Well, I didn’t come of age in Samoa and I didn’t grow up in New Guinea. One of the things people tend not to be aware of is that Margaret Mead made all but one of her major field trips before World War II, before I was born. So we’re talking about someone who died 20 years ago, but someone whose field work occurred 60 years ago. I think that’s a very important thing to have in focus.
I’m glad that Janet Jakobsen mentioned With a Daughter’s Eye, because I regard writing that book as my principal act of filial piety. Now, you might think that organizing a Mead centennial is also an act of filial piety. What I want to say to you is that I am not engaged in this centennial to increase the honor in which my mother is held. I’m engaged in this centennial because she stood for things that I think we badly need to emphasize at this moment in American history and at this moment in the history of our discipline.
I have a question for all of you. How many people here have read at least one book by Margaret Mead all the way through? Okay, almost everyone. So how many people have read more than two all the way through? Not many. I once was on a panel, next to a distinguished anthropologist of Oceania – whose name I will not mention because the story would be embarrassing for him – and he said to me, “What a pity it is that Margaret Mead spent all that time on mainland New Guinea, and all she produced was Sex & Temperament.” Well, that’s not unusual. A lot more people have read Sex & Temperament than have read her five-volume monograph on the Arapesh. This is true in the profession and outside of it. A lot of people feel they know an author when they have read one book by that author. For instance, the Shakespeare play that most people read in high school is Romeo & Juliet, so a lot of people feel they know Shakespeare. Been there. Done that. In Mead’s case, I call this the “left toe phenomenon.” A little piece of her life work has been made to stand for the whole. Aside from our general habit of reading one famous book, I think Freeman gets a lot of the blame. It’s interesting watching book sales: after Freeman, sales of Coming of Age in Samoa went up because people were teaching courses about the Mead/Freeman debate, and sales of her other books went down because of the rumor that Margaret Mead had been debunked. Most people don’t remember Freeman’s name, but they’ve heard that rumor.
I want you to imagine for a moment what it would be like to have your entire life judged in terms of what you did in a one-year period in your early twenties. The problem with an icon is that people think of something simplified, static and easy to caricature, stereotypic. I’m going to suggest that in many ways Margaret Mead is an undiscovered country. It’s really interesting to discover how much there is. All the monographs that have been out of print are coming out again, with new introductions. And even more important, all the work on contemporary cultures that started during World War II, and continued until the fifties, carrying on from Benedict’s Research in Contemporary Cultures project, is also coming out again. There is a gold mine there of thinking about contemporary cultures and how change occurs in them. And, incidentally, for thinking about what is today called “cultural studies.” So many of the techniques that they developed for the study of culture at a distance are now being used by cultural studies, while most anthropologists have missed the opportunity offered by those techniques. My personal theory is that one of the reasons that anthropologists study enclaves within industrialized nations is because you can get up close to the population of a nursing home, or the congregation of a particular, charismatic church. Right? And that’s our model of how you do it. When I lived in Iran, I realized that there was no way of getting up close to a whole country or to a city, so what I did was to try to replicate the methods developed for the study of a culture “at a distance,” which were a predecessor of the use of focus groups and group discussion by members of the community to study cultural products and interviews of various sorts. In other words, there’s no way of studying Tehran or New York except the sociologists’ way of statistics or “at a distance,” by taking a smaller number of very close looks at parts of the larger pattern.
Well, that’s parenthetical. There’s a lot of Mead’s work of which almost nobody is aware. There are, I am told, 500,000 items in the Mead archive in the Library of Congress – which is in constant use, for many, many different purposes. She didn’t believe in throwing things away.
There is a real problem with the flatness of our sense of Mead’s work; the limited focus of our sense of her; the situation of having read one or two books, mostly from her early career, but I want to challenge you to ask something rather different from what we usually ask. Not “Who was Mead? What did she stand for?” but “What was her process
of becoming?” Let’s take a look at her development. Let’s look at the things she changed her mind about and the things she didn’t. Because that is a better model for each of us than a static characterization, such as that which occurs in textbooks, summarizing somebody in a little paragraph. I sometimes think that Samoa has become to Mead like that cherry tree of George Washington’s. You know the story and you stop with saying, “Sure, honesty’s a good thing,” without going on to learn more.
