Margaret Mead

Margaret Mead (born December 18, 1901 in Philadelphia, Pennsilvania; died November 15, 1975 in New York City) was an American cultural anthropologist.

Life

Margaret Mead was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, as the oldest of four children. Her father was an university professor and her mother a social activist. Mead graduated from Barnard College in 1923 and enrolled into graduate school at Columbia University. It was at Columbia that Mead met Ruth Benedict, who became a very close friend of hers, and who persuaded Mead to turn to anthropology. Mead received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1929, after conducting her fieldwork in Polynesia. In 1926 Mead joined the American Museum of Natural History, in New York City, as assistant curator, eventually serving as its curator from 1961 to 1969. In addition, she taught at Columbia University, at New York University, Emory, Yale, and the University of Cincinnati. She founded the Department of Anthropology at Fordham University.

Mead served as a president of American Anthropological Association, Anthropological Film Institute, Scientists Institute for Public Information, Society for Applied Anthropology, and American Association for Advancement in Science.

Mead married first time in 1923 to a theology student Luther Cressman. She traveled with him to Pogo Pogo, a Polynesian island, where she studied local customs, and eventually wrote her first book in 1926. The couple could not have children, and that bothered Mead greatly, because she wanted to have a big family. During her trip to Europe, Mead met Reo Fortune, a New Zealand psychologist. She fell in love with him, divorced Luther and married Reo. The couple moved to New Guinea, where they spent several years. Mead studied child and adolescent development in Manus and Samoan cultures. In 1935 Mead divorced Fortune and married for the third time, to Gregory Bateson. The couple spent four years, from 1936 to 1939 in studying Indonesian cultures. Finally in 1939 Mead's dream came through and she bore a child.

Mead continued to research and teach until she died in New York City on November 15, 1978, aged 76 from cancer.

Work

Following the example of her instructor Ruth Benedict, Mead concentrated her studies on problems of child rearing, personality, and culture. However, it was her work in cultural anthropology, especially of the Polynesian cultures, that Mead remained the most famous for. Her Coming of Age in Samoa is considered one of the classics in anthropological literature.

Coming of Age in Samoa

In the foreward to Coming of Age in Samoa, Mead's advisor, Franz Boas, wrote of its significance:

Courtesy, modesty, good manners, conformity to definite ethical standards are universal, but what constitutes courtesy, modesty, good manners, and definite ethical standards is not universal. It is instructive to know that standards differ in the most unexpected ways.

Boas felt that a study of the problems faced by adolescents in another culture would be illuminating, especially due to the fact that so little was known about the subject so far. Mead herself described the goal of her research: "I have tried to answer the question which sent me to Samoa: Are the disturbances which vex our adolescents due to the nature of adolescence itself or to the civilization? Under different conditions does adolescence present a different picture?" She found that it did. (See pp. 6-7, American Museum of Natural History edition of 1973.)

Mead conducted her study among a small group of Samoans - a village of 600 people on the island of Tau, Samoa, in which she got to know, lived with, observed, and interviewed (through an interpreter) sixty-eight young women between the ages of 9 and 20.

She concluded that the passage from childhood to adulthood (adolescence) in Samoa was a smooth transition and not marked by the emotional or psychological distress, anxiety, or confusion seen in the United States. (Perey).

As Boas and Mead expected, this book upset many Westerners when it first appeared in 1928. Many American readers felt shocked by her observation that young Samoan women deferred marriage for many years while enjoying casual sex, but eventually married, settled down, and successfully reared their own children. The book started many controversies, of which "Freeman-Mead" was the most famous one.

