Mead’s vision and her achievement, as described by Peter Worseley in his introduction to Confronting the Margaret Mead Legacy, “was to show that the findings of anthropologists about remote people were highly relevant to the concerns of Americans about their own society, and that the culture of the United States was only one among very many cultural forms, not necessarily the culmination of human evolution.”
That’s my starting point. Seeing the cultural content that gets into scientific models of women’s bodies in the U.S. – a focus of my earlier work – owes much to Mead’s insistence on regarding U.S. culture as apprehensible by ethnography, among other methods. In my earlier work, I wrote that women’s bodies very often are described in medical texts as if they were mechanical factories or centralized production systems. In descriptions of menstruation, birth and menopause, the machine metaphor is as alive today as it was ten years ago, or as it was when Margaret Mead gave birth to her daughter, Catherine, and “was made” to time her labor pains with a watch. As she wrote in Blackberry Winter, at the hospital, “they were convinced that, as a prima para, I could not be so ready for birth, and I was given medication to slow things down.”
A few years ago I was feeling a bit optimistic about improving U.S. attitudes and practices concerning birth, and even menstruation. At that time, a device was in development that was meant to serve as a substitute for tampons and pads. This device was designed to treat menstrual fluid so matter-of-factly that it would collect it for disposal in a cup marked with measuring lines. The device was marketed under the brand name, “Instead,” but despite its popularity with women, its future is unclear. The company went bankrupt, although you can still buy it in CVS. [Laughter]
More recent developments in products for women are a mixture of the optimistic and pessimistic, and I want to plunge into an example here and let my work with the example bring us back to the kinds of issues that were so important for Margaret Mead.
“Seasonale” is a new formulation of the birth-control pill. It is said to offer women fewer periods – one a season, perhaps, for a year. It would be premature to make any definitive statement about the merits of this regimen, but it is coming. Speaking for myself, when reading about “Seasonale,” alarm bells sound on every side. If, as the promoters claim, the reduction in ovulation/menstruation cycles would reduce the rates of breast, ovarian and endometrial cancer, that would be wonderful. If anemia in women worldwide could be reduced, that would also be obviously beneficial. Perhaps this could be obtained more simply by dietary changes; however, at the same time I have to wonder why menstruation has to be cast into such unrelentingly negative terms. Beverly Strassmann, an anthropologist who worked among the Dogon in Mali, found that between being pregnant and breastfeeding, Dogon women only menstruate an average of 100 times their whole lives, compared to the average of between 350 and 400 times for contemporary Western women. As quoted in The New York Times, Strassmann concludes that “women’s bodies are being subjected to changes and stresses that they were not necessarily designed by evolution to handle,” and that, “it’s a pity that gynecologists think that women have to menstruate every month. They [the gynecologists] just don’t understand the real biology of menstruation.” In their book, Is Menstruation Obsolete? Elsimar M. Coutinho and Sheldon J. Segal conclude, “Recurrent menstruation is unnecessary, and can be harmful to the health of women. It is a needless loss of blood.” The New Yorker summarizes their argument: ” but for most women, incessant ovulation serves no purpose except to increase the occurrence of abdominal pain, mood shifts, migraines, endometriosis, fibroids and anemia,” the last of which, they point out, “is one of the most serious health problems in the world.”
At stake here is far more than substituting one kind of hormonal birth-control pill for another. This new regimen claims to offer all women their year-round health by using the pill to eliminate most ovulatory/menstrual cycles. In other words, ovulation and menstruation are not only abnormal, evolutionarily speaking, but dangerous to women’s health.
As the clinical trial results come in on “Seasonale,” we need to emulate Mead’s critical stance, asking “Seasonale” promoters questions like these: “Are you saying that to return to the ‘natural,’ ‘real’ biology found among the Dogon, we have to take a most distinctly unnatural thing – a pill made of synthetic hormones and designed by scientific researchers in collaboration with a pharmaceutical company, Barr Labs, which stands to create a huge market for this product? Are not the long-range effects of synthetic hormones unknown? Are not the secondary effects also largely unknown, especially now that recent evidence has shown that steroids, closely akin to synthetic hormones, are produced in and act on many regions of the brain? In other words, they’re not confined to women’s reproductive organs. Is it not true that we are just now entering the era of what are called ‘designer hormones,’ which can maximize the specific, desirable effects (such as strong bones) and minimize the specific undesirable effects (such as cancer)? But is it not likely to take a decade, at least, as it did with the pill, to understand the unintended, harmful consequences of products like ‘Seasonale’?” We would want to be sure of the health benefits advertised, given the uncanny way the early hype surrounding “Seasonale” offers solutions to very contemporary problems. Time Magazine describes them this way: “Using ‘Seasonale’ with some fine tuning, women can learn to turn their cycles on and off to suit their busy schedules.” Despite the obvious appeal – which I’m not immune to – we must wonder at what price such fashionable convenience might come. Nor is there, in any general media coverage of “Seasonale,” any mention of what women might lose with their periods. As I noted in my earlier work, although most women have plenty to complain about when it comes to their periods, many women also frequently recognize the mix of good and bad experiences that come with them, including their social significance as markers of womanhood. On the award-winning website of The Museum of Menstruation, a section was created for women to post their answer to the question, “Would you stop menstruating if you could?” – a question inspired by the coming release of “Seasonale.” (So an anthropologist is hardly even necessary to keep up with people’s awareness of the implications of these products.)
