Gods of the Upper Air Quotes

“Cultures are cunning tailors. They cut garments from convenience and then work hard to reshape individuals to fit them.”
― Charles King, Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century

“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. The best data generator was your own sense of disgust.”
― Charles King, Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century

“Deviance of any type, she argued, was no more than a mismatch between an individual’s way of navigating through life and the catalog of behaviors and emotions that her society tended to prefer and value. Normalcy in any society was only an edited version of the grand text of all possible human behaviors; there was no reason to expect that every society would do the editing in precisely the same way. Ways of being in the world were abnormal only in the sense that the local context created “the psychic dilemmas of the socially unavailable.”
― Charles King, Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century

“It was easy to show that criminals sometimes clustered in families. But it was a great leap to claim that the essential traits of criminality or deviance were the products of families—much less that these traits were transmitted from parent to child, as Goddard had tried to show with the Kallikaks. After all, societies differed on the basic definition of what constituted criminal behavior. Criminologists, for example, tended to pay scant attention to rich criminals or well-placed miscreants: the tax cheat, the unscrupulous businessman, the corrupt politician. Their theories of innate criminality seemed to be based exclusively on the poor: the pickpocket, the public drunkard, the street prostitute. That fact was itself evidence of how culturally determined the definition of crime was in the first place.”
― Charles King, Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century

“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.”
― Charles King, Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century

“Most white Americans had never met an Indian, but they were pretty sure they knew the Indians: a single primitive type, divided into named tribes, with a more or less common mass of “legends” and “lore” said to be characteristic of once-upon-a-time communities from New England to the Pacific Ocean.”
― Charles King, Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century

“There can be no real analysis of human societies without the prior assumption that one’s own way of seeing the world isn’t universal, Benedict said.”
― Charles King, Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century

“Rather, we should try to hold two things in our heads at once: first, that all people are individuals, with their own talents and tribulations, and second, that we are social beings who cling desperately to the sense of reality in which we are reared.”
― Charles King, Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century

“In Mules and Men she had tried to show, in plangent prose and revved-up storytelling, that there was a distinct there to be studied in the swampy southeastern landscape she knew from childhood—not a holdover from Africa, or a social blight to be eliminated, or a corrupted version of whiteness in need of correction, but something vibrantly, chaotically, brilliantly alive.”
― Charles King, Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century

“Mead had brought along an evening dress in case such occasions presented themselves in the South Seas, and she joined in the festivities on board. That night she found herself enduring an impromptu lecture from a navy officer, her escort for the evening. “He told me what he thought about language, instincts, race, inheritance and a few allied subjects,” she recalled, “and I discovered that the most boring thing in the world is to listen to someone talk to you about your specialty.”
― Charles King, Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century

“We became who we are through a monumental effort at forgetting: what to call this kind of tree, when to plant this seed, how to gods prefer to be addressed. We may revere our ancestors, but non of us would truly recognize them. Knowing human society, past and present, is a race against oblivion.”
― Charles King, Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century

“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.”
― Charles King, Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century

“Once you latched on to the idea that your group or your way of life was bound to a piece of real estate by history and national destiny, no supply of free elections could change the outcome. The result was a world in which every society reduced itself to one people, one country, even one leader--each expression its particular national will, wall-bound and suspicious.”
― Charles King, Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century

“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.”
― Charles King, Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century

“The disappointment of my life,' he told Ernst, was that Americans had succumbed to nationalism. His adopted country had come to look more and more like Germany or any other European nationstate: 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.”
― Charles King, Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century

“There is something in administrative positions that contaminates even decent people,” he once said.”
― Charles King, Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century

“For the first time, I felt that I had found something really better than myself, and was happy,” Mead later remembered. At Barnard she had friends by choice rather than by chance, a circle of ten or so young women who included the future U.S. poet laureate Léonie Adams. Each year they would adopt a derogatory name as a badge of honor, perhaps something hurled at them by West Side townies or by a professor outraged at some boneheaded behavior or radical political pose. The one that really stuck was the Ash Can Cats, a good label for a group of freethinking, adventurous women, disheveled but intellectually fashionable, half of them Jewish, and all equally acquainted with Bolshevism and the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay—bluestockings with bobs. The group apartment on West 116th Street was abuzz with impromptu aphorisms, the tinkle of overturned gin bottles, and campus gossip about affairs with older men and, sometimes, older women. By the summer of 1921, Mead informed the Philadelphia Daily Vacation Bible School that she would no longer be able to serve as director for Bible studies during the long vacation.”
― Charles King, Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century

“apperception,”
― Charles King, Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century

“A zealous janitor burned some of what remained after her death, until a passing sheriff’s deputy grabbed a garden hose and doused what could be saved. “Ain’t it a shame, how interesting people get after they’re dead,” said Alan Lomax,”
― Charles King, Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century

“I have had a curious experience in graduate work during the last few years,” Boas wrote to a colleague. “All my best students are women.”
― Charles King, Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century