Freeman-Mead Controversy

Derek Freeman, a New Zealand anthropologist, was inspired by Mead's work, and travelled to Samoa to follow up on her work. He held that Mead had been misled in the extreme by the two girls whom she spoke to, and at worst was fabricating her research from whole cloth. He published book, Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth in 1983, five years after Mead had died, in which he outlined his case. For example:

"In this and in his 1999 book, The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead, Freeman explores just how Mead had gotten it all so wrong. As he relates, Mead had dithered around Samoa aimlessly for months before starting her fieldwork. Hopelessly behind schedule, she frittered away much of this remaining time on an unrelated project. Finally, while traveling around the islands with two teenage girls, she had the opportunity to question them privately about their sex lives and those of their friends.

Mead kept prodding the girls. She did not want to hear about traditional taboos or Christian restraints. She wanted to hear about frolicking on the beach. The girls had no idea what Mead was up to. They didn't know she was an anthropologist or what one even was. But what they did know and enjoy was the "recreational lying" common among Samoan girls. Eager to please, they proceeded to spin the kind of yarns that Mead wanted to hear. Pinching each other all the way, they filled Mead's head with wild tales of nocturnal liaisons under the palm trees.

"She must have taken it seriously," one of the girls would say of Mead on videotape years later, "but I was only joking. As you know, Samoan girls are terrific liars when it comes to joking. But Margaret accepted our trumped up stories as though they were true." If challenged by Mead, the girls would not have hesitated to tell the truth, but Mead never questioned their stories. The girls, now mature women, swore on the Bible to the truth of what they told Freeman and his colleagues. "

However, it should be acknowledged that Freeman's account has been challenged as being ideologically driven to support his own theoretical viewpoint (sociobiology), and that considerable controversy remains over the veracity, or otherwise, of both Mead's and Freeman's account. Lowell Holmes completed a much less publicised restudy chronologically in between Mead and Freeman, and commented later about how "Mead was better able to identify with, and therefore establish rapport with, adolescents and young adults on issues of sexuality than either I (at age 29, married with a wife and child) or Freeman, ten years my senior". (Holmes, L.D. and Holmes, E.R, Samoan Village Then And Now, Harcourt Brace, 1992)

After an initial flurry of discussion, most anthropologists concluded that the absolute truth would probably never be known. Many, however, find Freeman's critique highly questionable. First, these critics have speculated that he waited until Mead died before publishing his critique so that she would not be able to respond. Second, they pointed out that Mead's original informants were now old women, grandmothers, and had converted to Christianity. They further pointed out that Samoan culture had changed considerably in the decades following Mead's original research, that after intense missionary activity many Samoans had come to adopt the same sexual standards as the Americans who were once so shocked by Mead's book. They suggested that such women, in this new context, were unlikely to speak frankly about their adolescent behavior. (Note also that one of Freeman's interviewees gave her born-again faith as her reason for admitting to the past deception.) Finally, they suggested that these women would not be as forthright and honest about their sexuality when speaking to an elderly man, as they would have been speaking to a young woman. Many anthropologists also accuse Freeman of having the same ethnocentric sexual point of view as the people Boas and Mead once shocked.

Anthropologists also criticized Freeman on methodological and empirical grounds. For example, Freeman conflated publicly articulated ideals with behavioral norms, that is, while many Samoan women would admit in public that it is ideal to remain a virgin, in practice they engaged in high levels of premarital sex and boasted about their sexual affairs amongst themselves (see Shore 1982: 229-230). Freeman's own data supported Mead's conclusions: in a western Samoan village he documented that 20% of 15 year-olds, 30% of 16 year-olds, and 40% of 17 year-olds had engaged in pre-marital sex (1983: 238-240). In 1983, the American Anthropological Association passed a motion declaring Freeman's Margaret Mead and Samoa "poorly written, unscientific, irresponsible and misleading." In the years that followed, anthropologists vigorously debated these issues but generally supported the critique of Freeman (see Appell 1984, Brady 1991, Feinberg 1988, Leacock 1988, Levy 1984, Marshall 1993, Nardi 1984, Patience and Smith 1986, Paxman 1988, Scheper-Hughes 1984, Shankman 1996, and Young and Juan 1985).