Nonetheless, here are some of the answers from women who answered, “No, I wouldn’t stop menstruating, even if I could”:
No, I don’t think I would get rid of my period, even if I could. For me cramps are minor and isolated to the first few days of menstruation. I enjoy the cramps I get the same way I enjoy the muscle pains after a really good, beneficial workout. I don’t know why, but I feel sexy when I’m menstruating. I realized at some point, in college, that that’s when I was most likely to get dolled up and go to parties. I think I met several boyfriends while menstruating. From ovulation through menstruation, I’m most interested in sex, most emotional, and also most able to achieve sexual climax. I think all of that is certainly worth a mess. I know that I’m lucky, and that many women have a very painful, sometimes physically and emotionally draining, period every month, and there needs to be a better solution for them than the current pill. But for me, I enjoy my current period right now.
And one more, from a different woman:
I’m a feminist and I don’t intend to have children; still, I’d rather menstruate than anything else in the world. [Laughter] That’s a characteristic of my female body and a natural function, like urinating or evacuating. Heaven knows what side effects this pill would have on me. How am I going to know if I’m okay or not? Abnormalities while having your period – or not having it at all – is the first signal that something is not going well with you. However, I think if a woman is suffering, and her period is a total disaster, she should be able to go on without menstruating and having a normal life. This is a right every female in this world should have. But, I am proud of being a woman; therefore, I am proud of menstruating. Sometimes only you know how much peace of mind a period can bring you. [Laughter] And you also learn a lot about you with your periods. So, if you can, enjoy it. [Laughter]
I by no means wish to romanticize menstruating, and if you go to the site yourself you will find there are plenty of women who said they would jump at the chance to end menstruation. I’m not meaning to ignore them at all. But there is a strong reluctance expressed by others, and the strong reluctance is very much ignored in books like Is Menstruation Obsolete? It’s simply ignored. And I think we should not ignore this reluctance, especially when, for some, menstruation is tied to enhanced feelings of pleasure and empowerment. The cessation of periods might be welcome to those women for whom menstruation causes serious problems, but to make all menstruation pathological, for all women, goes far beyond the bounds of what we know and begins to sound like a scientific replacement for the idea that menstruation is dangerous and polluting. One has to wonder whether the virtual elimination of women’s periods might make women’s bodies appear more calm, steady in predictable; in short, less “troublesome.”
There is also a pervasive refrain running through this enthusiasm to embrace the end of menstruation, and that is the sentiment that that doing so is natural and in tune with our human, ancestral populations. Here’s a quote: “It may be time to borrow from our distant past or from our contemporaries in distant cultures, and treat our bodies as nature intended.” But one hugely important fact is usually missing from these comparisons, setting aside the question of whether contemporary Dogon accurately represent the practices of ancestral populations. The women Strassmann describes among the Dogon spend most of their time when they are not menstruating pregnant, or doing extended, on-demand breastfeeding. Given the immense impact these practices would have on hormonal processes, and assuming no one is imagining contemporary Western women voluntarily would emulate this aspect of the Dogon’s life, jumping to the conclusion that synthetic hormones would replicate a Dogon’s hormonal experience seems quite a leap. My hope would be that the kind of analysis of culture and biology promoted by Margaret Mead, which can lead us to understand the grammar of the hierarchies biological thinking can often promote will remain a useful tool, as anthropologists continue to contend with new generations of techniques to improve and control women’s bodies.
Broadening the scope of my remarks, reducing women’s experience to a “more natural” state resonates strongly with other contemporary forms of biological reductionism, from the emphasis on genes (which Rayna Rapp has written about so wonderfully) to the growing efforts to reduce consciousness to neural structures in the brain – which happens to be the subject of my current work. Some general remarks about how I think cultural anthropology might contend with some of these issues:
As a discipline, I think cultural anthropology is threatened by these forms of reductionism. One reason is because they can lead many of our sister disciplines, such as philosophy, psychology, linguistics and cognitive science – with whom in earlier times we had strong and collaborative relationships – to operate on models that more and more ignore the social dimensions of experience. What can we do about this increasing reliance on reductionist models, which threaten the discipline of anthropology within the Academy and outside? Margaret Mead wrote of learning to take knowledge and experience gained from field work and using these, “studies of cultures in the modern world,” because of the insights they contained, the result of what she called “comparison and the practice of learning from the observed behavior of living beings.”
