Gods of the Upper Air

A dazzling group portrait of Franz Boas, the founder of cultural anthropology, and his misfit circle of women scientists, who upended American notions of race, gender, and sexuality in the 1920s and 30s--a sweeping chronicle of how our society began to question the basic ways we understand other cultures and ourselves.

At the end of the 19th century, everyone knew that people were defined by the characteristics of their race and sex and were fated by birth and biology to be more or less intelligent, idle, rule-bound, 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: wild haired and scarred, an immigrant with a thick German accent, but by the 1920s he was the founding figure and public face of a new school of thought at Columbia University that he called cultural anthropology. He proposed that cultures did not exist on a continuum from primitive to advanced. Instead, every culture solves the same social challenges with its own sets of rules, beliefs and taboos. Once you could see the value in another culture's strange ways, you could see that your own ways were not right or better, only different.

    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, Boas's chief assistant and the great love of Mead's life, whose research for the U.S. government shaped post-WWII Japan; Ella Cara Deloria, the Dakota Sioux activist who preserved the traditions of plains Indians; Zora Neale Hurston, whose ethnographic studies under Boas fed directly into her now-classic novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God; and others who left Columbia to create the country's foremost departments of anthropology.

    From Arctic outposts to South Pacific islands, The Humanity Lab weaves together their lives as they mapped vanishing civilizations and overturned the relationship between biology and behavior. Controversial in their own day, they ushered in the fluid conceptions of race, gender, and sexuality that define our present moment.