We need to look at historical process, not just in the areas where we do ethnography, but in the intellectual ancestors of the discipline. Because as we stereotype and caricature, we also bring into play a particular form of bigotry that I’ve heard called by Wilton Dillon “presentism.” Presentism is the temporal equivalent of ethnocentrism. It is judging a figure in the past by present-day standards. I thought I would start out with one example that might illuminate that.
Mead was interested throughout her career in issues involving race. That was one of the commitments imparted to her by her parents, who were social scientists, and, of course, by Boas and Benedict, who, in a sense, started the process of anthropologists speaking to the public about the issue of race. She was involved in the postwar effort by progressives to get the word “negro” spelled with a capital “N,” as a gesture of respect, and she valued that as a success. So, of course, she was uncomfortable when the word, “Negro,” became a negative term. It’s now even been removed by the United Negro College Fund, which has become “The College Fund.” But there was a period when she was still using the word that seems to us wrong. In fact, when you are engaged in an issue over time, you may appear a little bit behind the wave on that issue. I think that often happens. Because she was all her life deeply committed to feminism, when a new group of people came along and said, “Oh, that kind of feminism doesn’t count,” she was not willing to say, “Oh, I’m so glad you thought of it.” Another example I’ve been interested in, because it is such a powerful one, came up when people started speaking in the Christian churches in favor of the ordination of women. Mead belonged to the Episcopal Church through most of her life. (She was very talented at falling asleep during the sermon. It was one of the pre-conditions of a very happy relationship.) And when people started speaking about the importance of ordaining women, she was uncomfortable with the idea because, she said, “At a certain moment in the mass the priest represents the executioner of Christ.” Nobody knows that detail anymore, so it doesn’t matter, but she dragged her feet because of it. She listened and she listened, and eventually she said, yes, of course women must be ordained, in all of the churches. She was behind on that because of an awareness that almost nobody making the argument had anymore. I find that interesting.
So I’ve put together a list of areas where I feel she changed her position over her lifetime, in ways that I see as important. These changes were not expressed in rewriting her earlier work but in new work. She absolutely refused to change things she had written to conform to new ideas of either accuracy or political correctness. She said, “What you write stands as it was written. If you try and doll it up to look newer, what you do is falsify the whole thing.” I think that’s an accurate position. You know, it isn’t just that she insisted on the typing up of field notes. She insisted on the dating of every piece of paper, on the theory that they’re meaningless without that context. (I try to do that but I don’t succeed, so don’t feel badly.)
One change has to do with being with someone else in the field, and I do think that that represents a recognition that an anthropologist’s own past experience is the lens through which she sees, and because she is her own scientific instrument, she cannot help but be somewhat influenced by her own or his own personality. Chagnon is influenced by his personality. He’s interested in violence. He just is. That is a limitation on his very fine work. Oscar Lewis and Robert Redfield looked at Tepotzlan through the lens of two very different personalities. Wouldn’t it have been better if they had been there as a team, and able to talk about all of that? So after Mead went alone to Samoa, every field trip was done with a companion. Various husbands were companions. It’s so interesting that although she and Reo Fortune saw Manus very similarly, they had really contradictory views of the Arapesh, and it’s important to notice that. It is important not to regard those as alternative views, one of which must be wrong, but as views which complement each other, correct each other in some way. The tragedy of Derek Freeman is that, going to Samoa years and years after Mead, he sees Samoa in a way that arises from his personality. He’s interested in violence and is puritanical about sex, and he cannot use her view to balance his, or his hers, but only as something to attack and try to disprove.
For the rest of her life, after Samoa, when she went to the field, she went with another anthropologist, so there would be the possibility of discussing her impressions with a peer who shared the same theoretical frame of reference. I think we can learn from that. I think you can look at that idea, coming out of the Samoan experience, playing through her subsequent field work with a couple of husbands and then going back to Manus with Theodore and Lenora Schwartz and subsequent expeditions. You can follow that development into one of the two books that I felt it was most important to get back into print this year, of the 15 or so that have been reprinted, and
that is Continuities in Cultural Evolution. I’ve been telling people I don’t know where that famous quote – “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world” – first appeared in print. But if you want the long version, read Continuities in Cultural Evolution, because the direction of that book – which starts out as a kind of survey of the transmission of culture – is to talk about the role of groups and key members of groups, in the change and preservation of culture. It applies to group research as well. I was saying yesterday that, for me, it was a moment of discovery to realize that that’s a book of applied anthropology, because the first time I read it I read it as theory. It’s also proposal. So when expeditions began to be mounted in which groups went together, that was something she regarded as very valuable.
