CANR
WORK TITLE: GODS OF THE UPPER AIR
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.charles-king.net/
CITY: Washington
STATE:
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: CANR 290
http://explore.georgetown.edu/people/kingch/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born December 3, 1967; married Margaret Paxson (a writer and anthropologist).
EDUCATION:University of Arkansas, B.A. (summa cum laude), 1990; Oxford University, M.Phil., 1992, D.Phil., 1995.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, editor, lecturer, and educator. Georgetown University, Washington, DC, Edmund A. Walsch School of Foreign Service, former Ion Ratiu Professor of Romanian Studies, professor of international affairs, professor of government, and chair of faculty, 1996—. New College, Oxford University, Rank and Manning fellow; International Institute for Strategic Studies, London, England, research associate; Kennan Institute, scholar; Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, DC, fellow.
MEMBER:Phi Beta Kappa.
AWARDS:Marshall scholarship; Fulbright scholarship; Book of the Year designation, Moscow Times, for The Ghost of Freedom; National Jewish Book Award for Odessa; three-time recipient of teaching awards from Georgetown University; Dean’s Medal, Georgetown University; McGuire Medal, Georgetown University.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals and academic journals, including Foreign Policy, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, International Security, World Politics, Slavic Review, Times Literary Supplement, Harvard International Review, Russian Review, Foreign Affairs, Journal of Southeast Europe and Black Sea Studies, National Interest, Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics, and PS: Political Science and Politics; contributor to chapters in academic books.
SIDELIGHTS
Charles King is a writer, editor, lecturer, and educator with expertise in Romanian and Eastern European history and society. He is a professor of government and international affairs and a former Ion Ratiu Professor of Romanian Studies at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. He is also chair of faculty at Georgetown’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service.
With Neil J. Melvin, King is the editor of Nations Abroad: Diaspora Politics and International Relations in the Former Soviet Union. In this volume, the editors and contributors address the issues of diasporic ethnic and cultural communities. The case studies examine the diasporas of Jews and Armenians as well as difficult and nuanced questions about what constitutes a diaspora. Reviewer Ray Taras, commenting in American Political Science Review, noted that these questions include: “Is any group of coethnics living abroad a diaspora? Are coethnics living in contiguous territory but separated by an international border (or, in the case of Tatarstan-Bashkortostan, an internal, administrative boundary) to be differentiated into nationals and diaspora?” Further, is any native population living outside its homeland representative of a diaspora community? The editors and authors address these questions and provide “incisive answers,” Taras wrote.
“Perhaps the most important contribution of this volume is its successful demonstration of the enormous range and diversity in the relationships among the various participants in ‘diaspora politics,’ i.e., the kin-states, the host-states, and the diasporas,” commented Rolf H.W. Theen, writing in Europe-Asia Studies. Taras concluded: “A collection of essays in an edited volume is usually of uneven quality. King and Melvin’s book is striking in bringing together uniformly informed, judicious, and lively contributions.”
In The Black Sea: A History, King undertakes a detailed history of the Black Sea and the surrounding regions. He “provides an engaging portrayal of the region’s people, politics and the role of the sea from the early Greek period to the present,” commented John O’Kane in the Journal of International Affairs. King looks at the physical and ecological makeup of the sea itself, writing on the lifeless, murky areas at the sea bottom, where ancient shipwrecks are perfectly preserved, and contrasting it to the thin upper layer of the sea, which is teeming with marine life, including ancient and more recent species of fish. In the middle chapters, King “tackles the human dimension in five huge chunks of history, ‘themed’ rather schematically by powers that dominated the region at least some of the time. This is a bold and indeed laudable approach, attempting to find interactions between disparate peoples in each period,” wrote History Today reviewer Robin Milner-Gulland. King considers why, despite the fact that the Black Sea has long been a natural trade route, the sea supports only a minimal population along its shores. He looks at the effects of religious and political interaction by the sea’s neighbors and how the economics of trade often trumped conflicts that arose for other reasons.
In large measure, remarked a Contemporary Review contributor, King examines “those forces that unite the lands bordering the Black Sea and at those which separate.” King’s history of the Black Sea provides readers with a “depth of understanding not often found in Western treatments of the region,” O’Kane concluded. Milner-Gulland noted: “This is a useful and accessible work—with the Sea itself quite properly at the center of attention.”
