The job of philosophers should be to study the space between the sense-perceptions that bombard us and the mental pictures we fashion of things as we believe them to be. The way to understand something about the world was to steer a course between a belief in the universal power of reason and an unbending skepticism about our ability to know anything at all. One — : /mnt/onboard/King, Charles/Gods of the Upper Air_ How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists, and Gender in the Twentieth Century - Charles King.kepub.epub!OEBPS!xhtml/King_9780385542203_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml
One concerned the world of concrete reality, while the other had to do with sense perception, or as German university students had learned to name them, channeling Kant, the “noumenal” and “phenomenal” realms. — : /mnt/onboard/King, Charles/Gods of the Upper Air_ How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists, and Gender in the Twentieth Century - Charles King.kepub.epub!OEBPS!xhtml/King_9780385542203_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml
encountered it in the writings of Alexander von Humboldt and other philosophers he had read during his travels through Germany’s great universities, and it seemed the perfect way to describe the change of spirit that had overtaken him in the north: Herzensbildung, the training of one’s heart to see the humanity of another. Changing his place in the world had changed his perspective on it. — : /mnt/onboard/King, Charles/Gods of the Upper Air_ How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists, and Gender in the Twentieth Century - Charles King.kepub.epub!OEBPS!xhtml/King_9780385542203_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml
Herbert Spencer had recently coined the term “survival of the fittest” to describe the fight for biological superiority outlined by Darwin in his On the Origin of Species (1859). For Spencer and other theorists, societies, too, were engaged in a struggle for survival, and nature itself determined which peoples would, through their superior achievements and worldviews, dominate the less providentially endowed. On the contrary, Powell claimed, social evolution was not at all like biological evolution. Change in society was instead a human-centered progression from lower to higher forms of thought, behavior, and institutions. No people was inherently incapable of completing the same transformative journey already taken by others. — : /mnt/onboard/King, Charles/Gods of the Upper Air_ How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists, and Gender in the Twentieth Century - Charles King.kepub.epub!OEBPS!xhtml/King_9780385542203_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml
That was why Mason’s faulty arrangement of objects was such a critical mistake. He had effectively claimed that the peoples whose objects were on display lived in a kind of eternal present, their handiwork allegedly frozen in time. But these people had a history. They migrated. They came under the influence of different peoples and ideas. Boas had seen it himself on Baffin Island, as he pieced together the life story of his guide, Signa. He had seen it in British Columbia, where people speaking very different languages nevertheless told the same stories and repeated the same myths. — : /mnt/onboard/King, Charles/Gods of the Upper Air_ How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists, and Gender in the Twentieth Century - Charles King.kepub.epub!OEBPS!xhtml/King_9780385542203_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml
The only way to get at these issues was through what Boas knew as the inductive method—that is, by examining a range of groups in depth and suspending one’s theorizing until data had been collected from as many sources as possible. The alternative, to reason in the deductive fashion, involved beginning with a set of general principles and then applying them to the case at hand. But that was simply fishing around until you found some evidence to confirm your prejudices, Boas felt. — : /mnt/onboard/King, Charles/Gods of the Upper Air_ How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists, and Gender in the Twentieth Century - Charles King.kepub.epub!OEBPS!xhtml/King_9780385542203_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml
None of this was confined simply to descriptive data collection, however. The general theory underlying work in anthropometry was the belief that physical differences might provide hints about other puzzles of current interest, from public health to intelligence — : /mnt/onboard/King, Charles/Gods of the Upper Air_ How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists, and Gender in the Twentieth Century - Charles King.kepub.epub!OEBPS!xhtml/King_9780385542203_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml
