Gods of the upper air - Charles King

I am so glad I read and I love to read.

There are some experiences in life that visuality will never come close to being as good as my abundant imagination. The words of King were a gateway to a complex yet completely obvious understanding of the birth, foundation and struggle of anthropology and many other social 'sciences' (read the book to understand the quotes on science!).

The book ruthlessly (the tone is matter of fact though, the amount of judgement you add is yours to own) unmasks the bigotry, pompousness and unfair over-estimation of a singular (group/type?) of people who tried to dictate what culture should be for all - theirs, obviously. For this group every other culture was just not them, yet and every group must aspire to be them as they are what 'civilised' should be. The sheer gall.

Franz Boas and (thank you for introducing me to a brilliant and kind human being) his team (many women) systematically created a huge dent in the, 'we (white) are better, Darwin's theory is all about strength & superiority' narrative that if unchecked could have made the world a far, far, worse place. Each of Boas' proteges broke through unbreakable barriers to establish a humane and inclusive way of looking at culture, places and people. The biggest obstacle was navigating through their own bias/prejudice, it wasn't perfect neither were they (far from it) nor did they get it all right, but boy, did they try. They pushed and broke down so many fundamental beliefs that was rooted in bigotry & rot and established a parallel (researched) thinking that many of today's inclusive & progressive thought reflects.

I urge you to read, I rarely urge.

It is a book each nation needs to write to see where our thinking came from - the bias is brutal. We conveniently go back it time to suit our perspective & thinking. This illustration conveys it best.

To truly see what the US of A was and its terrifying influence on the world is a massive point of pause; for the open-minded.

Mead in one of her entries says (after a friend commits suicide), 'Ideas you introduce to the world could be devastating if you aren't paying attention'. Consequence is scary and unpredictable whereas a thought-out outcome is manageable - this book shines a light on both.

Some things that stayed:

1. Boas, 'all the evidence is now in favour of a great plasticity of human types, and the permanence of types in new surroundings appears rather as the exception than as the rule'. You as a human will evolve physically as well as mentally - what madness it is to divide ourselves and fight.

2. Boas on understanding the other, 'You had to struggle to follow new trains of thought and new logic, to grab on to new emotions. It took work to feel a fearful tug in your gut, a rising anger, a deep sadness - all for reasons that might seem strange and unfamiliar - and then take yourself to the point of acting in accordance to those feelings: the twitch of a foot ready to take flight or the tremble of a hand about to strike out. Otherwise you couldn't claim to understanding anything at all. You were simply staring at your own biases, reflected back at you in the mirror of someone else's culture' - needed all 3!

3. Loved Annie Myer's Shrewd Theory, 'to put any radical scheme across, it must be done in the most conservative manner possible'. - my life motto, by the way, that's why the love.

4. Benedict, 'Normalcy in any society was only an edited version of the grand text of all possible human behaviours; there was no reason to expect that every society would do the editing in precisely the same way.

5. The ash can cats - should look them up in case you have never heard of them, I hadn't. So cool.

6. 'Language, perhaps more than any other human behaviour has to be understood in the context of the culture that uses it.

7. 'Culture comes and goes, civilisation moves on. Practitioners of a culture seemed to have worked out a sensible and minimally frustrating placed for themselves inside it'.

8. Mead, 'for teens the stress is in our civilisation not in the physical changes they go through'.

9. Nothing is really taboo in the Samoan culture, it just needs to be done in the right place and at the right time.

10. Boas, 'People don't use anything they haven't got'. Amen

Loved reading the book