A Century of Margaret Mead

RAY McDERMOTT
Stanford University
Born in 1901, influential by 1928, engaged by public issues for the next fifty years,
and a continuing focus of admiration and complaint since her death in 1978,
Margaret Mead is a display board for the twentieth century. This paper analyzes
Meads contributions and contradictions in her ethnographies and in her work on
learning. Her first published papers critiqued intelligence tests for Italian children in
the U.S., and she insisted always that the children of the world could learn a
startling range of skills without suffering the pains of contemporary schooling. Mead
had little good to say about American education, but she liked to think that we could
get it right, and that school could turn out to be a sturdy foundation for trying on
American culture.
She had known for half a year that she had cancer, but she came to
help. So much of what is being remembered about her seems to have
that theme: She came to help.
Dell Hymes
1
For the half century between 1928 and 1978, anyone coming of age in
America had to deal with a world directly inf luenced by Margaret Mead.
From the publication of Coming of Age in Samoa
2
~at the near-coming-of-age
age of 27 in her own life! to her death in 1978, Margaret Mead relentlessly
pounded away at whatever she thought did not make sense in American
culture. She traveled the world, living for months to years at a time in eight
different cultures, always in search of cultural patterns that would put into
high relief the arbitrariness of the life Americans considered natural and
plain good sense. She was particularly incensed by the foolishness of Amer-
ican gender arrangements and child rearing. In the tradition of her teacher,
Franz Boas, she was present in the fight against racism; and, in the long
run, she would resist the arms race and the violation of our ecology. In
none of these battles was she alone, nor always right-headed, but she was
often predominant. In the early years, her writings made the difference;
but, for the last twenty years of her life, she was a highly visible media event
on the pages of Redbook and the talk shows of late night television. When
anthropologist Robert Murphy was asked what he thought about Margaret
Mead, he said it was difficult to have an opinion, for she was like the air we
breathe.
3
Teachers College Record Volume 103, Number 5, October 2001, pp. 843867
Copyright by Teachers College, Columbia University
0161-4681
America has not had a Margaret Mead for the past twenty-three years.
James Boon says it directly: Therell never be another Mead.
4
She is an
elder sorely missed. She was a moral force who gave direction and guidance
to all, whether they wanted it or not. As she traveled through America, she
asked her audiences to write down questions; and the hundreds of articles
she did for Redbook offered the answers. Most questions required more
information than she had available, but little deterred her from expressing
an opinion. The following examples are Mead at her Redbook best, disrupt-
ing the common sense categories of middle class America:
Are young people more realistic about love than their parents?
Young people today are typically the children of their parents. . . .
Far too few people in these two generations have thought very intensely
about the seriousness of taking responsibility for another persons
happiness or of the mutual responsibility of parents for the happiness
of children.
Will men get over feeling threatened by womens liberation?
It isnt really a question of mens getting over it, but of mens and
womens finding a new balance in their relationships.
In other cultures, are women valued for their appearance?
Why just women?
Should fathers share kitchen chores?
There is very little to be said for letting fathers share the kitchen
chores or, for that matter, do any work at home defined as chores. It
is denigrating not only to the man who is asked to do them but also
to the woman who defines homemaking tasks in this way.
Are you a cautious person or a risk taker?
Caution and risk-taking are not paired opposites.
5
She was always in search of a new angle. Her popular writings taught a way
of thinking. It is not enough to answer the questions given by our culture.
It is necessary to reformulate the key terms of the culture. It is necessary to
get a new place to stand, to get a fresh point of view, to get not just a
solution to a problem but a way of erasing the problem from its place in the
culture. Should men help out with kitchen chores? No! she said. No one
should do chores. People should do serious work. Kitchen work is serious
and should not be denigrated. Margaret Mead did things for a reason. In
her wonderful memoir, Meads daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson, has a
description of their nightly dinner ritual; everything in their kitchen was
844 Teachers College Record
done seriously, with a purpose, to get the best for the human relationships
at hand.
6
Activities and values inherent in either the private, intimate
kitchen or the exposed, public lectern validated, informed, and made good
sense in terms of the other. She did serious work, not chores.
There are three roads to a new angle on issues of the day. First, look at
the world until it releases new patterns for analysis; some call this science,
others literature, but all agree it is a slow way to proceed. Second, for a
quicker pace that takes courage, make change, keep track of how the world
resists, and develop a new angle of vision along with the kicks in the shins.
Mead opted mostly for a third road to reformulating our shared world: She
crossed into other cultures, discovered the arbitrariness of our way of life,
and brought the news home. In Samoa, she found a different way of orga-
nizing adolescence; in New Guinea, different ways of organizing arrange-
ments among genders ~three of them, at that!; and, in Bali, different ways
of organizing ones body. Between 1928 and 1942, she published eight
volumes reporting on life in eight cultures, and in each case she had the
same news: We do it this way, they do it that way, sometimes it seems they
have a better handle on life. In what Clifford Geertz calls the Us0Not-us
school of anthropology, from Jonathan Swift to Ruth Benedict and Marga-
ret Mead, There confounds Here. From Lilliput to Zuni or Samoa, There
confounds Here. The Not-us ~or Not-U.S.! unnerves the Us.