There was no reason to believe that a person of one racial or national category was more of a drain on society, more prone to criminality, or more difficult to assimilate than any other. What people did, rather than who they were, ought to be the starting point for a legitimate science of society and, by extension, the basis for government policy on immigration. — : /mnt/onboard/King, Charles/Gods of the Upper Air_ How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists, and Gender in the Twentieth Century - Charles King.kepub.epub!OEBPS!xhtml/King_9780385542203_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml
If you found yourself upset at some other society’s customs, Boas argued, the truly scientific thing to do was to analyze your own reaction. It was probably a good clue to the things that your own culture held dear. — : /mnt/onboard/King, Charles/Gods of the Upper Air_ How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists, and Gender in the Twentieth Century - Charles King.kepub.epub!OEBPS!xhtml/King_9780385542203_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml
When there was no evidence for a theory, Boas had suggested in The Mind of Primitive Man, you had to let it go—especially if that theory just happened to place people like you at the center of the universe. Otherwise, what you called science was nothing more than nonsense on stilts. — : /mnt/onboard/King, Charles/Gods of the Upper Air_ How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists, and Gender in the Twentieth Century - Charles King.kepub.epub!OEBPS!xhtml/King_9780385542203_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml
His adopted country had come to look more and more like Germany or any other European nation-state: obsessed by its own purity, wary of outsiders, and more concerned with being great than doing good. Americans turned out to be less exceptional than anyone, himself included, had supposed — : /mnt/onboard/King, Charles/Gods of the Upper Air_ How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists, and Gender in the Twentieth Century - Charles King.kepub.epub!OEBPS!xhtml/King_9780385542203_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml
our categories for human experience ought to begin with the experience itself, not with the mental frames imported by an observer — : /mnt/onboard/King, Charles/Gods of the Upper Air_ How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists, and Gender in the Twentieth Century - Charles King.kepub.epub!OEBPS!xhtml/King_9780385542203_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml
The drive to uncover the universal laws that determined the shape of individual lives—such as the consequences of dysgenic breeding, as with Emma Wolverton or Carrie Buck—seemed to be the obsessive purpose of many biologists, social scientists, and public policy advocates. For this reason, Boas said, “almost every anthropological problem touches our most intimate life.” When we think we are studying people out there, we are really making claims about people right here—about us and our neighbors, about our sense of the normal, the evident, and the standard. “We classify the variety of forms according to our previous experiences,” he wrote. Every society trains itself to see categories. Whom you love, whom you hate, the kind of person you’d be disgusted to see your daughter marry—none of these problems follow universal rules of attraction or repulsion. They are instead notions fired in the crucible of culture. The mobilization of sham science to justify bigotry might be said to be a deep characteristic of only one culture: that of the developed West. Northern Europeans and their diaspora, having conquered much of the world, predictably sought to remake it in their image. They filled it with imagined races and subtypes, imbeciles and geniuses, primitives and civilized men. They then declared their intellectual artifice to be deeply, provably natural, as unshakable as a god-made Valhalla. — : /mnt/onboard/King, Charles/Gods of the Upper Air_ How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists, and Gender in the Twentieth Century - Charles King.kepub.epub!OEBPS!xhtml/King_9780385542203_epub3_c008_r1.xhtml
Art would be liberating not in the sense that black voices would at last be heard but rather that black writers would now be seen as intellectuals with common claim to universal themes — : /mnt/onboard/King, Charles/Gods of the Upper Air_ How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists, and Gender in the Twentieth Century - Charles King.kepub.epub!OEBPS!xhtml/King_9780385542203_epub3_c009_r1.xhtml
born “a child that questions the gods of the pigeon-holes.” — : /mnt/onboard/King, Charles/Gods of the Upper Air_ How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists, and Gender in the Twentieth Century - Charles King.kepub.epub!OEBPS!xhtml/King_9780385542203_epub3_c009_r1.xhtml
They were not holdovers from prehistory but rather refugees from a brutal present. By — : /mnt/onboard/King, Charles/Gods of the Upper Air_ How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists, and Gender in the Twentieth Century - Charles King.kepub.epub!OEBPS!xhtml/King_9780385542203_epub3_c010_r1.xhtml
Curtis, whose arresting portraits filled the pages of — : /mnt/onboard/King, Charles/Gods of the Upper Air_ How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists, and Gender in the Twentieth Century - Charles King.kepub.epub!OEBPS!xhtml/King_9780385542203_epub3_c010_r1.xhtml
