Gods of the Upper Air

How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century

By: Charles King

Narrated by: January LaVoy

Length: 13 hrs and 32 mins

Publisher's summary

2020 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award Winner

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award

From an award-winning historian comes a dazzling history of the birth of cultural anthropology and the adventurous scientists who pioneered it - a sweeping chronicle of discovery and the fascinating origin story of our multicultural world.

A century ago, everyone knew that people were fated by their race, sex, and nationality to be more or less intelligent, nurturing, or warlike. But Columbia University professor Franz Boas looked at the data and decided everyone was wrong. Racial categories, he insisted, were biological fictions. Cultures did not come in neat packages labeled "primitive" or "advanced". What counted as a family, a good meal, or even common sense was a product of history and circumstance, not of nature. In Gods of the Upper Air, a masterful narrative history of radical ideas and passionate lives, Charles King shows how these intuitions led to a fundamental reimagining of human diversity.

Boas' students were some of the century's most colorful figures and unsung visionaries: Margaret Mead, the outspoken field researcher whose Coming of Age in Samoa is among 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 on 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 civilizations from the American South to the South Pacific and from Caribbean islands to Manhattan's city streets, and unearthed an essential fact buried by centuries of prejudice: that humanity is an undivided whole. Their revolutionary findings would go on to inspire the fluid conceptions of identity we know today.

Rich in drama, conflict, friendship, and love, Gods of the Upper Air is a brilliant and groundbreaking history of American progress and the opening of the modern mind.

©2019 Charles King (P)2019 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

"Elegant and kaleidoscopic... This looks to be the perfect moment for King’s resolutely humane book." (Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times)

"Thoughtful, deeply intelligent, and immensely readable." (Alison Gopnik, The Atlantic)

"King’s comprehensive archival research illuminates intellectual giants.... With a light yet unmistakable touch, King connects the dots from Boas’s time to ours. He mentions President Donald Trump’s describing of Mexicans as ‘rapists’ during the kickoff of his presidential campaign, and we get the point: The reduction of human beings to types - people stereotyped as inferior and menacing, deserving of being keep out or cast out - is a clear and present danger. Reading Gods of the Upper Air, though, provides inspiration. The anthropology of equality tells us that every population is as fully human as any other, and deserving of understanding and compassion." (Barbara J. King, NPR.org)

splendid in breadth, engaging in content

Seldom is the history of a science [here anthropology] so well told. Inventively it is narrated through real people's lives, their struggles and triumphs, and their passion about asserting the common humanity we all share.

Renegade is one way to characterize Franz Boaz and his students; misfits also might do it. But it is the quite amazing and often bizarre lives of these folk that makes the material so accessible and engaging. Would that other writings about the sciences had not only this breadth [they often do] but also such smart storytelling.

Before I ordered the book I read one review that gave very poor ratings for the narrator, apparently for very poor pronunciation of "foreign" words, especially German and French. I am fluent in both of those languages, and while I would not hire the narrator as a language instructor, her performance in general was splendid and her negotiation of the languages good.

This is a source I will go back to in my own writing and teaching for years to come. Bravo!

This book is fantastic

I am someone whose obsessed with anthropology and I found this book to be very insightful. Boas, Mead, Hurston, and hell even the reference to “two crows” is something that I’ve always saw in other books introducing the topic to me but now I feel I have a much stronger idea of their contributions to this field.

Fascinating Look at Early Anthropologists and Their Legacy

I came to this book knowing about Margaret Meade and Zora Neale Hurston, but not that they had worked for the same mentor (Franz Boaz), and not that the work they did directly confronted home-grown racist assumptions promoted by other early anthropologists. King's writing is engaging and accessible, following the lives of Boaz, Meade, Hurston, and a representative group of colleagues while also exploring the ways that American Jim Crow laws and American supporters of the eugenics movement were cited by the Nazis to further their own program. Readers who pay even minimal attention to current events will find chilling parallels in our daily news. Highly recommended. January LaVoy is an excellent reader.

eye opening

this his/her story is as relevant today as it was in the days of Boas and company. An important read.

An illuminating read

This was the perfect mix of biography and distillation of big ideas by a diverse cast of anthropologists. Not only is every chapter fascinating, but the whole thing adds up to something much bigger: a powerful examination of racism, sexism, ableism and other injustices. I’m in grad school working on issues close to the topic of the book and learned lots of new things. Definitely worth your time.

Love it

It was a bit slow to start but gets better with each chapter. Author did a great job of providing history in the format of an engaging story. I have never felt more at home in a book before then I did in this one.

Gods of the Upper Air is brilliant

This is an extraordinary record of the development of anthropology as foreground, with historical events as background. Thank you January LaVoy for reading it with such clarity and expression.

A must read

This is a very special book. The intellectual courage of Boas and his students and their research questions are as important as they were 100 years ago. A great read for understanding a bit better modern racism.

An entertaining education in anthropology

This is a very well-performed, well-written, and overall entertaining and digestible history of the Boaz circle and American anthropology. I found this super packed with new concepts and intellectual histories, reading this as someone with training in sociology and social theory, but it could easily be a fresh, first-foray into the origins of ongoing debates in social sciences and the human condition. Highly recommended.

Good writing, good performance.

Good writing, good performance, great experience. I enjoy it a lot, thanks you for this product.