Ethnography has been called an alternative form of knowledge about human nature, one that does not aspire to universal fundamentals or units of knowledge that can be used like blocks to build up structures. Instead of breaking nature down into apparently constituent parts, the knowledge ethnography produces re-instantiates experience of the world and presents it imaginatively. Even more crucially, ethnography could be regarded as a technology itself, a technology of “sociality,” contributing to a world in which individuals are only thinkable as subjects in so far as they participate in cultural and social activities. In a world where such a view (to think very optimistically) became entrenched, perhaps reduction of the socio-cultural world would feel like a violent act. “Veena Daas” has traced the outlines of the fault-line often raised up by literally unspeakable physical violence, between actions that can be incorporated into the human form of life and actions that cannot, actions that instead, in her words, “tear apart the very fabric of life.” Daas shows that a similar edge appears in panic rumors, and “both the source of speech and the trustworthiness of convention” are destroyed. She argues, “There is a mounting panic in which the medium of rumor leads to the dismantling of relations of trust – at times of communal riots. Once a thought of a certain vulnerability is lost, the world is engulfed without limit.”
So high are the stakes in preserving a robust sense that human life is cultural, not only neuronal or genetic, we might risk hyperbole to suggest that bio-genetic or neuro-reductionist accounts are like a panic rumor. As Daas says of panic rumor: “Access to context seems to disappear.” Ethnography, however, makes context life, and at times it does so vividly. Like the eighteenth-century essay, ethnography can draw the reader or viewer into engagement or conversation, instruct by example and elicit partial identifications, thus creating something akin to a social tie between author and reader. There can be so much pleasure in this that we have in our hands a powerful tool full of “sociality,” in the content of our ethnographies and in the form of the ethnographic texts themselves. This is significant because it could be argued that biological reductionism supports a particular kind of subjectivity, one that is both an instrumental and individual. Biological reductionism could be seen as a form of “governmentality,” or, one of those, to quote Mary Poovey, “technologies and theoretical accounts by which individuals are rendered ‘thinkable’ as governable subjects.” By describing the ineluctably social and cultural complexity of human actions, ethnography renders individuals (and this would be the hope, anyway) thinkable only as social beings. And, thus, if ethnography could do that, it could stand up to biological reductionism, saying we are not all alike, though we are related; we are only human in so far as we are connected to others. Human experience is active and inventive, not static and constrained. We may be a product of evolution, but it’s imperative not to exhaust the reasons for our actions. Because of humans’ immense cultural variability, the fund of experience people can draw on to produce knowledge about the self is far greater than anything biological science can teach us about human capacities.
Modeling our activities on Mead’s example, our writing, teaching, speaking and filming can both describe these aspects of human experience and actually bring them into existence by creating conversational relationships with our audience. The goal would not be to free ourselves from all governmentality, but to set in motion governmentality that could counter biologism by refusing to imagine human consciousness as constituted by anything other than the social and cultural.
I want to end by returning to Judith Shapiro’s remark that, since Mead’s death, we anthropologists have more or less left the public sphere to the biologists. We didn’t necessarily want to, but, in effect, that’s what’s happened. They dominate, for example, the pages of the Science Times. In an effort to redress this imbalance a group of cultural anthropologists have recently been trying to create a new print magazine in cultural anthropology, something a bit more serious than Psychology Today but much more jazzy than the English newsletter, Anthropology Today. [Laughter] It is conceived as an international effort; it’s in a very initial phase. Our working title (and we are open to suggestion) is “Culture Matters.” We have a very enthusiastic committee, mostly made up of people from the American Anthropological Society and the Society for Cultural Anthropology, plus the President and the president-elect of the American Anthropological Association. We have a somewhat optimistic but reasonably realistic budget. We have a passionate statement of our goal, and I doubt if there could be a more wonderful audience from which to request help with this project.
We’re working on a website that will appear within the American Anthropological Society web page. Keep an eye out for it.
In the meantime, we’re looking for answers to the following questions: How do we raise funds? Who do we engage as a managing editor? Who do we enlist as writers, including students? What topics should we cover? How can academics learn to write for this kind of venue? Who do we consult for inspiration and advice? What college or university might want to provide an operating base, because we would be dependent upon that? How can we meet journalists who would talk with us, without the Halloween costumes described by Micaela di Leonardo, about genetics and other topics, as well as my colleagues in the Biology Department at Princeton?
Please email me to continue this conversation.