In The Ghost of Freedom: A History of the Caucasus, King presents the tumultuous history of Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and the Caucasian provinces of Russia, a region that “has a complex history,” derived in large part from its diverse ethnic population and from its interactions with neighboring areas in Europe and the Middle East, as Library Journal reviewer Harry Willems observed. King provides a comprehensive historical accounting of “events from the past two centuries that shaped czarist, Soviet, and Russian relations with the region,” Willems added.
Reviewer Jan Künzl, writing in Caucasian Review of International Affairs, commented: “King presents a book which is well researched, inventive and remarkably readable. The rather unusual perspectives he proposes from time to time are entertaining and highlight his theses.” Künzl further stated that the book offers an “introduction for readers who want to get a general idea of the confusing heterogeneity of the Caucasus and its turbulent history.” A writer on the Georgetown University website commented that King’s book “illuminates the origins of modern disputes, including the ongoing war in Chechnya, conflicts in Georgia and Azerbaijan, and debates over oil resources from the Caspian Sea and the impact of these deposits on world markets.” The writer further remarked that “ The Ghost of Freedom paints a rich portrait of one of the world’s most turbulent and least understood regions.”
King published Extreme Politics: Nationalism, Violence, and the End of Eastern Europe in 2009. The book deals with the concepts of nationalism, social violence, and ethnic politics in Eastern Europe as the communist system began to crumble. King also discusses the theoretical complexes of nationalism. Reviewing the book in Foreign Affairs, Robert Legvold opined that King’s “treatment of the fall of communism in Eastern Europe and the disintegration of the Soviet Union is thoughtful,” even if it is only “tenuously linked” with the account’s central themes.
In 2011 King published Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams. The book acts as a memoir of the Ukrainian city of Odessa, chronicling its history and development, its famous residents, and its perception by residents and others. King also uses the history of the Jewish residents of Odessa as a vehicle to relate the city’s changing character and fortunes.
Writing in Washington Post Book World, Alex Remington said that Odessa “comes alive only when the city is engaged in myth-making, particularly when King writes about the filming of ‘Battleship Potemkin,’ or in general suffering, as in a horrifying section on the little-known fate of the Jews.” A contributor to Publishers Weekly claimed that the author’s skill at laying “bare the city’s secrets—both good and bad—gives a fascinating prism through which to observe.” Calling the book “a sharp, graceful account of a fascinating place,” a Kirkus Reviews critic pointed out that King “observes that the city today seems more interested in fanciful mythology than in historical memory.” Reviewing Odessa in Wilson Quarterly, Timothy Snyder commented that King’s “writing is aesthetic without superficiality, and erudite without pretension. Reading the book is like traveling as your best self, the self that you never quite are, ready with every reference, worldly and wise. Because King opens a difficult world with grace, the book’s ending comes, as it should, as a shock.” In a review in Library Journal, Elizabeth Zeitz insisted that “history buffs, religious history enthusiasts, or lovers of that great city will enjoy this work.”
With Midnight at the Pera Palace: The Birth of Modern Istanbul, King explores the emergence of modern-era Istanbul through the lens of city’s Pera Palace hotel. Built in 1892, the Pera Palace survived several historical changes that charted Istanbul’s transformation from seat of the Ottoman Empire to secular metropolis. King profiles notable guests and workers, explaining how the city became an international hub between World War I and World War II. The author addresses the city’s literary, artistic, and intellectual history, and he also touches on its cultural politics. The sultan welcomed various ethnic groups into the city, and the later nationalist government, led by Mustafa Kemal, encouraged these groups to adopt Turkish citizenship or leave the country. While violent clashes occurred, they were small compared with those in neighboring countries.
