'Gods Of The Upper Air' Traces The Birth Of Cultural Anthropology
Charles King tells the story of Franz Boas' powerful challenge to racial science — and of how others like Margaret Mead and Zora Neale Hurston contributed to that project.
In the United States around the turn of the 20th century, anthropologist and German immigrant Franz Boas challenged the accepted view, at the time, that all human beings could be grouped into fixed races.
According to this erroneous view, where you were born and what complement of genes you received from your ancestors determined both your physical form and your character. This race science purported to show that white Europeans were genetically destined to be the best and brightest; other races were profoundly inferior by comparison.
As Charles King writes in his captivating , "The deep inequality of potential and achievement across the races was taken for granted." An