7
By age 27, Margaret Mead was unnerving us. Her wisdom came quickly
and easily, and her conclusions were sometimes wild and without warrant.
She was a good fieldworker, not the best and, recent controversies aside,
certainly one anthropologists have felt free to ignore.
8
She was a good
enough fieldworker to bring home important news. It is increasingly pop-
ular for commentators to make Mead look bad, and extensive quotation
from her work can make things worse. Still, there is much to be gained
from her work and especially from an examination of her life of trying.
Both the positive and negative literature on her work has exploded over the
past twenty years.
The United States that made Margaret Mead possible provided a lan-
guage of democracy, modernization, and science for self-ref lection, each a
positive development, and each also an efficient cover for the countrys
aggressive capitalism and colonialism. In this paper, the term America refers
to a slightly larger level of analysis, covering not just the United States but
the America that was alive at its borders, gobbling up other cultures for
exploitation and explanation. The America that is now without Margaret
Mead includes, in various ways, the Samoa, New Guinea, and Bali she not
only brought home, but for which she found a market. In the years from
the Depression to the end of the Vietnam War, America needed a Margaret
Mead to locate what it could hardly imagine being. Her take on public
issues like adolescence and learning emerged from an effort to define
A Century of Margaret Mead 845
cultural differences that could circumscribe what was intrinsically Ameri-
can. Not only does her world of the middle half of the century no longer
exist, it perhaps never existed in ways she presumed. Certainly, it should
have never existed in the ways she presumed. As much as she fought for
cultural relativity, she rarely doubted that American democracyby which
she meant also Western capitalism and sciencewas in practice the yard-
stick by which cultures might measure their progress. She helped to build
that yardstick by defining its edges.
9
This paper offers an analysis of Meads contributions and contradictions
in two sections, one on her ethnography, the other on her legacy applied to
the problems of contemporary America, particularly her rarely noticed
contributions to a theory of learning.
MARGARET MEAD, ANTHROPOLOGIST
It is difficult to imagine starting a career more dramatically than Margaret
Mead. Coming of Age in Samoa was her first book, and it captured the
popular imagination immediately with its account of a Samoa that allowed
young girls more freedom and access to sexual experience than most Amer-
icans thought possible. This was not the first such news brought home by
anthropologists,
10
but Mead made life in Samoa appear so sensible, so
emotionally soothing, it became, with reservations, a recommended way of
life. The book was warmly greeted in academic circles. Franz Boas was the
most inf luential anthropologist of the time; and he praised its dual contri-
bution to anthropological theory, first for showing the inf luence of culture
on what had been thought to be a universal, biologically induced, and
socially suffered stage of life called adolescence, and second for showing so
thoroughly the personal side of the life of the individual normally elim-
inated from anthropological treatments of rigidly defined cultural forms.
11
Two years after Coming of Age, Mead published a technical volume on The
Social Organization of Manua from the same Samoan fieldwork, and a sec-
ond volume designed for a popular audience, Growing Up in New Guinea,
this time from her fieldwork with the Manus in the Admiralty Islands.
12
The New Guinea volume received a negative review for its version of the
kinship system; and, four years later, she answered the complaints with a
more technical monograph on Kinship in the Admiralty Islands.
13
In 1935,
she published the still popular Sex and Temperament ~in three cultures, but
starring the Mountain Arapesh!; and over the next fourteen years she
added five volume length technical articles with the Arapesh data.
14
This
pattern of doing everything twice, once for the public and once for the
academy, lasted for the first half of her career, but gradually gave way to a
more total concern for the American public. Stephen Toulmin has fash-
ioned a generous parallel:
846 Teachers College Record
For Margaret Mead, anthropology was thus what ethics had been for
Aristotle: a field less for theorizing about abstract issues than for
practical wisdom in dealing with concrete problems.
15
She had to give answers. She had to have solutions.
Although attention to the public eye made her academic anthropologys
ambassador to the wider world, it also contributed to a declining place for
her work within the discipline over the second half of her life; and she has
not been essential reading for graduate students in anthropology for decades.
Some of her preoccupations within the field did not help matters much.
Her strong emphasis on the cultural patterning of mother-infant relations
had her making large generalizations from tiny experiences among the
tiniest of people. She thought nothing, for example, of explaining her own
success with an account of her being a wanted and properly, on-demand,
breast-fed baby. She even claimed that the temporary advantages or polit-
ical preponderance of one tribal group in a new nation over another, as in
Nigeria or Indonesia, may be likewise attributable to the repercussions in
early childhood of differences in historical experience.