Seattle Times correspondent Melissa Davis called Midnight at the Pera Palace “an engaging, detailed look at the old city that became the newest of them all in the interwar years. King uses the colorful history of the real hotel of the title to illustrate the rise of the Turkish Republic out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire.” Lauding this approach in the New York Times, Jason Goodwin declared: “This distillation of comings and goings—the influx of Russians in the 1920s and Eastern European Jews in the 1940s, the arrival of German Jewish academics in the 1930s, all amid the partygoers, the writers and musicians, the bar girls and photographers—makes up a dizzying kaleidoscope of a city that became recognizably modern in just a few decades. Charles King has combed out the threads of this complex and highly nuanced story in a hugely enjoyable, magnificently researched and deeply absorbing book.” Offering further applause, an Economist reviewer observed: “If there is a theme that holds this rich, stimulating narrative together, it is the perpetual and often tragically unsuccessful search for terms on which the city’s communities could share the same hotly contested space.” The reviewer added: “King has found a winning formula for depicting the micro-and macro-history of one of the world’s most seductive places.”
King published Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century in 2019. The account offers biographies of several pioneering anthropologists and how their turning away from racially inclined scientific norms changed the field of anthropology. King begins with the innovative ways that Franz Boas approached fieldwork by challenging the Eurocentric views of human development and a hierarchical system among the races. This approach was passed on to his students. American anthropologist Margaret Mead also features prominently in King’s book, as do other female anthropologists like Ruth Benedict, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ella Cara Deloria.
Booklist contributor Kristine Huntley lauded that “King’s engrossing look at these extraordinary trailblazers deftly illustrates how crucial their research and work remains today.” A contributor to Kirkus Reviews said that the account is “rich in ideas,” noting that it “also abounds in absorbing accounts of friendships, animosities, and rivalries among these early anthropologists.” The same reviewer claimed that “this superb narrative of debunking scientists provides timely reading for our ‘great-again’ era.” A Publishers Weekly contributor insisted that “this complex, delightful book will get readers thinking and keep them turning the pages.” The same critic found the prose to be “energetic,” appending that it is “enlivened with delicious quotations.” In a review in USA Today, David Holahan mentioned that King “succeeds in bringing Mead and her fellow travelers into sharp focus as they pioneered a new field and documented mankind’s many-splendored diversity in a positive, rather than a divisive, light.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
American Political Science Review, June 1, 1999, Ray Taras, review of Nations Abroad: Diaspora Politics and International Relations in the Former Soviet Union, p. 489.
Booklist, February 15, 2011, Jay Freeman, review of Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams, p. 44; September 15, 2014, Gilbert Taylor, review of Midnight at the Pera Palace: The Birth of Modern Istanbul, p. 16; July 1, 2019, Kristine Huntley, review of Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century, p. 8.
Canadian Journal of History, winter, 2010, Wim van Meurs, review of The Ghost of Freedom: A History of the Caucasus, p. 641.
Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, April, 1999, K. Tololyan, review of Nations Abroad, p. 1531; September, 2000, D. MacKenzie, review of The Moldovans: Romania, Russia, and the Politics of Culture, p. 194; January, 2005, C. Ingrao, review of The Black Sea: A History, p. 907; February, 2009, A.V. Isaenko, review of The Ghost of Freedom, p. 1162; October, 2010, L. Stan, review of Extreme Politics: Nationalism, Violence, and the End of Eastern Europe, p. 374.
Contemporary Review, September 1, 2004, review of The Black Sea, p. 192.
Economist, September 13, 2014, review of Midnight at the Pera Palace.
Europe-Asia Studies, July 1, 1999, Rolf H.W. Theen, review of Nations Abroad, p. 921; July 1, 2011, Timofey Agarin, review of Extreme Politics, p. 904.
Foreign Affairs, November 1, 2000, review of The Moldovans, p. 185; May 1, 2008, Robert Legvold, review of The Ghost of Freedom, p. 152; May 1, 2010, Robert Legvold, review of Extreme Politics.
Guardian (London, England), June 26, 2004, Kathryn Hughes, “The Bad-Tempered Shore.”
Historian, spring, 2011, Ilya Vinkovetsky, review of The Ghost of Freedom, p. 192.
History: Review of New Books, July 1, 2011, Jonathan Grant, review of Extreme Politics, p. 89.
History Today, February 1, 2005, Robin Milner-Gulland, review of The Black Sea, p. 59.
International Affairs, April 1, 1999, Taras Kuzio, review of Nations Abroad, p. 434; October 1, 2001, Gwendolyn Sasse, review of The Moldovans, p. 1011.
International History Review, June 1, 2005, John P. LeDonne, review of The Black Sea, p. 332.