Another thing I would emphasize is her interest in change. She did not start out interested in change. Now that’s a little bit of an exaggeration, because her doctoral dissertation at Columbia (if anybody thought it was Coming of Age, it wasn’t) was a library dissertation on change of designs on fabric in Polynesia. Change was there from the very beginning, just as it was impossible to see Samoa, in her time, simply through the lens of the ethnographic present. Half the girls she was interviewing were living in the missionary house, and being chaperoned. So change has always been a topic, but it became central after the war.
One of the critiques we have now of the work done in that generation – which is associated with “salvage” anthropology – is that they saw a culture as a terribly delicate and closely integrated thing that would easily be destroyed by any stone axe or Coke bottle introduced into it. Therefore, they believed that the more pre-literate cultures they could get out and describe fast, the better, because they would disappear. Well, the answer to that, as we all know, is yes and no. They have indeed changed, and it is important to have records of them, as good as we can get, but culture is transmitted from parent to child and can be very tenacious. So these cultures haven’t just disappeared. This is not a reason not to try to describe at greater depth, but that generation made a first pass in as many places as possible.
I try to emphasize to people that if you asked Mead what part of her work she regarded as the most important – think about that for a minute; all the different things she did – the answer was the field notes and photographs, which were as near as she could get to primary data about what, as a young woman, she called “primitive cultures,” and as an older woman she called “preliterate cultures.” And, as we all know, in this country Native American Indians are now going to the Library of Congress, going to the writings of anthropologists, to reclaim portions of their history that are no longer available to them otherwise.
Mead’s postwar work was focused on change. I think that interest in change really came out of World War II and the effort at systematic application of intellectual understanding to the war effort. You know, she belonged to a generation whose lives were dominated by a war in which they believed. Unlike, say, myself and many of us here. Youth was dominated by the Vietnam War, which I couldn’t possibly believe in, and before that, by the antagonism between government and the intelligentsia that McCarthy and the Cold War brought into being. This was an early alienation that she never suffered. She was awfully careful about what petitions she signed, so I bet she never signed a newspaper ad opposing the Vietnam War, but she spoke and wrote where she could give her words context, taking a fundamental idea that was in her World War II book about American character, And Keep Your Powder Dry, that “Americans should never be asked to fight a war they do not believe in. They don’t do it well.” So, certainly, she ended up opposing the Vietnam War but not by signing petitions, and not as part of a habitual cynicism about national policy. It was World War II that made her interested in issues around change, and her single postwar field trip to Manus, the one that led to the book New Lives for Old, launched her, really, on a second career. I think she was quite depressed after the war. Benedict died. My father left her. The Cold War began. That trip to Manus really launched her on a second career of thinking about the possibilities and choices for change. One of the ironies in Freeman’s over-simplification of calling her an “absolute cultural determinist” (as if that were possible for anyone to be), was her assertion of the fact that human beings not only learn, not only are flexible, not only transmit tradition, they can make choices in modifying their culture.
Two more things that I would mention. One is the way she embraced new technology. My take – not to subtract from the influence her work did have particularly on ethnographic film making – is that no one has taken up the challenge of the work with photographs she did with Bateson in Bali, and in Iatmul. Eric Silverman is working in the Library of Congress on that: photographs not as illustrations but as primary data, which can then be studied to come up with new ideas – like the field notes. You see, the books are one interpretation of a set of notes and photographs. The notes and photographs, however imperfect, are closer to being primary data and should be interpreted again by every generation. And we should be collecting that kind of data and not losing it, as we tend to do.
