As many other speakers at today’s centenary have made perfectly clear, Margaret Mead, in all her controversy, common sense and commitment to an optimistic belief in the uses of scientific knowledge for social engineering, was a pre-eminent public intellectual of her day. Along with her friend and mentor, Ruth Benedict, she popularized the ideas of a culturally relativizing anthropology, making them widely accessible beyond the Academy. Indeed, her indefatigable curiosity, energy and willingness to take on just about any issue she considered to lie at the intersection of science and public policy gleaned her recognition as “Mother of the World,” in Time Magazine‘s words, and, later, “Grandmother to the Nation,” as many have pointed out.
Margaret Mead was a ubiquitous media presence. From her earliest days in bringing home “Lessons from Samoa for Western Civilization,” that famous extra chapter, to her highly respected standing as lecturer at the U.N. and the Menninger clinic, as the famed New Yorker cartoon depicted it, a chieftain, preparing young boys for a traditional initiation ritual in a small village on the other side of the world from New York, could confidently say, “Rather than going into the details, I’m simply going to present each of you with a copy of this rather excellent book by Margaret Mead.” Margaret Mead had already been there. So when the second wave of American feminism reared its head in anthropology departments across our country in the early 1970s, it was unsurprising that we all immediately bumped into Margaret Mead. Many of us early acolytes slogged through literally thousands of pages of ethnographies, in search of usable snippets, in our early “Anthropology of Women” courses. We always found Mead’s rich and full-length Sex & Temperament in Three Primitive Societies a lifeline. In embracing that book’s optimistic lessons concerning the cultural plasticity of what we would now call “gender” arrangements, we conveniently overlooked her sharp criticisms of our more angry political and gender-deconstructive feminism. And in our oversight, we also often missed her commitment to what the philosopher Sara Ruddick would later label “maternal thinking.” Mead had a modernist, Progressive-Era belief in a rebalancing of what she took to be the bedrock nature of male and female activities and values in the service of social reform, easily read, for example, in her later Male and Female. That message emanated continuously for seventeen years from her Redbook Magazine column, where she took on everything from pre-marital sex and nuclear destruction to genetic engineering and her version of race relations.
We second-wavers had a concerted case of Meadean
Redbook envy: How, we wondered? How would we ever seize the means of cultural orientation as effectively as she had done? The short answer, of course, is that we couldn’t. The longer “yes-but” answer must include a sober assessment not only of Mead’s intellectual and public legacy but also an account of how times have changed (see Micaela di Leonardo’s essay).
Several social movements later, and almost a quarter century after Mead’s death, we look back on feminism and the associated rise of academic women’s studies, the rise and fall of the anti-war movement (about whose tactics she certainly had doubts), the world-shaking movement toward de-colonization that proceeded at a pace she began to imagine in New Lives For Old. These massive social transformations and others all rocked anthropology, along with the rest of the world. The ripple effects of those waves included our feminist suspicion of Redbook itself, for media portrayal of normative femininity was quickly put under siege. So we aspired to write for Ms. Magazine instead. And we built our own institutional bases in hundreds of women’s studies programs, new feminist journals and popular media outlets, and, of course, in women’s centers like the one here at Barnard, which has been absolutely critical for the development of feminist theory and practice from the 1970s forward. Just like the youthful initiates that the New Yorker cartoon was talking about, wherever we went, we found that Margaret Mead had already gotten there first. Yet, for our purposes, her cosmopolitan gifts required transformation through the grid of analysis of power.
With a nod to my own research biography, I’d like to illustrate both Margaret Mead’s presence and its necessary transformation in the work of feminist scholars on reproduction, reproductive technologies and their increasing intersection with disability consciousness. Mead’s insistence on the plasticity of the life cycle and the cultural context within which sexuality, marriage and reproduction are structured, and, in turn, structure individual and group experiences, was the foundation on which much of early feminist anthropology was built. But, believing, along with most of her intellectual generation, in the inherent positive value and neutrality of science, Mead’s work ignored the structured power dynamics which made reproduction such a culturally volatile topic. “Power” analyses that take a larger, more global framework into account have become quite conventional in the contemporary practices of anthropologists. We often etch our current ethnographies in the bright light shed by post-colonial critiques of how scientific and literary representations of subject people impacted on their governance; or, how Cold War funding (subtly and sometimes not so subtly) shaped the research questions anthropologists were likely to ask.
