Charles King - The Reinvention of Humanity: A Story of Race, Sex, Gender and the Discovery of Culture

Charles King is Professor of International Affairs at Georgetown University where he teaches a popular course called Ethnicity, Race, and Nation. His many books include Midnight at the Pera Palace: The Birth of Modern Istanbul, a 2014 New York Times Book Review Notable Book, and Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams, winner of a National Jewish Book Award in 2011. He reviews books in the New York Times and the TLS, and writes for Foreign Affairs and The New Republic, and op-eds for the New York Times, Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal.

Also by Charles King

Midnight at the Pera Palace

Odessa

Extreme Politics

The Ghost of Freedom

The Black Sea

The Moldovans

Nations Abroad (co-editor)

FOR MAGGIE,

who else?

Margaret Mead wading in the surf (title page): Margaret Mead Papers, Library of Congress

Franz Boas aboard the Germania: Franz Boas Papers, American Philosophical Society

Boas with his wife, Marie Krackowizer: Franz Boas Papers, American Philosophical Society

John Wesley Powell, ca. 1890: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

Anthropology Building at the Chicago Worlds Fair: Gift of Frederic Ward Putnam, 1893. Courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, PM93-1-10/100266.1.17

Kwakiutl dancers at the Chicago Worlds Fair: Gift of Frederic Ward Putnam, 1893. Courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, PM93-1-10/100266.1.37

Boas demonstrating the Kwakiutl hamatsa: National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institute

Franz Boass anthropometry inventory sheet: National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution

Ruth Benedict in 1924: Margaret Mead Papers, Library of Congress

A page from Boass report for the Dillingham Commission: U.S. Government Printing Office

Tabletop display used by the American Eugenics Society: American Eugenics Society Records, American Philosophical Society

Madison Grant: Library of Congress Rare Book and Special Collections Division

Adolf Hitlers copy of The Passing of the Great Race: Library of Congress Rare Book and Special Collections Division

A dedication to Hitler from the publisher: Library of Congress Rare Book and Special Collections Division

Margaret Mead as a girl: Margaret Mead Papers, Library of Congress

Margaret Mead as a student: Margaret Mead Papers, Library of Congress

Edward Sapir: Margaret Mead Papers, Library of Congress

The house of the Holt family: Margaret Mead Papers, Library of Congress

Margaret Mead with Faamotu: Margaret Mead Papers, Library of Congress

Reo Fortune with boys of Pere village: Margaret Mead Papers, Library of Congress

Margaret Mead with children in the lagoon of Pere village: Margaret Mead Papers, Library of Congress

Zora Neale Hurston with car: Zora Neale Hurston Papers, Special and Area Studies Collections, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida

Gregory Bateson: Margaret Mead Papers, Library of Congress

Ella Deloria: The Indian Leader, Sept. 25, 1925. Courtesy of Haskell Indian Nations University Library

Bateson, Mead, and Fortune in an Australian newspaper: Margaret Mead Papers, Library of Congress

Felicia Felix-Mentor in Life: Life, Dec. 13, 1937

Zora Neale Hurston by Carl Van Vechten: Margaret Mead Papers, Library of Congress

Bateson and Mead eating in New Guinea, 1938: Margaret Mead Papers, Library of Congress

Hurston with musicians, 1935: Margaret Mead Papers, Library of Congress

Boas on the cover of Time: Time, May 11, 1936

Benedict, ca. 1931: Ruth Benedict Papers, Archives and Special Collections, Vassar College Library

Interned Japanese Americans at Santa Anita racetrack, 1942: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

Map of Meads relationships in the Boas circle: Margaret Mead Papers, Library of Congress

Mead in her office in the American Museum of Natural History: Image #338667, American Museum of Natural History Library

I do not say that my conclusions about anything are true for the Universe, but I have lived in many ways, sweet and bitter, and they feel right for me. I have walked in storms with a crown of clouds about my head and the zig zag lightning playing through my fingers. The gods of the upper air have uncovered their faces to my eyes.

Zora Neale Hurston , anthropologist, 1942

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

Max Planck , physicist, 1948

On the last day of August 1925, the triple-deck steamship Sonoma, midway through its regular run from San Francisco to Sydney, slipped into a harbor formed by an extinct volcano. The island of Tutuila had been scorched by drought, but the hillsides were still a tangle of avocado trees and blooming ginger. Black cliffs loomed over a white sandy beach. Behind a line of spindly palms lay a cluster of open-sided thatched houses, the local building style on the string of Pacific islands known as American Samoa.

On board Sonoma was a twenty-three-year-old Pennsylvanian, slight but square-built, unable to swim, given to conjunctivitis, with a broken ankle and a chronic ailment that sometimes rendered her right arm useless. She had left behind a husband in New York and a boy-friend in Chicago, and had spent the transcontinental train ride in the arms of a woman. In her steamer trunk she carried reporters notebooks, a typewriter, evening dresses, and a photograph of an aging, wild-haired man she called Papa Franz, his face sliced by saber cuts and melted from the nerve damage of a botched surgery. He was the reason for Margaret Meads journey.

Mead had recently written her doctoral dissertation under his direction. She had been one of the first women to complete the demanding course of study in Columbia Universitys department of anthropology. So far her writing had drawn more from the library stacks than from real life. But Papa Franzas Professor Franz Boas, the department chair, was known to his studentshad urged her to get out into the field, to find someplace where she could make her mark as an anthropologist. With the right planning and some luck, her research could become the first serious attempt to enter into the mental attitude of a group in a primitive society, he would write to her a few months later. I believe that your success would mark a beginning of a new era of methodological investigation of native tribes.