Investigate HERS, October-November, 2014, Melissa Davis, review of Midnight at the Pera Palace, p. 41.
Journal of International Affairs, September 22, 2005, John O’Kane, review of The Black Sea, p. 309.
Kirkus Reviews, November 15, 2010, review of Odessa; July 1, 2014, review of Midnight at the Pera Palace; July 1, 2019, review of Gods of the Upper Air.
Library Journal, February 1, 2008, Harry Willems, review of The Ghost of Freedom, p. 84; February 15, 2011, Elizabeth Zeitz, review of Odessa, p. 120; August 1, 2014, Stephanie Sendaula, review of Midnight at the Pera Palace, p. 106.
New Statesman, November 10, 2008, “Mountain Megalomaniacs,” p. 52.
New York Times, December 5, 2014, Jason Goodwin, review of Midnight at the Pera Palace.
Publishers Weekly, December 20, 2010, review of Odessa, p. 45; July 14, 2014, review of Midnight at the Pera Palace, p. 61; June 24, 2019, review of Gods of the Upper Air, p. 162.
Reference & Research Book News, May, 1998, review of Post-Soviet Moldova: A Borderland in Transition, p. 30; November, 1998, review of Nations Abroad, p. 33; August, 2000, review of The Moldovans, p. 33.
Russian Review, October 1, 2005, review of The Black Sea.
Seattle Times, September 14, 2014, review of Midnight at the Pera Palace.
Slavic Review, fall, 1999, Ben Fowkes, review of Nations Abroad, p. 702; summer, 2001, Wim van Meurs, review of The Moldovans, p. 419; fall, 2005, Patricia Herlihy, review of The Black Sea, p. 627; summer, 2011, Ben Fowkes, review of Extreme Politics, p. 434.
Slavonic and East European Review, July 1, 2005, James Gow, review of The Black Sea, p. 529.
Times Literary Supplement, March 30, 2001, Richard Crampton, review of The Moldovans, p. 28; August 13, 2008, Donald Rayfield, “Russian Bombs, Georgian Fragments”; August 15, 2008, Donald Rayfield, “Histories of Hope,” p. 11.
USA Today, August 6, 2019, David Holahan, review of Gods of the Upper Air, p. 5D.
Washington Post Book World, March 12, 2011, Alex Remington, review of Odessa.
Wilson Quarterly, spring, 2011, Timothy Snyder, review of Odessa, p. 87.
ONLINE
Caucasian Review of International Affairs, http://cria-online.org/ (October 4, 2009), Jan Künzl, review of The Ghost of Freedom.
Charles King, http://www.charles-king.net (August 21, 2019).
Georgetown University Explore, http://explore.georgetown.edu/ (February 5, 2015), author profile.
Georgetown University, http://www.georgetown.edu/ (October 4, 2009), “Professor Illuminates History of Modern Caucasus”; (December 12, 2011), author profile.
Oxford University Press, http://www.oup.com/ (October 4, 2009), author profile.
Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, http://www.wilsoncenter.org/ (October 4, 2009), author profile.
CHARLES KING is the author of seven books, including Midnight at the Pera Palace and Odessa, winner of a National Jewish Book Award. His essays and articles have appeared in the The New York Times, The Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, and The New Republic. He is a professor of international affairs and government at Georgetown University.
Charles King is the author of seven books, including GODS OF THE UPPER AIR (2019); MIDNIGHT AT THE PERA PALACE (2014), which received the French Prix de Voyage Urbain "Le Figaro-Peninsula Paris"; and ODESSA: GENIUS AND DEATH IN A CITY OF DREAMS (2011), winner of a National Jewish Book Award. He lectures widely on global affairs and has worked with broadcast media including National Public Radio, the BBC, and the History Channel. A native of the Ozark hill country, King studied history and politics at the University of Arkansas and Oxford University, where he was a British Marshall Scholar. He is Professor of International Affairs and Government at Georgetown University, chair of the Department of Government, and former faculty chair of the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. @charleskingdc, www.charleskingauthor.com
Charles King is the author of seven books, including Gods of the Upper Air; Midnight at the Pera Palace, which received the French Prix du livre de voyage; and Odessa, winner of a National Jewish Book Award.
