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.

Nonetheless, here are some of the answers from women who answered, "No, I wouldn't stop menstruating, even if I could":

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.

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.

We're working on a website that will appear within the American Anthropological Society web page. Keep an eye out for it.

Please email me to continue this conversation.