The Reinvention of Humanity: A Story of Race, Sex, Gender and the Discovery of Culture
CHARLES KING
(Bodley Head, 448 PP, £25)
Tablet bookshop price £22.50 • Tel 020 7799 4064

This book’s central figure is Franz Boas, without whose groundbreaking insights, influence and support the careers of the many other researchers and writers here related are inconceivable. He created the “four-field” approach to studying human societies, linking archaeology, linguistics, cultural anthropology and physical anthropology, an approach that so came to dominate his discipline in the twentieth ­century that it is impossible to imagine our own world view without it.

Boas was born in eastern Westphalia, then Prussian, in 1858, into an assimilated Jewish family. While at Kiel University, he decided he wished to do research on the effects of environment upon the living patterns of the Inuit of Baffin Island. He soon found, like many Europeans before and after him, that he depended on them for survival. This brought a profound reappraisal of the then current philosophy among anthropologists that there were distinct “stages” in human societal development, leading – you guessed it – to the pinnacle of human achievement: modern, white, industrialised and ethnically European. The rest of Boas’ career was devoted to a systematic dismantling of this model, demonstrating that societies are a complex and dynamic interaction of contexts, without hierarchies in development or culture.