Translations have appeared in French, German, Italian, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, and other languages. He lectures widely on international affairs and has worked with major broadcast media such as CNN, National Public Radio, the BBC, the History Channel, and MTV. King’s articles and commentary have been published in magazines and newspapers such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Foreign Affairs, and The Times Literary Supplement, as well as in leading academic journals.
He is professor of international affairs and government at Georgetown University, where he has served as chair of both the Department of Government and the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, the world’s premier school of global affairs.
King grew up on a cattle farm in the Ozark foothills of northwest Arkansas, one hollow over from J. William Fulbright’s rural home at Rabbit’s Foot Lodge. He studied history and philosophy at the University of Arkansas and later earned master’s and doctoral degrees at Oxford University, where he was a British Marshall Scholar. Before coming to Georgetown, he was a junior research fellow at New College, Oxford, and a research associate at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.
He lives in Washington, DC, with his wife, the writer and anthropologist Margaret Paxson.
CHARLES KING is the author of seven books, including Midnight at the Pera Palace and Odessa, winner of a National Jewish Book Award. His essays and articles have appeared in the The New York Times, The Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, and The New Republic. He is a professor of international affairs and government at Georgetown University.
* Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century.
By Charles King.
Aug. 2019.448p. illus. Doubleday, $30 (9780385542197). 301.
King (Midnight at the Pera Palace, 2014) takes a sweeping look at the rise of cultural anthropology under Franz Boas (1858-1942), paying particular attention to the extraordinary women who studied under Boas and made further key advancements in the field. A native of Germany who began his own research on Baffin Island with the Inuit people, Boas came to New York to teach anthropology at Columbia University. Boas made waves by rejecting the idea of any innate superiority or inferiority in terms of intelligence or physical ability between people of different backgrounds. His research went against the notions his contemporaries were preaching in attempts to assert the supposed superiority of Anglo-Europeans. When the president of Columbia made a concerted effort to keep undergraduates from studying under Boas, the anthropologist found a new pool of eager young minds at Columbia's sister school for women, Barnard. Among his more famous students were Margaret Mead, whose study of young Samoan women, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), became a bestseller; and Zora Neale Hurston, whose research brought her back home to Florida to document the cultural traditions of African Americans living in the region. King's engrossing look at these extraordinary trailblazers deftly illustrates how crucial their research and work remains today.--Kristine Huntley
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Huntley, Kristine. "Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century." Booklist, 1 July 2019, p. 8. Gale General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A595704925/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=419ad822. Accessed 10 Aug. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A595704925
King, Charles GODS OF THE UPPER AIR Doubleday (Adult Nonfiction) $30.00 8, 6 ISBN: 978-0-385-54219-7
The story of cultural anthropologist Franz Boas (1858-1942) and "a small band of contrarian researchers" who shaped the open-minded way we think now.
In this deeply engaging group biography, King (Government and International Affairs; Georgetown Univ.; Midnight at the Pera Palace: The Birth of Modern Istanbul, 2014, etc.) recounts the lives and work of a handful of American scholars and intellectuals who studied other cultures in the 1920s and '30s, fighting the "great moral evils: scientific racism, the subjugation of women, genocidal fascism, the treatment of gay people as willfully deranged." Led by "Papa" Franz, who taught for four decades in Columbia University's first anthropology department, the group of "misfits and dissenters" (as a university president called them) included Margaret Mead, whose expeditions to Polynesia produced Coming of Age in Samoa (1928); Ruth Benedict, Boas' assistant, Mead's lover, and author of Patterns of Culture (1934); Zora Neale Hurston, the Harlem Renaissance writer whose ethnographic studies led to her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937); and Ella Cara Deloria, a Native American scholar and ethnographer. King offers captivating, exquisitely detailed portraits of these remarkable individuals--the first cultural relativists--who helped demonstrate that humanity is "one undivided thing," that race is "a social reality, not a biological one," and that things had to be "proven" before they could shape law, government, and public policy. "When there was no evidence for a theory," Boas argued, "…you had to let it go--especially if that thing just happened to place people like you at the center of the universe." King's smoothly readable story of the stubborn, impatient Boas and his acolytes emphasizes how their pioneering exploration of disparate cultures contradicts the notion that "our ways are the only commonsensical, moral ones." Rich in ideas, the book also abounds in absorbing accounts of friendships, animosities, and rivalries among these early anthropologists.