Much more could have been and has been said about the rise of power sensitivity in contemporary anthropology, on many fronts, but, for purposes of discussion, I’ll briefly mention two arenas untouched by Mead’s work but central to our own. First, we now need to account for the power relations of reproduction itself. The “politics of reproduction” are exquisitely stratified, not only between women, men and their communities – including legal and religious institutions – but also, of course, across lines of class, racial/ethnic divides and as an aspect of global, international, political economy and culture. Second, many of us are now attentive to the power relations that structure the production, distribution and consumption of scientific knowledge. At stake is financing prestige, worldview and cultural control of the ethos of Western rationality. Science itself has come under scrutiny as a powerful force in and of social life. It would be anachronistic to hold Margaret Mead accountable for not seeing these complex relations, especially as they reside in the discourses and practices of science. Nonetheless, others of her generation were surely more attentive to the dynamics of power, even as they shared her commitment to a more absolutely objective and humane evaluation of scientific knowledge.
Of course, the subject of reproduction and its scientific control sits on the rhetorical divide between nature and culture, connecting the past and the future not only of individuals and social groups, but of nations, as well. It is therefore fraught with political significance. Because reproduction is so centrally linked to women’s bodies, it has served as a touchstone of feminist theory and practice for more than three decades now. Issues of equality and difference, women’s oppression and accomplishment, our place in public life and social policies and the resources needed to improve it – in all their complex and stratified diversity – necessarily engage reproductive issues. When in the 1990s Faye Ginsburg and I assessed the “politics of reproduction” for an Annual Review piece, deciding to organize the conference which led to our edited volume, Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction, we ambitiously hoped to move the study of reproduction to the center of social theory in anthropology. Of course, Margaret Mead had been there first. In collaboration with the psychologist Niles Newton – and informally with Newton’s obstetrician husband, Michael Newton – she had authored several essays during the 1960s on the “cultural pattern of perinatal behavior.” Normative in its core, this work laid out in great detail the state of cross-cultural knowledge at the time and an agenda for further interdisciplinary and applied research, confidently assuming the authority of scientific expertise. Anthropologists, psychologists, research physicians, health service planners should have both the collaborative data and the authority to come up with better maternal/child health interventions. Yet the women’s health movement was quick to interrogate whether and to what degree scientific bio-medical knowledge was simply a benign and enabling presence in the life of most pregnant women and their families. Feminist scholars quickly began to investigate the places where women’s bodies and experiences, in all their diversity, intersected bio-medical authority. And as we worked, the project of understanding human nature through the tools of science became more complicated.
Three research projects in my own work illustrate that complexity. First, for many years, I have worked to understand how women of diverse racial/ethnic, class, religious and national backgrounds here in New York understand the offer of genetic testing in pregnancy: What do they want, and not want, from amniocentesis? How do they understand what a fetus is? What does the possibility of childhood disabilities mean to them? What conditions might be worth an abortion? This research led to the publication of Testing Women, Testing the Fetus two years ago, and in it I worked closely with genetic counselors and geneticists, a move that I think Margaret Mead would have approved of. But I also problematized the intersection where scientific understandings meet family dilemmas, and this would have made her, I think, far less comfortable.
To pluck one example from many to show you what I mean, while watching a genetic counselor in the heart of Brooklyn, at a public hospital serving many, many immigrant populations, especially from the Caribbean, one day I observed an interaction in French, an interaction in which a husband, an evangelical, Protestant minister (Haitian) was translating the offer of an amniocentesis for his wife, pregnant with their third child. When offered an amnio (and they had explained what chromosomes were, what the test was for and what you could find out), he said, “What is this ‘retarded,'” referring to the offer of an amnio to screen for Down’s syndrome. “What is this ‘retarded?’ They always say that Haitian children are retarded. But if we put them in the Haitian Academy ( a private, community-based school in Brooklyn), they do just fine.” In order to take apart that example, one would have to think not only about his patriarchal and evangelical zeal, but also about the history of migration, the global encounter with racism and what public education had provided and not provided for recent immigrant children, especially when they could be assimilated to the tropes of race in this country, at that time. It’s a much more complicated picture that I’m trying to pursue there, rather than just saying, “Well, science offers neutral tools, and people simply have to be educated to understand the rational value.”
The second project to which I’ll refer is a collaborative investigation called “Making New Genetic Knowledge,” which I’ve undertaken with anthropologists Deborah Heath and Karen Sue Taussig. Under the shadow of the Human Genome Project, we have been watching how physicians and bench scientists, especially geneticists, and patients in support groups, have all collaborated to make new scientific knowledge about conditions for which the genes were found in the 1990s; that is, their genes got found, and we needed all that family cooperation to get the blood and stories. The patients’ needs and the patients’ desires are in conversation with those of the researchers, in both the bench science and in the clinical, who are going to have to use this knowledge. It’s a very complicated conversation that we’re trying to track; to understand not some abstract, philosophical question about eugenics, but what actually happens in the trenches, as new genetic knowledge gets made, using the techniques of fieldwork in anthropology.