16
Even a good idea
can be pushed beyond usefulness; and, in a discipline of real men study-
ing the real stuff of life in other cultureskinship structures, power
relations, and economic strategiesMargaret Mead became disparagingly
known as a diaperologist.
17
Attention to children was not the only prob-
lem. During WW II, she stretched anthropological good sense beyond its
limits, even by national defense standards, by organizing projects on study-
ing cultures at a distance; and many people in the worlds most powerful
nations were made a little less by her stereotypes.
18
Strangely, Meads best fieldworkin Bali, with a strong supporting team
of husband and natural historian Gregory Bateson, artist Jane Belo, musi-
cian Colin McPhee, and some extraordinary European aficionados of Bali-
nese culture
19
has been mostly ignored. Steven Lansing wrote recently
that Bateson and Meads Balinese Character was interesting but irrelevant,
and that seems to summarize the books place in Balinese studies.
20
Although
a handful of the most prominent names in anthropologyClifford Geertz,
Hildred Geertz, James Boon, Fredrik Barthhave worked in Bali in the
decades following, until recent criticism there has been surprisingly little
discussion of Balinese Character. Like a number of experimental ethnogra-
phies from the early 1940s, Bateson and Mead focused on the details of the
personal and interactional order in search of the logic that guided rela-
tionships inside a culture. In most cases, what was won by detailed attention
to the behavioral environments in which people lived their lives with each
other has been overwhelmed by complaints about what was left out. The
complaints are not completely unjustified, particularly for descriptions that
moved too quickly from surface behavior to depth psychology for an expla-
A Century of Margaret Mead 847
nation of a national character.
21
It is certainly true that an analytic focus on
the orifices of the body as the key not just to child rearing, but the whole
drama of people living with each other in Bali, can certainly look silly
without a corresponding analysis of the politics of the family in the wider
social structure. This is particularly true, warns Tessel Pollmann, in the
context of a colonial police state with an explicit agenda of showing off a
traditional Balinese culture devoid of political intrigue, of which, says Clif-
ford Geertz, there was a great deal.
22
Hildred Geertz ~1994! is typical of
modern anthropologys impatience with a strong diaperological version of
analyzing children to gain a prediction of what they will look like as adults:
Bateson and Mead . . . present a complex hypothetical model of the
character of the Balinese, based on the premise that the people of
every nation, ethnic group, or culture have common personality con-
figurations due to commonalities in their early childhood experi-
ences. This premise, popularly held among many still today, has been
rejected by anthropologists since the 1960s.
23
When phrased in terms of psychological character gained early in life and
maintained without circumstance and variation through adulthood, the
theory is worth not taking too seriously.
24
When phrased in terms of a
patterned constancy in how people relate to each other, as a constancy
newly experienced by youngsters and old timers alike across multiple set-
tings, data from child training appears more interesting. Although Bateson
and Mead sometimes wrote as if they were analyzing the behavior of tod-
dlers only in search of the psychological roots of the next generations
adult behavior, methodologically they were attempting much more: They
were trying to describe the ongoing organization and maintenance of char-
acter types in terms of the behavior of many people within and across
various scenes inside a frame they called culture.
So there is much to complain about, but much to admire as well. Balinese
Character is written in two parts. The first is an essay by Mead describing
Balinese culture primarily through the lens of child rearing. The second is
a photographic tour de force by Bateson in which he delivers sequences of
behavior for readers to share his impressions of the play of life in Bali.
Bateson was an excellent photographer and natural historian.
25
For every
statement made about Bali, Bateson and Mead wanted pictures and ideally
sequences of pictures best to make their point. An example should help us
appreciate the method. Under the heading of Stimulation and Frustra-
tion ~Plate 47!, they offer us a sequence of nine photos of a mother and
her toddler covering about two minutes of interaction. First, the mother
brings the child into a stimulating interaction, then she lets her attention
wander until the child gets refocused, then the two of them look out
together into space. This is a particularly interesting sequence. Bateson and
848 Teachers College Record
Mead had a strong sense the Balinese often arranged ways to be together
but unengaged, to be in each others presence but unavailable. Bateson
and Mead called this awayness.
26
Potentially, awayness is a messy cat-
egory for analyzing a peoples behavior. From the ethnographers sense of
how behavior might work to a written description of an attitude is an
analytically treacherous road. Bateson and Mead limited the treachery by
describing how the Balinese could teach each other to do awayness across
a lifetime. They tried to display the behavioral shape of awayness in
photos. The last photo captures awayness on the faces of the mother and
child. The previous eight photos show how it is orchestrated by the partici-
pants. Just what awayness might be, how it connected to the rest of
Balinese life, and how it should be interpreted, all that remains unsettled;
but something has been described and must be attended to in future
accounts of the society.
