Lakes by #DanEgan
4. They Both Die at the End by #AdamSilvera
5. The Thursday Murder Club by #RichardOsman
6. How to Hide an Empire by #DanielImmerwahr
Honorary Mention:
Some Things I Still Can't Tell You by #MishaCollins
pick⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ I highly recommend this! Such timely and important work!
~
𝘎𝘰𝘥𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘜𝘱𝘱𝘦𝘳 𝘈𝘪𝘳 is about a small group of anthropologists, all inspired and anchored by Franz Boas, who worked passionately and tirelessly to ultimately dismantle what science and policy of the time held dear: that our worth and our abilities are defined by our race, our sex, and our nationality.
(Continued in comments)
I had an unexpected laugh this morning!
After discussing Edward Sapir's criticism of Margaret Mead (his former lover, who ultimately rejected him) via a "thinly veiled attack on 'free women' who failed to understand that jealousy was a universal human emotion", Charles King wrote:
"Mead responded in kind. Jealousy, she said in her own article on the subject, was in her experience frequently found among old men with small endowments." (p. 246) ?
What is it about a person eating alone and reading a book that says "talk to me about anything and everything"??
Took myself out to a late lunch, thinking I could squeeze in some reading (I am so into the tagged book) but NOOOOO...my waiter wants to talk to me about the Gabby Petito case!
I literally had my face in my book, and he came up and asked, "So are you following that girl's case?" ?
Photo of my fabulous Nutella & banana crepe.
"Every society trains itself to see categories. Whom you love, whom you hate, the kind of person you'd be disgusted to see your daughter marry—none of these problems follow universal rules of attraction or repulsion. They are instead notions fired in the crucible of culture. The mobilization of sham science to justify bigotry might be said to be a deep characteristic of only one culture: that of the developed West." (p. 179)
This book is right up my alley! My little world-traveling heart and anthropology minor self are loving it so far! Particularly the revelation of "Herzensbildung" being interpreted here as "the training of one's heart to see the humanity of another."
That is the main reason I so love to travel and to encourage others to do so. As King writes of Boas, "changing his place in the world had changed his perspective on it."
pickGood history of the Boas circle of anthropologists and their biographies. Boas emphatically refuted claims that one race was superior than another throughout the early to mid 1900s. Little long in some parts, but it encompassed a lot of material. If you like how research is done on cultures or history of the science of race, this is a good pick.
pickA great read if you are interested in the beginning of Anthropology and Boas, Mead and the fight for women to be taken seriously in the field.
There was not as much information about Zora as I would have liked. But overall it is a good and easy to follow read.
pickThis is great book about the work of Frank Boas, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Zora Neale Hurston, etc. Their approach to anthropology upended the dominant theories of their time (late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century) which depended upon false notions of fixed racial and gender capacities (as well as fixed social norms). It‘s a very enlightening read.