There are many stories I could draw on, but let me just pull one. Of the three major conditions we are tracking, one is Achondroplasia, the short-statured dwarfing condition for which the gene was found in 1994. At a convention of the Little People of America (LPA), I had the extraordinary experience, in a cohort of anthropologists, none of whom is over 5’3″, of having to register (thank you, Margaret Mead) as “of average stature.” We discovered that the question of pre-natal screening (the use of amniocentesis), which is what you can do once a gene is found, is a highly controversial matter for people of short stature, who have intimate knowledge of what it is to live with a dwarfing condition. The meaning of the test is very different than their worst fears and fantasies of what will happen, given discrimination against typically different people in this culture. If you are a carrier of this particular condition (if you have this condition and have the gene for it), and you have children with somebody else who also carries it, this is an Autosomal, dominant condition. This means you have a one in four chance that the fetus resulting from such a pregnancy will be of average stature; a two in four (or 50 percent) chance that it will carry the gene from one parent and, therefore have the same stature as the parents; or a one in four case (25 percent) that the baby will be born dying of double dominance, because it’s a lethal dose if you get two of it at once. Under those conditions, people of short stature screening often, although not always, makes sense, and all the usual caveats about religious and cultural background apply. But on the whole, people are very open to the idea of that test, for people who know why they need it. Which is to say there’s a 25 percent risk of giving birth to a dying child. But they are quite frantic about the possibility that that test is going to go out on a gene chip to the rest of us, because they understand how much bias there is out there, and there will be just one more condition for which people will assume there’s a reason to abort. And, of course, from the point of view of anybody who’s ever lived with short stature, it’s not a reason for abortion at all.
The question of whose knowledge counts where in society, as we all rev up for these kinds of genomic dreams, is a very problematic notion. Indeed, perhaps someday gene therapy or stem cell therapy, which now seem to be on a kind of bio-medical and cultural horizon, will be actualized. And, of course, the expansion of these fantasies, as well as their possibilities, is deeply linked to NASDAQ’s wild ride in our stock economy, in our particular moment of capital accumulation. Our national fascination with gene dreams is, thus, hardly innocent of a political economy of power. So that’s my second example.
Third example, and final one: On this terrain, where reproductive options and disability consciousness meet, Faye Ginsburg and I are beginning a study of the growing epidemic in learning disabilities. Here, I can only index the dense socio-cultural landscape we hope to explore. In the sciences, where cognitive and neuroscience, and a study of complex genetic traits, intersect the exquisitely stratified world of special education, the majority of children, both served and entrapped in the bureaucracy of the “Board of Dread” (as my son describes his frequent special-Ed testing) here in New York City, are basically black and brown little boys, to cut to the chase. Yet, the picture shifts demographically when we examine special accommodation for predominately white and quite gender-balanced children with learning disabilities, now attending college as young adults, who have benefited from diagnostic and remedial interventions, with federally mandated, Individual Educational Plans. An entire legal framework of legislation and litigation is revealed, once disabilities are analyzed as social, rather than as inherently, and limitingly, biological.
In this project, we want to know more about what we strongly suspect is a hidden “army of mothers” who have professionalized remedial reading, and speech and occupational therapy, in the service of normalizing atypical children. Above all, we are interested in the growing public presence of families with disabled members on the Internet, the Oprah Show, the science section of The New York Times, in novels and self-help books, all narrating their stories. We believe they’re operating under what we call “a narrative urgency.” As the tension between reproductive choice and techno-scientific interventions is growing more and more intense, they need to tell their story of disability as part of quotidian, daily life. Thus, the authority of science as a powerful construction that lives inside of social relations here meets a feminist attentiveness to family difference, eugenic fears and aspirations.
By way of conclusion, the cultural landscape I have been describing is rapidly expanding its horizons. So, too, are our understandings of how science and reproduction are powerfully intertwined. To all this innovation, W.W.M.M.S.? (What Would Margaret Mead Say?) What would she have said to the American public? The generations of feminist analysts who have followed Mead cannot aspire to her public presence as a singular and uniquely charismatic public intellectual. She got their first. But collectively, we are surely on the case. And we know that, with her extraordinary appetite for cultural innovation, she would have used that famous thumb-stick to point our attention to the intersection of reproductive technologies and disability consciousness, saying, “Now watch this very carefully.”