27
That was their intention, and it is still worthwhile.
Batesons picture of Bali was built up behavior by behavior, scene by
scene, and stood in marked contrast to Mead, who offered Bali in broad
brush strokes. Her picture was easier to read and easier to attack; his was
easier to ignore.
28
Together they present a seldom acknowledged break-
through in how to do ethnography and how to worry about its adequacy.
29
Despite a focus on socialization to the exclusion of politics, economy, and
colonization, Bateson and Mead delivered enough documentation that they
should still have inf luence on debates about the nature of culture, learn-
ing, and behavior analysis more than a half century later.
30
After Bali, Meads focus on fieldwork gave way to a concern for public
duty, initially in the war effort of the early 1940s and then in a more
dispersed effort to straighten out everyone for the next thirty-five years.
Ethnography, but for revisits to old sites, particularly to the Manus,
31
gave
way to policy, but anthropology was still her calling card. Whatever anthro-
pologists had to say about Margaret Mead privately, and however much they
said less as the decades passed, publicly, she spoke for the discipline. Even
if they did not read her, anthropologists had to know her opinion. Dra-
matic to the end, she passed away during the annual meeting of the Amer-
ican Anthropological Association. The drama was returned, and the
Association dedicated an issue of its journal assessing her inf luencethe
only person ever accorded the honor.
32
Meads legacy hit an unfortunate low in early 1983 with the announce-
ment of a forthcoming volume on Margaret Mead and Samoa by Derek
Freeman.
33
The book claimed that Meads Samoan ethnography was terri-
bly f lawed by her own naivet, her desire to find a paradise with great
sexual freedom for all, including women, and her theoretical bias in favor
of culture being more important than biology. Where Mead saw free love,
Freeman counted rape; where Mead saw generosity and detachment, Free-
man found jealousy and aggression; and where Mead saw cooperation,
A Century of Margaret Mead 849
Freeman found hierarchy and ambivalence. The book was announced on
the front page of the New York Times weeks before it was available to review-
ers, and Meads scholarly virtues were dragged through the mud, momen-
tarily without redress, in the public press.
34
A great debate ensued, and,
while there is reason to thank Freeman for some correctives, anthropolo-
gists have been overwhelming in their support of Mead, her fieldwork, and
even some of her overly enthusiastic conclusions.
35
The Freeman volume
was mean spirited and filled with its own biases.
36
In addition, because
Mead and Freeman worked mostly in quite different parts of Samoa ~under
the control of different colonial powers! and did so separated by at least
fifteen years of intense social change, many of the comparisons revealed
less about her work than would be implied by all the variants of Samoa
being called Samoa.
37
Perhaps most importantly, the restudy of Meads own
Samoan village by Lowell Holmes has been overwhelmingly in Meads favor:
Despite the greater possibilities for error in a pioneering scientific
study, her tender age ~twenty-three!, and her inexperience, I find that
the validity of her Samoan research is remarkably high. Differences
between the findings of Mead and myself that cannot be attributed to
cultural change are relatively minor. . . . I confirm Meads conclusion
that it was undoubtedly easier to come of age in Samoa than in the
United States in 1925.
38
Coming of Age is filled with details. When we are told about the children
learning to work, we are given the content of the jobs, the materials used,
and the expectations of all others on the scene. When we are told that
young girls must learn to weave, we are told what they weave, with what
materials, learned in what order, and with what eventual outcome. The
young Mead delivered a picture of both the pleasures and the problems of
growing up in Samoa. In a careful reading of the book, Richard Feinberg
shows that she delivers two Samoas in her text, the Samoa of her conclu-
sions and the Samoa of Freemans counter-conclusions, the Samoa of free-
dom and abandon and the Samoa of constraint and ambivalence.
39
The
news from the book was in fact the freedom and abandon, and so it was
summarized, presented, and easily taken by the world. But as little as a
cursory reading shows Mead displaying the constraints and the struggles
with which Samoan adolescents had to deal.
As good as the details are for the careful reader, Coming of Age deserved
much of its misreading. Mead insisted on it. In an Appendix to his mag-
num opus, Bronislaw Malinowski, with characteristic arrogance, warned
that the ethnographer has no right to say I dont know to any question
about the people with whom the ethnographer has lived and worked.
40
Strong words, an impossible recommendation and now terribly out of style,
but good ethnographers, ever humble in the face of the complexity of the
850 Teachers College Record
people under study, must try to get as much detail as possible. Along with
documenting everything they can ask about, ideally they should record
their failures and then circumscribe their topic of focus with a statement
about what they are not studying. At her worst, Mead tried to look as if she
had all the detail anyone might want. Coming of Age is filled with a false,
confident authority on many points of description:
And you will see that his eyes are always turned softly on the girl.
Always he watches her and never does he miss a movement of her lips.
~p. 96!
What would an ethnographer have to know to make such statements?
