Gods of the Upper Air by Charles King

This is a book about the influence of Franz Boas, who lived from 1858 to 1942, and his trainees on how we view people across the planet.  His views on race, culture, and the intellectual potential of women diverged radically and presciently from the conventional wisdom of his day.
When Boas began practicing anthropology in the 1880s, after abandoning physics, Western societies generally embraced a hierarchical classification of races and the notion of race and gender as biologically fixed. Thanks to Boas and his circle, anthropologists today reject the belief that social development is linear, moving from “primitive societies” to “civilized ones.”

The book is a well written portrait of Boas and some of the diverse women he helped train at Columbia University, King suggests that they transformed anthropology—and Western thought more broadly—by unmooring cultural differences from biology, viewing cultures holistically, and according equal value to non-Western societies.  Boas’ students were Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ella Cara Deloria. Each one contributed groundbreaking anthropological research. While Mead may be Boas’ most celebrated student, Benedict was Boas’ chief acolyte, and successful in her own right . Hurston became the Harlem Renaissance’s star contrarian, whose novels were rooted in her anthropological fieldwork. Deloria, of Yankton Dakota Sioux and European descent, was able to be both a scientist and a native of the culture.  They seem very modern in their thinking, which reflects how much they changed views from then to now.