The Reinvention of Humanity (versione in eBook)

Descrizione

The Reinvention of Humanity tells the story of a small circle of renegade scientist-explorers who changed something profound: what it means to be normal. In the early twentieth century, these pioneering anthropologists, most of them women, made intrepid journeys that overturned our assumptions about race, sexuality, gender and the nature of human diversity, paving the way for the suffrage and civil rights movements that followed and sparking a debate that continues to this day. From the Arctic to the South Pacific, from Haiti to Japan, they immersed themselves in distant or isolated communities, where they observed and documented radically different approaches to sexuality and child-rearing, family structure and the relationship between men and women. With this evidence they were able to challenge the scientific consensus – and almost universal belief – of the time that a person’s intelligence, abilities and character are determined by their race or sex, and show how the roles we play are shaped not by these crude ‘biological’ categories but according to the infinite variety of human culture. Theirs were boundary-breaking lives, filled with scandal, romance, rivalry and tragedy. Those of Margaret Mead and her lover Ruth Benedict resulted in fame and notoriety; those of Native American activist Ella Deloria and the African-American folklorist Zora Neale Hurston ended in poverty and obscurity. Here their achievements are brought fully into the light for the first time. All were outsiders, including the famous founder of their field, the wild-haired German immigrant, Franz Boas. The Reinvention of Humanity takes us on their globe-spanning adventures and shows how, together, these courageous and unconventional people created the moral universe we inhabit today.