Always, never, and only are difficult terms and should appear rarely
in ethnographies of people engaged in complex activities like courting,
not to mention more private acts.
41
Nor did she shy away from ascribing
motives:
Nine times out of ten her lovers only motive is vanity. ~p. 103!
Can we say she was likely nine times out of ten wrong?
42
In a wise passage in The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, Meads teacher and
close friend, Ruth Benedict, noted that even if no Japanese behaved accord-
ing to the principles she described, her conclusions could still be accurate;
as long as it could be shown that the Japanese, in not behaving according
to principle, nonetheless worried about the principles they were not fol-
lowing, Benedicts description could stand.
43
By this score, ethnographic
certainty comes from inside the worries of a people and not from the
predictive assurances of an outside observer.
44
Assurance, not humility, was
Meads trademark. When focused on details, her assurance pays off; when
wildly concluding that people always, never, and only do one thing or
another, her assurance leads to trouble.
45
By the same desire to generalize, Meads conclusions about the cultures
she worked with were often overdrawn. Even her good friend, Edward
Sapir, complained that she confused the individual psychology of all
members of society with the as-if psychology of a few.
46
As she grew
further from her fieldwork over the decades, this problem became worse;
with hindsight, complex patterns became simple behaviors, ambivalent
attitudes became simple desires, and random observations became the
key to stating how people in another culture were so different from us. In
an evaluation worth repeating, James Boon has noted that Mead wrote
incisively, yet repetitively, almost always in duplicate, and often all over
again, whether soon after or years later.
47
As Mead grew further from
the data, detail grew thin and conclusions conformed less with the lives
of Samoan and New Guinea children and more with what Mead was try-
ing to say to America.
48
It is possible to complain that both Samoans
A Century of Margaret Mead 851
and Americans are unduly simplified in Meads comparisons.
49
For her
work on America, as with her fieldwork in other cultures, we have reason
both to praise her and critique her for new purposes. On both accounts,
we have reason to miss Margaret Mead, anthropologist. In a recent
Presidential Address to the American Anthropological Association, An-
nette Weiner reminded her colleagues: Even today, at every association
meeting, someone always declares how much Meads presence is missed,
saying with passion, if only Margaret were here, she would set things
right!
50
MARGARET MEAD, EDUCATOR
It is inviting to critique Margaret Mead. Much like the America she repre-
sented so fully and forcefully, she was often simultaneously on two sides of
key issues, the right and the wrong sideand even the wrong and the
wrong side. She spoke with authority in a country dominating and coloniz-
ing other parts of the world, and just by virtue of that position she made
compromises that turned into political mischief in the lives of those for
whom she claimed to speak. In an account of the sexism and racism latent
in Meads writing, Louise Newman displays how much opposition move-
ments retain residues of that which they oppose.
51
American sexism and
racism are so tightly fitted to American colonialism, militarism, and eco-
nomic domination, it is difficult for anyone speaking from within the sys-
tem, never mind a Margaret Mead speaking for the system, to get clear
about what is being opposed, when, in what circumstances, and with what
effect. Whatever her accomplishments, we can always turn to Mead as a
display board for the difficulty of using the materials of ones own culture
to fix the problems of that culture.
Gilliam and Foerstel have pointed to occasions when the residue of
opposed prejudices swayed Meads activities from her stated positions, whether
by commission, omission, or mere association.
52
The positives greatly out-
weigh the negatives, but the missteps are significant. Gilliam and Foerstel
offer examples: Despite her commitment to the peoples of the Pacific and
her public work against nuclear armaments, her long term engagement
with national defense policy making kept her strangely silent on the use of
Micronesia for nuclear testing; and despite her commitment against racism,
her willingness to talk about a group of people sharing personality charac-
teristics often had her sounding racist ~as in her comments on Melanesians,
whom she found bellicose and easy to despise, or African Americans, whom
she found without self-esteem!.
53
It is not hard to imagine how, in trying to
do the right thing for the most people, she gets stuck in positions invidious
to her own cause. In each case, she struck out for new ground, worried
about how to fit her position to the institutional realities of the day, and
852 Teachers College Record
wound up back home, conceptually and politically having gone nowhere.
Other women around Boas and Mead, for example, ethnographers Ruth
Landes and Gene Weltfish and folklorist and novelist Zora Neale Hurston,
found it less easy to compromise; and they had much harder lives.
54
A
comparison with the less fortunate careers of the women around her could
be used to call into question Meads courage, but it might better highlight
the treachery of the constraints facing women going against the grain and
the difficulty of their communicating with the powers that were.
Meads position on gender is perhaps the clearest case of an advance
reverting to a status quo. It is ironic she is attacked by Freeman for choos-
ing culture over biology in her search for explanations of human behavior.
