Gods of the Upper Air - How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century - Charles King
Language: EnglishKeywords: 
Anthropology
 Biography
 Race
 Sociology
Shared by:Synchoresis
Written by
Read by January LaVoy
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged
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.
Published 2019.
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| Creation Date: | Fri, 10 Jan 2020 20:52:13 +0000 |
| This is a Multifile Torrent | |
| Gods of the Upper Air - 016 - Chapter 13.mp3 33.32 MBs | |
| Gods of the Upper Air - 002 - Dedication.mp3 2.83 KBs | |
| Gods of the Upper Air - 003 - Epigraph.mp3 584.39 KBs | |
| Gods of the Upper Air - 004 - Chapter 1.mp3 14.94 MBs | |
| Gods of the Upper Air - 005 - Chapter 2.mp3 25.37 MBs | |
| Gods of the Upper Air - 006 - Chapter 3.mp3 21.46 MBs | |
| Gods of the Upper Air - 007 - Chapter 4.mp3 22.19 MBs | |
| Gods of the Upper Air - 008 - Chapter 5.mp3 28.84 MBs | |
| Gods of the Upper Air - 009 - Chapter 6.mp3 24.33 MBs | |
| Gods of the Upper Air - 010 - Chapter 7.mp3 32.49 MBs | |
| Gods of the Upper Air - 011 - Chapter 8.mp3 30.72 MBs | |
| Gods of the Upper Air - 012 - Chapter 9.mp3 30.28 MBs | |
| Gods of the Upper Air - 013 - Chapter 10.mp3 32.65 MBs | |
| Gods of the Upper Air - 014 - Chapter 11.mp3 32.41 MBs | |
| Gods of the Upper Air - 015 - Chapter 12.mp3 28.63 MBs | |
| Gods of the Upper Air - 001 - Gods of the Upper Air.mp3 320.75 KBs | |
| Gods of the Upper Air - 017 - Chapter 14.mp3 15.66 MBs | |
| Gods of the Upper Air - 018 - Credits.mp3 456.99 KBs | |
| Combined File Size: | 374.62 MBs |
| Piece Size: | 256 KBs |
| Comment: | Updated by AudioBook Bay |
| Info Hash: | 56980165804bbd45341e60e545dc452c5cf58d1e |
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This post has 10 comments with rating of 3/5
January 10th, 2020
Does this one have angsty vampires and/or tasteful bdsm? A little spanky vampy?
Some names to conjure with there - thanks, from a clearly warlike Celt.
January 10th, 2020
Cool. The history of anthropological thought is really interesting, and there are not many audiobooks about it.
January 11th, 2020
And the trouble is that none of it’s true.
Margaret Mead’s work in Samoa, for example, has been thoroughly debunked. Her assumptions around human sexuality were based on embarrassed locals telling her enormous lies because they thought that that was what she wanted to hear. This was fully understood back when I was at University more than 20 years ago, you’d think they’d have caught up by now.
And there are many other moments of ludicrous to be found here.
Once again, we have fiction masquerading as fact to act as confirmation bias by a bunch of plonkers obsessed with a dream of equality that our biology does not support
January 11th, 2020
Thanks for the upload. I listened to an interview with the author about this book and it sounds great.
Regarding GordonCoon’s comment, a good book about the Mead controversy is Paul Shankman’s The Trashing of Margaret Mead: Anatomy of an Anthropological Controversy. People who think that Mead was “thoroughly debunked” are not well informed or are lying for ideological reasons.
January 12th, 2020
Research showing significant differences between IQs across racial groups has not been debunked. Some cultures ARE superior to others, obviously. No one is lining up to emigrate to Haiti. Stone Aged aboriginals are less advanced than Space Age European cultures. These are commonsense facts.
January 12th, 2020
@GordoCoon and @boneswithfiddle
So, would it be accurate to say the interpretation of Mead’s work is STILL controversial? This reminds me of Napoleon Chagnon and his Fierce People book. I have a chemistry and CS background, so I find it interested how damn near impossible it is for social scientists to agree on anything. I guess the data and it’s interpretation is just nowhere as clear cut as in the physical sciences, and this opens a space for all our biases.
I have to admit I’ve read Pinker’s Blank Slate, and so think I take Chagnon’s side on that debate. I suppose this might be interesting to read regardless. Be skeptical, as always, and rarely is anything the last word.
February 7th, 2020
A collection of inveterate ignoramuses! Save your brains some real hogwash.
February 23rd, 2020
complete post-modern fairy tales. we are not the same. we are not all born “equal”. we are not blank-slates.
March 14th, 2020
“we are not blank-slates.”
that’s not modernism, mouth-breather.
April 10th, 2025
People who repeat idiocies like “we are not the same”, “we are not all born ‘equal’”, and “some cultures ARE superior to others” just don’t have the capacity to conceptualize that the whole is made of different parts. I’m sure they’d argue why they are not dumb but the fact remains that they still repeated the same garbage intimating they are, the argument likely affirming. We are all the “same” and “equal” when we are born. Sure, genetic traits make us unique, but we all identify as the same species. And we all have exactly the same sense of self and of the world around us…that is to say, zero. There are innate tendencies we have due to our genetics but the brain is a miraculous thing and growing up then coming of age is where biology and mind dance their dance to make us who we are. No brain is the same but most are similar enough to have given us a sense of “normal” and “abnormal” through our history. But make no mistake: environment is the bludgeon that forms our understanding of the world, our brains just interpret it. Switch Dr. King and Malcolm X at birth, do we get the same Dr. King and Malcolm X?
A culture being superior to another culture is a subjective opinion. Stating it objectively displays a lack of awareness for how dumb you sound. Like right there. I objectively stated how dumb you must be, which is subjective since a lot of people might read how you claim commonsense and think, ‘dang, he’s right!’ and then clearly have the subjective opinion that maybe you aren’t as dumb as you sound making my objective declaration patently un-objective and throwing into question the objectivity of the rest of my claims. In order to avoid that, I restate that it seems to me that your opinion ’some cultures are superior to others, obviously’ is dependent on the eye of the beholder and, as stated, makes you appear dumb.
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