To write properly about Indians, you had to stop using the past tense. — : /mnt/onboard/King, Charles/Gods of the Upper Air_ How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists, and Gender in the Twentieth Century - Charles King.kepub.epub!OEBPS!xhtml/King_9780385542203_epub3_c010_r1.xhtml
The only thing Boas would hazard was a single sentence: “People don’t use anything they haven’t got.” — : /mnt/onboard/King, Charles/Gods of the Upper Air_ How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists, and Gender in the Twentieth Century - Charles King.kepub.epub!OEBPS!xhtml/King_9780385542203_epub3_c011_r1.xhtml
there is no such thing as a defective human being. — : /mnt/onboard/King, Charles/Gods of the Upper Air_ How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists, and Gender in the Twentieth Century - Charles King.kepub.epub!OEBPS!xhtml/King_9780385542203_epub3_c011_r1.xhtml
In her own language, Hurston was reiterating Boas’s code for how to be ambitious as a scientist and modest as a human being: jettison the search for universal laws and open your eyes to the people standing, singing, and chanting right before you. — : /mnt/onboard/King, Charles/Gods of the Upper Air_ How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists, and Gender in the Twentieth Century - Charles King.kepub.epub!OEBPS!xhtml/King_9780385542203_epub3_c012_r1.xhtml
The discovery that human communities make mental boxes—dead people, living people, and zombies, as Hurston put it—is an important insight, Boas acknowledged. But the fact that we engage in this behavior in so many different ways means that we shouldn’t take any society’s categories, not even our own, as the only serviceable ones. The carving off of human beings into discrete classes is the product of our own imagining, not something derived from the laws of nature. And that division is dangerous. The belief in natural hierarchies implies a belief in dominance, whether it took the form of the “pitying smile” Boas had talked about in The Mind of Primitive Man or of the overbearing, cleansing state then rising in Germany. The strongest moral schemas rest on the proven truth that humanity is one undivided whole — : /mnt/onboard/King, Charles/Gods of the Upper Air_ How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists, and Gender in the Twentieth Century - Charles King.kepub.epub!OEBPS!xhtml/King_9780385542203_epub3_c013_r1.xhtml
Science pointed toward the progressive widening of the circle of people to whom we owed moral behavior, however we defined it, and liberal democracy was the best way of assuring that the circle would at least expand as far as your own country’s frontiers. The next step was to figure out how to extend it to the entire planet — : /mnt/onboard/King, Charles/Gods of the Upper Air_ How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists, and Gender in the Twentieth Century - Charles King.kepub.epub!OEBPS!xhtml/King_9780385542203_epub3_c013_r1.xhtml
As Boas had taught his students, the worldviews represented by Japanese nationalism, Nazi race-madness, and American eugenics sprang from the same source. They were all products of an intensely modern fiction: that the highway of human social development led straight to us. — : /mnt/onboard/King, Charles/Gods of the Upper Air_ How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists, and Gender in the Twentieth Century - Charles King.kepub.epub!OEBPS!xhtml/King_9780385542203_epub3_c014_r1.xhtml
The fact that we are still tempted by the desire to root our society-bound prejudices in something allegedly deeper than our own collective imagination is the best evidence of how relevant the Boas circle’s ideas remain — : /mnt/onboard/King, Charles/Gods of the Upper Air_ How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists, and Gender in the Twentieth Century - Charles King.kepub.epub!OEBPS!xhtml/King_9780385542203_epub3_c014_r1.xhtml
“There is no evolution of moral ideas,” Boas wrote succinctly in 1928. The only thing that changes are the people we believe should be treated as full, purposive, and dignified human beings. This is the scientific finding and ethical disposition that Boas and his students wanted to share with the world. Focus less on the rules of correct behavior—eat this, don’t touch that, marry him, don’t speak to her—and more on the circle of humanity to which you believe the rules apply. Work hard at distancing yourself from ideas that feed your own sense of specialness. Figure out what your own society thinks of as its best behavior, then extend that to the most unlikely recipient of your goodwill—someone who might be living around the world or just down the street. Do this no matter how distasteful their beliefs and practices might be to you. — : /mnt/onboard/King, Charles/Gods of the Upper Air_ How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists, and Gender in the Twentieth Century - Charles King.kepub.epub!OEBPS!xhtml/King_9780385542203_epub3_c014_r1.xhtml