Freeman is wrong twice: First, Boasians, Mead included, did not deny biol-
ogy as much as they wanted to know the exact conditions that biology
imposed;
55
and second, of the Boasians, it is possibly Mead who stays
closest to a deterministic biologyof the kind, for example, that keeps
women essentially different from men. To the biological essentialism that
has men and women acting as men and women simply because that is how
they are, there is a politically necessary and usually right social constructiv-
ist corrective, namely, that the arrangement between the sexes is just that,
an arrangement, an arbitrary and likely bad arrangement, with its only
saving grace being that it can be rearranged. Mead took such a step, well,
mostly, with Sex and Temperament in 1935. To the social constructivist essen-
tialism that has men and women acting as men and women only because
others have told them how to behave, there is a politically backward and
mostly wrong corrective, namely, that men and women act as men and
women simply because that is how they were born. Mead took such a step,
again, well, a little, with Male and Female in 1949.
56
Given males are restless, quest driven, and achievement motivated and
woman more content, pliant, and care-giving, what would a useful ar-
rangement between the sexes be; and is it possible some societies, Samoa,
for example, and not America, play more satisfying and realistic tunes on
natures keyboard of genders and temperaments? This had become, un-
fortunately, her question, and to answer it she had to make the conspic-
uous assumption that she knew the real characteristics of males and females.
First comes biology, then culture; first core, then frills; this is the essen-
tialist song.
57
Throughout the world, people repress each other with ac-
counts of biological gender as destiny; and it is crucial in escaping such
foolishness to remember gender, once born into the world and wrapped
in pink or blue, is mostly made up. Thank you, Margaret Mead, circa
1935. It is also crucial to remember that to say something is socially con-
structed is not to claim it is without constraints. Biological determinism
and social construction are not paired opposites in scientific explanation.
Gender, easy to say, is in every nuance socially constructed and made
A Century of Margaret Mead 853
consequential on a moment-to-moment basis by people in interaction; but
this is not to say it is made up from thin air, as if according to whim.
Thank you, but much less so, Margaret Mead, from 1949 on. Remember-
ing biology counts does not have to drive a theory back to an inherent
essentialism rooted in the drives of the individual person. Remembering
that biology relentlessly presents problems for cultures to solve does not
have to invite a view of individuals as slaves to motives established in
phylogeny. Ever present biological issuessexuality, procreation, the help-
lessness of infantspresent part of what humans must deal with in orga-
nizing societies together, but biology is not well conceived as a determinant
of individual behavior without a full accounting of the world in which the
individual makes a life.
The America of Meads time was in need of an overhaul. Not long before
Mead passed away, Eric Wolf identified the biases of her time as the drive
to democratize America. . . . to explain and justify the entry of new and
previously unrepresented groups into the American scene and to adum-
brate the outlines of a pluralistic and liberal America, and all that without
acknowledging, says Wolf, the economic and political power differentials
that originally created the problems in the first place.
58
It was a time to add
nurture to nature and to celebrate human diversity as so many tunes played
on the same piano. For Meads generation, intellectual and political advance
required documenting enough diversity to shrink the role of nature in the
explanation of behavior. Nature was assumed to be the stable core left after
cultural layers were removed, as if from an onion. The Boasian program
showed the human situation played out primarily in outer layers and not
determined by a biological core. This was a worthy program and necessary
still to each new generations struggle with genetic theories of intelligence,
school achievement, sexual orientation, and whatever other cultural sys-
tems scientists claim to find a gene for every week. It remains an essential
program, but it is not enough.
59
Adding cultural diversity to presumably
stable and natural forms does not go far enough.
Nature and nurture should not stand as conceptually opposed and only
in the real world sometimes interactive. The dichotomy itself has to be
challenged The very existence of a category called human nature has to
be challenged. The very category of natural never comes to us free of his-
tory, never free of the intentions of others. Just how the category of natural
has been used by people pushing each other around must be examined for
a record of political intrigue and a call for change.
60
Mead came of age in an
America excited about the question of variation in how people were naturally
gendered, raced, coming of age, and ready to learn. That same America has
delivered to the present a new set of questions about how people use ideas of
what is naturally inherent to mark areas of life where there are inequalities
and no means to negotiate them: By folk accounts of natureyes, women are
854 Teachers College Record
less than men, Blacks are less than Whites, adolescents are virtually nuts, and
everyone knows school is only for the best and brightest, and all this is nat-
urally so. Meads accounts of diversity in how nature could be handled were
a first freedom. Calling into question the whole platform for naturalizing in-
equality is an exciting next step.
61
For Mead moving beyond nature and nurture to the details of life, we
can turn to her seldom acknowledged work on learning. Mead did not
write much about learning theory, at least not directly; but it would be easy
to reshape her ethnographies into accounts of what the people studied and
were learning from each other about how to behave, be it about adoles-
cence in Samoa, gender among the Arapesh, awayness among the Bali-
nese.
