![]() He saw each culture as having its own integrity, its own ways of providing meaning and direction to the people who comprised it. Boas worked alongside these fellow anthropologists at museums of natural history, world’s fairs, and universities, but his views were different. Theories of evolution were used to justify imperial ambitions, and anthropologists served up accounts of primitive cultures left far behind in the march to modernity. Ultimately, this was a vested interest legitimating the superiority of those doing the displacing. In the last decades of the 1800s, Western countries were competing to build their empires in far-flung regions, and there was more than a little interest in the peoples being displaced. It was also a form of Herzensbildung, an education of the heart, King notes: “Changing his place in the world had changed his perspective on it.”Īrctic expeditions belonged to the genre of 19th-century explorations of the exotic, but Boas’s cut against their grain. Interviewing Inuit in the region, being introduced to their languages and their social organizations, opened for him a different way of thinking about how particular cultures develop in specific environments. Other Arctic explorers had looked to test themselves in unusual and extreme conditions Boas was interested in those for whom such conditions were normal: indigenous peoples who found the landscape no more extreme than he had found the University of Kiel, his alma mater. ![]() In the late 1800s, Boas set off for the Arctic. What if one tried to grasp how a quite different culture offered a different modality for navigating the world? Could an outsider come to understand that process and those people, and then communicate this understanding to others? Gods of the Upper Air explores how Boas and his extraordinary students sought to do just that. Suddenly he was less interested, Charles King tells the reader, in building mathematical models of how the world changed than in understanding how our own changing conditions altered the way we made sense of it. Paths for acceptance were not unknown to him, but after receiving a doctorate in physics, he grew impatient and forged a different path. ![]() Born in the middle of Europe, and in the middle of the 1800s, Franz Boas was the son of assimilated German Jews. Gildersleeve Professor Alice Walker, drew over 1,000 participants to Barnard College.Ī founder of modern anthropology, Boas discredited theories of racial superiority.Īrchival treasures and interviews tell the story of one of the world's most famous and influential neighborhoods.Ĭolumbia's history, as seen by those who have studied, taught, and worked here.Ĭolumbians have changed the world and how we see it.THE FATHER OF 20th-century anthropology in America came - fittingly enough - from another time and another place. Read more about Hurston in the Columbia Encyclopedia.Ī conference on Hurston's legacy, featuring a keynote lecture by Fall 2003 Virginia C. At Columbia, the Zora Neale Hurston Professorship of English honors her life and work. She left New York to conduct research in Florida and in Haiti, her field work resulting in the folklore collections Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse (1938). After graduation at the age of 37, Hurston later pursued graduate work at Columbia with renowned anthropologist Franz Boas. ![]() Her admission was secured and expenses paid by Barnard cofounder and longtime trustee, Annie Nathan Meyer. Hurston also collaborated with Langston Hughes on the 1931 play Mule Bone, which was never performed during their lifetimes due to disagreements between them over authorship.Ī published short story writer by the time she came to New York in 1925, Hurston studied anthropology at Barnard, where she was the college's first African-American student. Her reputation was resuscitated after Alice Walker's 1975 essay, "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston," led to rediscovery of novels such as Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934) and Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). She became one of the most widely read authors of the Harlem Renaissance but died penniless and forgotten, her eight books long out of print. Hurston combined literature with anthropology, employing indigenous dialects to tell the stories of people in her native rural Florida and in the Caribbean. "No matter how far a person can go the horizon is still way beyond you." ![]()
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