Franz Boas, whose achievements are set out in Charles King’s The Reinvention of Humanity, recast the foundations of American anthropology. Against the prevailing political and intellectual orthodoxy, Boas and his students insisted that the basic unity of humankind was beyond dispute, and that within this unity there was no natural hierarchy of races, languages or cultures. What’s more, they argued that any system of thought seeking to prove otherwise wasn’t just ethically bankrupt but demonstrably wrong. There was no great ladder of civilisation on whose rungs the different peoples of the world and their states of development could be placed; there was only a multitude of peoples, and the various ways to live they had developed for themselves. These ways of living – cultures, as Boas and his school called them – were shaped by the vicissitudes of local and global history, not in accordance with any universal law. However different or strange the customs of a people might seem, if you took the time to understand them you would find they made sense in their proper context. Who knows: they might even make more sense than the way you do things yourself. And if you could in turn look with a dispassionate eye at your own culture, perhaps you would be able to see that it was just one among many cultures, and that it had no natural claim to superiority.

Francis Godding, "G&Ts on the Veranda", London Review of Books, 4 mars 2021.