62
Her version of the social actor, that is, the unit of analysis in her
ethnographies, was in constant need of guidance from others. In her photo-
graphic study of growth and development among Balinese children, she
states her theme well:
Cultural analysis of the child-rearing process consists in an attempt to
identify those sequences in child-other behavior which carry the great-
est communication weight and so are crucial for the development of
each culturally regular character structure.
63
She was trying to describe how Balinese children learn balanced and f lex-
ible whole-body postures, with dissociated hands and eyes that attend to
side issues in interpersonal relations. She used hundreds of photographs to
analyze the sequences in child-other behavior in which everyone learned
from everyone the proper displays of regular character. If we were to
translate all her work into an account of what everyone has to learn from
everyone else, this quote shows how her cultural and interactive learning
theory might be phrased. For any event in which learning seemed to occur,
her question would focus on how many people, in what order, and by virtue of
what levels of organization are involved in shaping the specifics of anyones learn-
ing.
64
Among Samoans and the Manus, Mead did not yet know how to ask
this question, although her descriptions can be used to fill in partial answers.
In Bali, with Batesons help, she both asked the question and attempted an
answer. Thereafter, she only pointed at the importance of the question.
She was almost always able to hold the line against an essentialist theory
of intelligence and learning. In her masters essay, she defended Italians
against the implications drawn from their performance on IQ tests that
they were of lower intelligence than people of Northern European extrac-
tion.
65
In Samoa, she administered intelligence tests and noted mostly that
Samoans seemed little interested in the tasks and performed with little
variation across persons. Among the Manus, she found the children unimag-
inative, but smart, and noted that
A Century of Margaret Mead 855
Personality is a more powerful force . . . than is intelligence. . . . And
it is this very manner of force, of assurance, which seems so heavily
determined by the adult who fosters the child during its first seven or
eight years. . . The leading lines of the community represent the
inheritance, not of blood, not of property, which is mostly dissipated
at death, but of habits of dominance acquired in early childhood
~Mead 1930; see also Mead 1932a on the cultural context of animism
and the foolish lumping of children and primitives into the same
psychological type!.
66
The biological inheritance of a natural intelligence was of no interest to the
Manus and of mostly negative interest to Mead, particularly in the case of
low IQ scores that, whether in New Guinea or the United States, whether in
1927 or 1978, can be attributed to such a wide variety of factors that they
do not have comparative significance.
67
Against a rampant essentialist
theory of intelligence, she sought an alternative account of how learning
was organized by a people building a culture together.
As we restate her theory, we can appreciate the ways it can be used. Then
and now, it stands in contrast to the ways most Americans think about
learning. It is particularly different from how learning has been institution-
alized in American schools. Where Americans focus on learning as hierar-
chically organized from teacher to student, Mead focused on learning as
laterally connected among people doing things together. Where Americans
focus on learning as cognition stuck inside the head just in case the organ-
ism might have to do something, Mead focused on learning as habits
developed in the context of social relations. She was early inf luenced by the
Gestalt psychology of Kurt Lewin and later by the cross-cultural work on
stages of identity development by Erik Erikson.
68
But the main inf luence by
far is the work of Gregory Bateson, natural historian, husband of a decade,
and one-time, and almost only one time, co-author. Batesons main treatise
on the systematics of human learning did not appear until 1972, but he
wrote little in the thirty-five years before that was not about the organiza-
tion of contexts for communication, in his terms, contexts for learning.
69
For Bateson, there is little reason to distinguish communication and learn-
ing, and this is usually true for Mead as well. Learning is the on-going
engagement with the details of life. As life moves on, so is learning relent-
lessly necessary.
The Bateson and Mead model of learning anticipates much of what is
currently under debate in the ethnographic study of learning. Suppose
that, instead of a model of the mind in isolation, we are in need of a theory
of how children actually learn inside the complex institutions that carry
their lives across multiple pathways into maturity. Most learning theories do
not, indeed cannot, begin to address the issue of learning in the real world,
856 Teachers College Record
for they have both a theoretical and, more importantly, a methodological
commitment to understanding not just the single child but the single child
only when interfaced with tasks well defined in the psychological test. The
real world, as psychologists like to say, is rough and messy, out of control
really; and the psychologists well-defined task brings order, experimental
control, and a corresponding set of constraints on interpretation. To the
extent learning theories are based on the well-controlled experimental
task, that is the extent their findings are irrelevant to what people do with
the hard to define and constantly shifting tasks of everyday life, including,
of course, everyday life in school.
70
Bateson and Mead demanded much
more than an account of the workings of heads in isolation from the
world.
71
They wanted instead a theory of how sequences of child-other
behavior were arranged, made consequential, and fitted into more general
patterns well structured across the institutions of society. We are still in
need of such a focus.
72
In Bali, says Mead, the child is fitted into a frame of behavior, of
imputed speech, imputed thought and complex gesture, far beyond his
skill or maturity.
