100 books like Gods of the Upper Air

The reader gets a three-for-one deal in this incredibly thoughtful book: an intimate look at two towering anthropologists by their daughter, a distinguished anthropologist herself. Mary Catherine Bateson understood her difficult parents and their groundbreaking work as well as anyone could.

Talking to her father, she wrote, was “a form of argument that was also a dance.” Her mother was “a one-person conference.” The reader gets to know each member of this remarkable family through insightful anecdotes, rare family photos, conceptual diagrams, and lucid prose.

In her first book, Coming of Age in Samoa, Mead argued that Americans could un-learn a lot of bad ideas about gender and sexuality by studying faraway cultures. She was alternately thanked and blamed for setting in motion the sexual revolution of the 1960s. A few years after her death, a rival anthropologist, Derek Freeman, claimed that her original research was wrong, because she was too naïve to realize that the Samoans were lying to her. People who knew nothing about anthropology but disdained the sexual revolution jumped in on Freeman’s side, blowing up a scholarly debate (that was rooted in a deep, personal grudge) into a cultural firestorm. Anthropologist Paul Shankman waded through the mess to determine that Mead was mostly correct, and Freeman was mostly just bitter. Shankman’s definitive book on the controversy demonstrates how the scientific process works, eventually.

I’m not a big reader of historical fiction, but this book was a big exception to that.

Nell Stone, inspired by renowned anthropologist Margaret Mead, is thoroughly engaging. And so is the portrayal of the science of anthropology and how it was done, for better or worse, in the 1930s.

Like all the books on this list, you don’t need to know about the science in the book's pages before being swept into the story. The characters taught me what I needed to know, all without me realizing it, as they made their way up rivers, into indigenous cultures, and meandered through their own messy lives.

Mead wrote thousands of letters, a reflection of her era, her many travels, and her astonishing ability to make new connections constantly without dropping any of her old friends. She became who she was and processed what she observed of the world through relationships. In these letters, the reader gains a multifaceted sense of her personality and gets a taste of what it is like to delve into her archive—the largest personal collection in the Library of Congress, with more than 530,000 items. The editors’ headings for the sections indicate how well they knew what the various relationships meant to Mead: Husbands: Starved for Likemindedness; Lovers: Continuingly Meaningful; Friends: A Genius for Friendship; Colleagues: What Is Important Is the Work.

This collection of essays by one of the greatest anthropologists of the last century inspired a whole generation of historians—for example, Joan Scott and William Sewell, Jr. as well as myself.  The essays also should appeal to the general reader because of their well-wrought style and wit.  Drawing on Max Weber, Geertz treats cultures as symbolic systems and shows how they helped ordinary people make sense of the world.  Far from wandering off into abstractions, he offers fine-grained descriptions of actual events, notably a Balinese cockfight in an essay that has been cited and debated endlessly among social scientists.

Ethiopia is a country with the second largest population in Africa. There are over 80 ethnic groups and languages, living in a region that includes the largest area of mountains in Africa and also the lowest point on the earth’s land surface. While this book tells the history of the Christian north, including the national epic which tells how Ethiopian kings are descended from Solomon of Israel, it also describes the culture and traditions of other societies which make up this fascinating country, and shows both the tensions and the creativity within Ethiopian society. 

The Vulnerable Observer is a classic work in anthropology in which the author underscores the emotional impact of being a research anthropologist. 

Behar’s wonderfully crafted stories evoke the wisdom of others and demonstrate why it is important for anthropologists to describe the emotional impact of social being in the world. It is an important text for understanding the emotional contours of the human condition.

A lot of Inga Clendinnen’s work dealt with what happens when two very different cultures and ways of making sense of things come into contact. In the subtitle of her book Aztecs: An Interpretation, she boldly asserted her method for approaching history. It is not merely a recitation of facts, it is an elucidation of those facts by an expert steeped in the knowledge of a particular past. Having written about the Maya and the Aztecs, Reading the Holocaust was a departure, topically, geographically, historically. What I found so extraordinary about the book was precisely Clendinnen’s decision to look anthropologically at staggering events historians had often written about in “functional” terms (who did what, when, and where). In so doing, she tried to offer insight into something unthinkable (what the perpetrators thought they were doing) and something unimaginable (what the victims experienced).

Gregory Bateson, an intellectual maverick, had an evolutionary rule named after him when he was a teenager, (his father was a famed geneticist), was the formulator, along with Jurgen Ruesch, of the double-bind hypothesis of schizophrenia, and was a pioneer in the field of mammalian communication. Given its wide range of address to issues within evolutionary biology, psychiatry, anthropology, systems theory, cybernetics, and communication theory, this is a classic “must read” collection of short essays. Bateson’s unrelentingly original and provocative analyses provoke thought and defy any easy categorization. At the very least, he shows how mammalian play, as multileveled interaction, paves the way for the evolution of human language, and also, how human interaction, with its multiple logical types and different kinds of learning, occurs at various levels of abstraction.

Though I am not an anthropologist, I devour ethnographies with a gusto that can only be attributed to disciplinary envy. There are several fascinating ethnographies of emotions and how they differ across cultures. Beatty’s book stands out among them for its rich ethnographic description as well as the sophistication with which he treats the relationship of emotion and culture.

He spots the limitations that lab experiments impose on studying emotions and suggests instead that we have to pay attention to the narratives in which emotions are situated, made, and deemed meaningful. And I rather like how he punctures “affect theory.”