Mead's research in other societies

Another extremely influential book by Mead was Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies. This became a major cornerstone of the women's liberation movement, since it claimed that females are dominant in the Tchambuli (now spelled Chambri) tribe of Papua New Guinea (in the western Pacific) without causing any special problems. The lack of male dominance may have been the result of the Australian administration's outlawing of warfare. According to contemporary research, males are dominant throughout Melanesia (although some believe that female witches have special powers). Others have argued that there is still much cultural variation throughout Melanesia, and especially in the large island of New Guinea. Moreover, male anthropologists often miss the significance of networks of political influence among females. The formal male-dominated institutions typical of some high-population density areas were not, for example, present in the same way in Oksapmin, West Sepik Province, a more sparsely populated area. Cultural patterns there were different from, say, Mt. Hagen. They were closer to those described by Mead.

Mead stated that the Arapesh people were pacifists, although she noted that they do on occasion engage in warfare. Meanwhile, her observations about the sharing of garden plots amongst the Arapesh, the egalitarian emphasis in child-rearing, and her documentation of predominantly peaceful relations among relatives hold up. These descriptions are very different from the "big-man" displays of dominance that were documented in more stratified New Guinea cultures — e.g., by Andrew Strathern. They are, indeed, as she wrote, a cultural pattern.

When Margaret Mead described her research to her students at Columbia University, she put succinctly what her objectives and her conclusions were. A first-hand account by an anthropologist who studied with Mead in the 60s and 70s provides this information:

1. Mead tells of Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies. "She explained that nobody knew the degree to which temperament is biologically determined by sex. So she hoped to see whether there were cultural or social factors that affected temperament. Were men inevitably aggressive? Were women inevitably "homebodies"? It turned out that the three cultures she lived with in New Guinea were almost a perfect laboratory — for each had the variables that we associate with masculine and feminine in an arrangement different from ours. She said this surprised her, and wasn't what she was trying to find. It was just there.

• "Among the Arapesh, both men and women were peaceful in temperament and neither men nor women made war.
• "Among the Mundugumor, the opposite was true: both men and women were warlike in temperament.
• "And the Tchambuli were different from both. The men 'primped' and spent their time decorating themselves while the women worked and were the practical ones — the opposite of how it seemed in early 20th century America."

(Perey. Reproduced by permission of the author.)

2. Mead tells of Growing Up in New Guinea. "Margaret Mead told us how she came to the research problem on which she based her Growing Up in New Guinea. She reasoned as follows: If primitive adults think in an animistic way, as Piaget says our children do, how do primitive children think?

• "In her research on Manus Island of New Guinea, she discovered that 'primitive' children think in a very practical way and begin to think in terms of spirits etc. as they get older.
• "Note: Animistic thinking gives feelings or personality to inanimate objects. For example, a child can say "Bad sidewalk!" if she falls and hurts herself on it — seeing the sidewalk as mean for causing her pain. The term animism comes from the Latin for soul, "anima." And tribal cultures often do have animistic concepts: Pueblos see the clouds as cloud people, who can be pleased or displeased by what man does — and give rain or drought."

(Perey. Reproduced by permission of the author.)

Bibliography

• Margaret Mead. (2001). Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation . Harper Perennial Modern Classics. (original work published 1928). ISBN 0688050336
• Margaret Mead. Growing Up in New Guinea (1930) ISBN 0688178111
• Margaret Mead. The Changing Culture of an Indian Tribe (1932)
• Margaret Mead. Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935)
• Margater Mead. (2001). Male and Female. Harper Perennial. (original work published 1949). ISBN 0060934964
• Margaret Mead. New Lives for Old: Cultural Transformation in Manus, 1928-1953 (1956)
• Margaret Mead. People and Places (1959; a book for young readers)
• Margaret Mead. Continuities in Cultural Evolution (1964)
• Margaret Mead. Culture and Commitment (1970)
• Margaret Mead. (1972). Blackberry Winter (a biographical account of her early years). ISBN 0317600656
• Margaret Mead. Cultural Patterns and Technical Change, ed. (1953)
• Margaret Mead. Primitive Heritage: An Anthropological Anthology, ed. with Nicholas Calas (1953)
• Margaret Mead. An Anthropologist at Work, ed. (1959, repr. 1966; a volume of Ruth Benedict's writings)
• Margaret Mead. The Study of Culture At A Distance. Edited with Rhoda Metraux, 1953
• Margaret Mead. Themes in French Culture. Co-authored with Rhoda Metraux, 1954
• Margaret Mead. A Way of Seeing. Co-authored with Rhoda Metraux, 1975