Lastly, in terms of real changes in orientation – and this is something she talked about a good deal – when she first went to the South Pacific it did not occur to her (as it did not occur to other anthropologists of that generation) that the peoples she was studying would someday read her books. It isn’t just that she didn’t get them to sign releases when she took photographs. Their lives seemed so remote that when she left they thought she was dead. And when she started revisiting field sites after the war; when she met Manus children going to school, learning to read; when people from places she had worked pulled out copies of her books and talked about them, that was to her a very exciting and important idea. It echoed, of course, the decision to study what Benedict called “contemporary cultures,” looking, as an anthropologist, at the culture of peoples in industrialized societies – people will read your books, you know? Suddenly there was an equation, a connection, that was to her terribly exciting, between those you study and those who study you, either by doing, let us say, ethnography in this country or by reading and criticizing what ethnographers had written about them. That was, for her, I think, transformative. It was one of the moments that made her really begin to think about a new kind of human unity, which is a recurrent metaphor that took her into environmental issues and into disarmament issues. What does it mean to assert human unity and still celebrate cultural diversity? She embraced new technologies every time she had a chance – photography, cinema – I remember her rhapsodizing about Super 8 cameras. Nobody uses them anymore because they use video instead. I wish that she had a chance to meet the Worldwide Web. She would have loved it.
This is where I pause for a commercial. The website address of the Mead Centennial Site is www.Mead2001.org. I hope you visit it. If you would like to receive the Newsletter, you can ask for it by sending your mailing address to the website.
One last thing. We’ve talked about reductionism, and about myths. I would like to add two more to our list of the reductionisms that we should be aware of – and beware of. You know, I look at Mead writing about change in Manus, and the truth is they radically revamped their culture, though not totally. Residues of all the old institutions crop up from time to time. But, of course, they couldn’t change their – ahem – political economy. They couldn’t change their global power positions. They could not generate capital. Mead was a bit naive about that. But I think it is very important to notice that our understandings of both money and power are also socially constructed. We live in one of the great ages of faith, like the high Middle Ages, with its belief in the incredibly complex cosmology of the Roman Catholic Church. All these beings and processes and entities and salvation, and so on and so forth. Well, we believe in money. And as anthropologists we should be sophisticated enough to remember that it doesn’t exist.
Now that doesn’t mean it doesn’t affect our lives. Not for a minute. Economics is an immensely powerful ideology, which a lot of people take much too seriously. I sometimes feel the same thing is true about anthropology’s contemporary discovery that power is what we should really be talking about. Everyone says, let’s talk about the realities of power. Let’s talk about the realities of money. Every human being today lives in a world where they are affected by these particular social constructs. But let’s bring our sophistication to bear in realizing that these are constructs, and that one of the reasons the early anthropologists were not inclined to think in terms of issues of power had to do with the very different ways power was constructed within the cultures they studied, in spite of the impinging European and missionary powers. So I advocate avoiding the reductionisms of economics and political science that are so fashionable.
All right. I would make a distinction between what we do with Mead, within the profession, and what use we make of Mead the icon, in our society. I hope that our work within the profession would involve discovering a lot of useful stuff in her work that people haven’t yet noticed, and that Freeman has distracted them from; and, I hope, would involve using that primary data in the Library of Congress, much of which is going to be available online, through an academic website – some 50,000 digitized photographs of Bali and Iatmul, so you can almost send your students on a field trip. That is Mead, the undiscovered country,that anthropologists may need to discover.
Mead has something different to offer to our society at large. A lot of people – several speakers today – have pointed out the implicit alliance between biological determinism – the emphasis on biology as real science – and various kinds of rightist and authoritarian politics. When we say that Mead believed in human malleability, believed in culture (I shouldn’t use the word “believed” – I should say that she spoke in terms of human malleability and culture), it’s another way of saying that she regarded human beings as capable of learning – which all too many people today do not. I think it’s important to hold that affirmation of human learning in front of American society and to keep re-emphasizing it as the fundamental basis of our respect for each other as human beings, so we don’t try to solve all problems by prescribing drugs, for instance, or gene therapy. We regard human beings as capable – not always, not perfectly, not totally, but in general – as capable of learning. That’s where I see her as an icon. And unless members of the discipline hold that affirmation up in the world it will disappear. It’s too easy to say, “Oh, well, the concept of culture’s kind of messy. Let’s not use the word anymore.” It was the great achievement of Mead’s generation to get that indispensable word into the vocabulary of ordinary people, so they could bring it into play in every situation where they encountered groups that were different from them. And we’re still working on it. It’s imprecise, but you can’t put the toothpaste back into the tube, and how are you going to brush your teeth if you don’t get it out?
So that really, in short, is what I want to say to you. I want you to take note of Mead on two levels. I want you to think of her both as an inspiration for engagement in the affairs of your own society, and as a source of intellectual ideas. I would love to welcome all of you – write, publish, give tea parties – around that idea. We need it in America today. I think we are going in the wrong direction.
