Cultural Anthropology 2022
This course paired Charles King’s Gods of the Upper Air with Laura Tubelle de González’s Through the Lens of Cultural Anthropology to examine how Boasian anthropology fought against biological determinism—and why that fight was more complicated than the heroic narrative suggests. The course traces what anthropology got right, what it got wrong, and the roads not taken: the alliances with Hurston, Du Bois, and Deloria that might have made the discipline genuinely useful for understanding and transforming American society.
Part 1: Fighting Biological Determinism
What is Cultural Anthropology?
González chapter 1. Introduction to the anthropological lens.
The Greatest Moral Battle
King chapters 1-2, “Away” & “Baffin Island.” Boas proving humanity is one undivided thing.
Is Ethnocentrism Getting Worse?
González chapter 2. In 2000, students were split. In 2022, everyone said yes.
Updating Cultural Relativism
González chapter 3. Swimming pools filled with sand, and seven lessons about race.
Anthropology’s Forgotten Founders
King chapters 3-4, “All is Individuality” & “Science and Circuses.” Firmin wrote against race years before Boas changed his mind. Du Bois did ethnography while Boas measured heads.
Boas Basically Lost
King chapters 5-6, “Headhunters” & “American Empire.” He proved immigrant bodies changed in one generation. Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1924 anyway.
Part 2: Roads Not Taken
Marriage and Family
González chapter 7. Engels borrowed Morgan’s kinship theories—left and right weaponized them for opposite agendas.
Why Americans Love Biological Determinism
King chapter 8, “Coming of Age.” If all are created equal but society is unequal, genes must explain it.
Kula Ring, NFTs, and Reciprocity
González chapter 6. Why would someone pay millions for a JPEG? Economic anthropology beyond capitalism.
Far Away Peoples as Laboratories
King chapter 9, “Masses and Mountaintops.” Samoa was a puzzle to understand. Harlem was a disease to cure. Hurston did more fieldwork than Mead.
People Before Data
King chapter 10, “Indian Country.” Sapir’s late realization: “supremely important to think of people as people first, not as mere data generators.”
Politics & Power
From Standing Rock to an analysis of rational discourse and sanitization of violence.
Anthropology and US Empire
King chapters 12-14, “Spirit Realms,” “War and Nonsense,” & “Home.” Haiti occupation, WWII’s two different wars, and an ever more capacious view of humanity.
Related Courses
This course is part of a series of Cultural Anthropology courses:
- Cultural Anthropology 2024 — Cultural Anthropology Toolkit
- Cultural Anthropology 2023 — A Global Toolkit
- Cultural Anthropology 2021 — Introducing Anthropology
- Cultural Anthropology 2020 — Ken Guest’s Essentials