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Gregory Acciaioli. (1983). Fact and Context in Etnography: The Samoa Controversy. Canberra Anthropology (special issue) 6(1), 1-97.
• George Appell. (1984). Freeman's Refutation of Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa: The Implications for Anthropological Inquiry. Eastern Anthropology 37, 183-214.
• Ivan Brady. (1991). The Samoa Reader: Last Word or Lost Horizon?. Current Anthropology, 32, 263-282.
• Hiram Caton. (Ed., 1990). The Samoa Reader: Anthropologists Take Stock. University Press of America. ISBN 0819177202.
• Richard Feinberg. (1988). Margaret Mead and Samoa: Coming of Age in Fact and Fiction. American Anthropologist, 90, 656-663
• Derek Freeman. (1983). Margaret Mead and Samoa. Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-54830-2.
• Derek Freeman. (1999). The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis of Her Samoan Research. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press. ISBN 0813336937.
• Lowell D. Holmes. (1987). Quest for the Real Samoa: The Mead/Freeman Controversy and Beyond. South Hadley: Bergin and Garvey. ISBN 0897891104
• Eleanor Leacock. (1988). Anthropologists in Search of a Culture: Margaret Mead, Derek Freeman and All the Rest of Us. Central Issues in Anthropology 8(1), 3-20.
• Robert Levy. (1984). Mead, Freeman, and Samoa: The Problem of Seeing Things as They Are, Ethos 12, 85-92
• Jeannette Mageo. (1988). Mālosi: A Psychological Exploration of Mead's and Freeman's Work and of Samoan Aggression. Pacific Studies, 11(2), 25-65
• Mac Marshall. (1993). "The Wizard from Oz Meets the Wicked Witch of the East: Freeman, Mead, and Ethnographic Authority. American Ethnologist, 20(3), 604-617.
• Bonnie Nardi. (1984). The Height of Her Powers: Margaret Mead's Samoa. Feminist Studies 10, 323-337.
• Allan Patience and Josephy Smith. (1986). Derek Freemanin Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of a Biobehavioral Myth. American Anthropologist, 88, 157-162.
• David B. Paxman. (1988). Freeman, Mead, and the Eighteenth-Century Controversy over Polynesian Society. Pacific Studies, 1(3), 1-19
• Roger Sandall. (2001). The Culture Cult: Designer Tribalism and Other Essays. ISBN 0813338638
• Nancy Scheper-Hughes. (1984). The Margaret Mead Controversy: Culture, Biology, and Anthropological Inquiry. Human Organization, 43(1), 85-93.
• Paul Shankman. (1996). The History of Samoan Sexual Conduct and the Mead-Freeman Controversy. American Anthropologist, 98(3), 555-567.
• Bradd Shore. (1982). Sala'ilua: A Samoan Mystery. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 0231053827
• R.E. Young and S. Juan. (1985). Freeman's Margaret Mead Myth: The Ideological Virginity of Anthropologists. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology. 21, 64-81.

External links

• Creative Intelligence: Female ("The Silent Revolution: Creative Man In Contemporary Society" Talk at UC Berkeley, 1962 (online audio file)
• The Institute for Intercultural Studies - ethnographic institute founded by Mead, with resources relating to Mead's work
• Margaret Mead biography at IIS
• Library of Congress, Margaret Mead: Human Nature and the Power of Culture

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