This superb narrative of debunking scientists provides timely reading for our "great-again" era.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"King, Charles: GODS OF THE UPPER AIR." Kirkus Reviews, 1 July 2019. Gale General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A591279033/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=007ba686. Accessed 10 Aug. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A591279033
* Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century
Charles King. Doubleday, $30 (448p) ISBN 978-0-385-54219-7
Georgetown University professor King (Midnight at the Pera Palace) serves up a tasty group biography of trailblazing American women and depicts how the field of cultural anthropology emerged to challenge popular Eurocentric beliefs about human development. Early chapters chronicle how, at the turn of the 20th century, the process of field work turned pioneering anthropologist Franz Boas away from dominant theories of cultural and racial hierarchy, toward a more broad-minded, inductively reasoned approach that took seriously the "many different ways of being human." The second half of the book follows the adventures and achievements of four notable women Boas trained at Columbia University. Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, both well-known theorists who helped to popularize anthropological insights at midcentury, had an intellectually productive, emotionally supportive lifelong partnership; Zora Neale Hurston and Ella Cara Deloria each applied their anthropological skills outside of traditional academic settings to study and depict their own cultures (African-American and Native American, respectively). King chronicles both the women's struggles to achieve professional recognition and institutional support in a male-dominated field and the challenges of debunking white supremacy in a period of xenophobia, scientific racism, and imperialist ideologies. His prose is energetic, enlivened with delicious quotations, juicy personal details, and witty turns of phrase ("Fieldwork was the destroyer of worlds. Marriages failed. Youthful ambitions came to look quaint."). This complex, delightful book will get readers thinking and keep them turning the pages. (Aug.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century." Publishers Weekly, 24 June 2019, p. 162. Gale General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A592040091/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=2285c462. Accessed 10 Aug. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A592040091
Byline: David Holahan, Special to USA TODAY
Franz Boas, a German immigrant, was the Pied Piper of modern American anthropology. More than a century ago, he taught his students at Columbia University to look at other societies, whether the Zuni of the American Southwest or South Sea Islanders, with an open mind.
Boas challenged his charges to shed their Western cultural baggage as they fanned out across the planet to document and understand how the rest of the world lived.
His followers and successors included the likes of Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict. The latter helped the United States government understand Japanese culture on the eve its occupation of that nation following World War II.
In his new book, "Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century" (Doubleday, 448 pp., ***), Charles King follows the often eccentric lives of a handful of adventurous academics who trekked to isolated and oftentimes dangerous places to do their research.
In some cases, these globetrotting scholars established a society all their own. For example, Mead and Benedict were lovers, while Mead, who married three times, was known to have a boyfriend or a girlfriend (or both simultaneously) on the side.
More significantly, King ably documents the collective impact that Mead et al. had on how anthropologists and the public alike viewed their own and other cultures. Not everyone behaved like Americans, or wanted to, and some of the "primitive" people Mead and her colleagues studied and lived among clearly had things to teach "more advanced" societies. They disseminated their finding not only in research papers, but also in best-selling books, such as Mead's "Coming of Age in Samoa."
In Samoa, teenagers didn't wax rebellious as they transitioned into adulthood and there was no juvenile delinquency to speak of. Sex was viewed more casually, before and after marriage, and occasional dalliances and same-sex encounters were common. In some cultures, women did the same work as men and the line of familial descent was matrilineal. These societies had figured such things out centuries ago.
What Boaz and his acolytes pioneered was the notion that there are myriad cultures and lifestyles, and that ranking them or arbitrarily separating humanity into categories based on nationality, ethnicity, gender, IQ, sexuality or religion is a mistake, sometimes a disastrous one.
The author, a professor at Georgetown University, succeeds in bringing Mead and her fellow travelers into sharp focus as they pioneered a new field and documented mankind's many-splendored diversity in a positive, rather than a divisive, light.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Holahan, David. "'Gods of the Upper Air' studying 'the other'." USA Today, 6 Aug. 2019, p. 05D. Gale General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A595731152/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=8258646f. Accessed 10 Aug. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A595731152