Gods of the Upper Air

Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century by Charles King, Vintage Books Edition, 2019. 

Anthropology Comes to America

Franz Boas was a German Jew who emigrated to America. He founded anthropology in America. Boas did field work on Canada's Baffin Island with the indigenous Inuits. He also visited Canada's Vancouver Island, where he studied: the Tlingit and Kwakiutl indigenous peoples.

Issues Addressed by Franz Boas and His Students

• Whether differences between peoples originate in heredity or culture

• Whether all cultures are equally valuable, or some cultures are more valuable than others.

Students of Boas and Other Interesting People Discussed in This Book

• William Bateson, the scientists who coined the word genetics

• Ruth Benedict, student of Franz Boas, who wrote Patterns of Culture, comparing Zuñi, Dobu and Kwakiutl peoples

• Allan Bloom, who criticized the cultural relativism of the Boas school

• Charles Benedict Davenport, advocate for eugenics

• William P. Dillingham, who founded a commission to restrict immigration from inferior races

• James Owen Dorsey, who studied the Omaha Indians who spoke Siouan and Poneu

•  Reo Fortune, who visited the Dobu Islands of Melanesia

• Clifford Geertz did not believe in Western exceptionalism

• Arthur de Gobineau, who promoted the supremacy of the Aryan race

• Madison Grant, who wrote the 1916 book The Passing of the Great Race

• Granville Stanley Hall, psychologist who studied the development of adolescents

• Robert Seido Hashima, Japanese-American internee at Poston, AZ relocation camp

• Zora Neale Hurston, novelist and student of Franz Boas

• Alfred Louis Kroeber, cultural anthropologist at the University of California

• Bronisław Malinowski, Polish anthropologist who visited the Trobriand Islands

• Margaret Mead, student of Franz Boas, who studied adolescence in Polynesia

• Annie Nathan Meyer, philanthropist and founder of Barnard College

• John Wesley Powell, who explored the Colorado River

• Frederic Ward Putnam, curator of Harvard’s Peabody Museum

• Edward Sapir, student of Boas, who studied languages of indigenous peoples