Franz Boas and Margaret Mead teach and inspire my heroine in the reinvention of race, sex, and gender
100 years ago biological fictions of who we are were challenged by radical thinking - humanity is one!
Boas invented the field of cultural anthropology
Boas opposed the popular ideology of scientific racism that believed in racial superiority/inferiority. He demonstrated that differences in human behavior are largely the result of culture acquired through social learning. Thus culture became the central concept of anthropology.
Boas' critique of racial ideologists was a significant milestone in combating racial prejudice in academia and society.
Margaret Mead
Her field work in Samoa and Southeast Asia studying the sex attitudes of traditional cultures led to influential books that influenced the 1960s sexual revolution. She like Boas, her teacher, believed that varying cultural patterns express an underlying human unity.
Her Coming of Age in Samoa posited that sexuality is shaped by culture, and that it is worth studying girls.
The Ash Can Cats of Barnard College
My heroine and wanna-be anthropologist Estela rooms with the Ash Can Cats (Mead in center of photo) at Barnard College who challenged the social conventions of the time regarding women.
Mead was honored posthumously with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Jimmy Carter: "Intrepid, independent, plain spoken, fearless, she remains a model for the young and a teacher from whom all may learn."
The top book on my favorite non-fiction reads!
Charles King writes engagingly in Gods of the Upper Air of how Boas, Mead, Ruth Benedict, Ella Deloria, and Zora Neale Hurston changed the foundations of how we think today.
For a short version, listen to him on the podcast Throughline, on NPR.