This book by the distinguished Georgetown professor Charles King is one of those books that should be read by everyone interested in culture in the broadest sense of the word, including anthropology students at our bureaucratized universities. Nothing is more curative for the spirit than following the life and work of Franz Boas, the founder of Anthropology as a university discipline in the United States and his best reference since his chair at Columbia University, New York City. York. He and his capable group of students—Ruth Benedict, Margared Mead, Ella Deloria, Zora Neale Hurston—formed a veritable school of rebels.
With an elegant but rigorous style, this book reconstructs the vital world of some social scientists (the word chosen by King in honor of his mentor and wife, the well-known Margaret Paxson) who changed the course of history. The self-sacrificing fight against prejudice, which has become the reason for dad Frank’s life, leads him to place the notion of race in the foreground and, in its wake, the differentiated elements of that unique reality that is the human being.
Boas, a German from a family of Jewish merchants from the Hanseatic area that faces the Baltic, soon began to decipher the work model he wanted for himself and for those who dared to follow him; field work as a collection of materials on civilizations or human groups that show the richness of the difference. He’d known it from his first inquiries on frigid Baffin Island, a giddy boy who knew what he didn’t want but hadn’t yet figured out what he was to be. Only the love for a wealthy young Jewish woman from New York served as a guide when she made the most important decision of her life, to go to the United States and create a discipline there that would allow her to understand the world of cultures (in the plural, as she liked to say).
But it would not be until 1911, when he published The Mentality of Primitive Man, that he was able to show the stiff academic world the need to create a discipline that would analyze human behavior without the usual prejudices of the time, especially the idea of ??race superiority. White in full swing with the appearance of Madison Grant’s book The Disappearance of the Great Race. The dream of a not very jovial man (opponents said he was a real curmudgeon), who often felt like an outsider because he spoke English with a strong German accent (he dragged his r’s) in the years before the Great War , a conflict between two different civilizations, the German and the Anglo-Saxon: the dream that the United States would be pioneers in the study of anthropology, as they already were in some other scientific subjects.
Then, in the twenties, Boas surrounds himself with intelligent female students, beginning with Ruth Benedict and followed by the brittle and brilliant Margaret Mead. As life went on to ragtime these students dedicated themselves to their fieldwork to turn anthropology into a social conversation topic and editorial demand with Mead’s 1928 text Adolescence, Sex and Culture in Samoa.
Celebrity obliges. King closely follows this intellectual process thanks to files from the Mead file kept at the Library of Congress in Washington. A follow-up that makes possible the constant silences about the teacher Boas to face the work of his disciples, Zara Neale Hurston’s fascinating about voodoo in Haiti, where by the way he wrote the novel His eyes looked at God that had such an impact on the adolescent Zadie Smith .
King’s book creeps towards its 500 pages, reaching its peak in the third third when it is revealed that it was history that finally credited Boas’s effort by stating that in 1933 “all the false ideas that he had been fighting for decades in his adopted homeland they were becoming state-sanctioned dogmas in their native country,” a reference to the idea of ??a master race, the mantra of the Nazis.
This irony of fate caused him a deep sorrow that led him first to retirement with the grim gesture that it was not his disciple Benedict who replaced him in the direction of the department but a reputable but gray member of the academic establishment, then a bad health increased by loneliness and, finally, to die of a heart attack on December 21, 1942 in the middle of a tribute to a French anthropologist, whose tablemate (it’s already a coincidence!) was the young Claude Levi-Strauss.
An epilogue to his work was carried out by his first and main student Ruth Benedict who, after being rudely removed from the university, was hired by the government to study the Japanese, who after Pearl Harbor were the quintessential enemies of the Americans: the study gave rise to a bestseller (three million copies were sold in Japan alone) with a poetic title The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. Boas, from his grave, would smile mischievously at the posthumous success of his ideas elaborated with such precision by his student. She had won the game against the resentful of the university. Without a doubt, he deserved such an ending.
Charles King. School of rebels. Taurus. Translation by M. Peyrou. 497 pages 22.70 euros
