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Bezig met laden... Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century (editie 2019)door Charles King (Auteur)
Informatie over het werkGods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century door Charles King
Bezig met laden...
Meld je aan bij LibraryThing om erachter te komen of je dit boek goed zult vinden. Op dit moment geen Discussie gesprekken over dit boek. A really fascinating look at the intersecting lives of some of the key figures in the establishment of cultural anthropology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Charles King focuses largely on the circle that formed around German-born Columbia University professor Franz Boas, one which saw their burgeoning field as not just “a science but also as a state of mind.” This is not a topic I knew a huge amount about, and I appreciated the introduction to how Boas—plus Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ella Deloria—helped to shape popular thinking about many now well-known concepts such as cultural relativism. King is perhaps a bit easier in his assessments/judgement of their work and its legacy than is quite earned, but still very interesting. (And hey, academics a hundred years ago being over-worked and under-paid! Plus ça change.) The story of the founding of anthropology as we know it today. I really appreciated the impression from this book that even though Franz Boas founded what is today a powerful school of thought, to everyone else in his world, he looked very aimless. His rich father paid to send him abroad because otherwise there'd be nothing on his resume, that kind of thing. I don't know whether to read a children's book narrative into this -- that if you just persist in following your dreams you'll be successful -- or whether to read a story of inherent unworthiness of anthropology as a field -- or whether to read a story of accidentally stumbling into inspiring a new view of reality -- or something else entirely. Abandoned regardless, because I found it much too dry, academic, and interpersonal for a world I'm unfamiliar with, despite the book's exciting title. (I also found I was more interested in Margaret Mead than Franz Boas, and she doesn't appear in the beginning because she's an inheritor of his rather than a peer -- not something I'd realized when I picked up the book). This book is best understood as a history for people who are already interested in the early days of anthropology. geen besprekingen | voeg een bespreking toe
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"At the end of the 19th century, everyone knew that people were defined by their race and sex and were fated by birth and biology to be more or less intelligent, able, nurturing, or warlike. But one rogue researcher looked at the data and decided everyone was wrong. Franz Boas was the very image of a mad scientist: a wild-haired immigrant with a thick German accent. By the 1920s he was also the foundational thinker and public face of a new school of thought at Columbia University called cultural anthropology. He proposed that cultures did not exist on a continuum from primitive to advanced. Instead, every society solves the same basic problems -- from childrearing to how to live well -- with its own set of rules, beliefs, and taboos. Boas's students were some of the century's intellectual stars: Margaret Mead, the outspoken field researcher whose Coming of Age in Samoa is one of the most widely read works of social science of all time; Ruth Benedict, the great love of Mead's life, whose research shaped post-Second World War Japan; Ella Deloria, the Dakota Sioux activist who preserved the traditions of Native Americans of the Great Plains; and Zora Neale Hurston, whose studies under Boas fed directly into her now-classic novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. Together, they mapped vanishing civilizations from the Arctic to the South Pacific and overturned the relationship between biology and behavior. Their work reshaped how we think of women and men, normalcy and deviance, and re-created our place in a world of many cultures and value systems. Gods of the Upper Air is a page-turning narrative of radical ideas and adventurous lives, a history rich in scandal, romance, and rivalry, and a genesis story of the fluid conceptions of identity that define our present moment"-- Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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Google Books — Bezig met laden... GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)306Social sciences Social Sciences; Sociology and anthropology Culture and InstitutionsLC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde:
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Charles King also wrote a very different book that I loved, about Istanbul and its history, called “Midnight at the Pera Palace” — highly recommended. ( )