73
The frame is much like a Vygotskian zone of proximal
development, a fast action guide to the appropriately perplexed soul in
search of pattern, in search of connections that enrich a persons engage-
ment with the world.
74
The framing may be different for Balinese babies
and American babies, but there is a frame nonetheless; and a description of
the child learning requires a description of the framing work:
Where the American mother attempts to get the child to parrot sim-
ple courtesy phrases, the Balinese mother simply recites them, glibly,
in the first person, and the child finally slips into speech, as into an
old garment, worn before, but fitted on by another hand.
75
Words are the garments of the mind. They come to us close to fully formed,
already patterned, well used by others, and available only with a heavy price
of conformity. The road to maturity is well traveled; it takes us mostly to
places where others have already been, places thick with connections, much
like Meads prose, again and again, to what has already happened and will
still happen. Mead could be so taken with patterning she could easily forget
about the ingenuity it took for participants to squeeze into or out of the
patterns even a little change. She was taken with the patterning, and she
would often write as if, once socialized, the person is nothing more than an
internalized pattern. Then she would f lip-f lop and give, first, the details of
the behavior and the complexity of the persons involved and, second, the
cultural pattern as if it described the behavior of socialized robots.
76
Meads theory of learning may be her most radical move, because it
disallows an analytic separation between individual and culture, between
nature and culture, and, most importantly, between those condemned by
A Century of Margaret Mead 857
the world and those doing the condemning. By her theory of learning, the
units of analysis are engagements, sequences of engagement, and patterns
of sequences of engagement. Left aside are theories of inherent intelli-
gence and motivation free of the world in which they are played out; left
aside also are theories that permanently fix a childs learning trajectory in
traits developed by early experience as if there were no world holding the
trajectories together. Just as in her work on gender and adolescence, Mead
could not always stick to her own insights, and she easily gave way to more
established ideas about how a childs career line could be decided by, say,
an overly scheduled bottle feeding. But when she did stick close to behav-
ioral detail, she had the theoretical material to undermine how Americans
think of knowledge and its distribution.
This is a crucial issue in contemporary America, where we send our
children to school not to learn to read and write but to read and write
better than each other.
77
The school test has become our measure of how
each child is to move through the world. As our population is increasingly
divided between the few who have and the many who do not, school failure
is attributed earlier and more completely to those on the bottom. Under-
lying this trouble is a theory claiming that small differences among children
at early ages are signs of their inherent potential. Mead knew how such a
theory could be misused. If a country organizes for half of its citizens to get
educated, precise tests can be constructed for the purpose, and they can be
legitimated by a competition of all against all until the top half, or the top
tenth, emerges as the rightful heirs to success. Individual performances on
standardized tests with little relation to reality have become the cement
that keeps American social structure in place. Mead knew better, and she
struggled to develop a descriptive language that would analytically place
each child in the push and pull of cultural forces that shaped their lives far
more than the small differences that could be observed in the psycholo-
gists laboratory. She never did say what has to be said, but she could have:
America is that well-organized place that arranges for individual children
about fifty percent of themto be analytically isolated and institutionally
condemned to failure in school and often in the rest of life; and this job is
done by everyone in a series of engagements in which the cultural materials
available to the participants are structured to allow a student to look good
only at the expense of others.
CONCLUSION
When Margaret Mead started writing, her America needed redirection; and
she went to what she thought were new worlds and brought back part of
what was needed. Anthony Wallace described anthropology as the science
of the anecdotal veto, and no one has lived up to the task better than
858 Teachers College Record
Mead.
78
She could not have made up better stories to challenge American
commonsense. She needed, of course, the help of the Samoans, the Manus,
the Balinese, and others she found at the edges of an ever expanding
America. With them, she developed counter examples to American beliefs
on how people were naturally supposed to be.
Meads America was marked by an adolescence that made teenagers
outsiders to their own society, and, to add craziness to a potentially difficult
time of life, in ways orchestrated by that same society. To this mess, she
could remind everyone that more emphasis on responsibilityfor no one
worked harder than Samoan children taking care of younger siblingsand
less emphasis on repression just might net us young adults who could build
a better society.
Meads America was marked by theories of learning that separated mea-
sured knowledge from intelligent activity in ways that gave those with access
to schooling unfair advantage in every public arena. To this mess, she could
show that all learning was a matter of alignment with otherseveryone did
it, and even those who appeared not to learn were in fact learning to look
that way with the help of those around them.
Although this is a great deal to have delivered, Margaret Meads counter
examples did not change her America. She could not have developed her
examples without the American frame, not just in the sense America helped
cast her net to distant shores, but in the more important sense her exam-
ples were developed explicitly to speak to Americans. As she took away, she
also gave back; as she took away core American beliefs about adolescence
and learning, she confirmed science and democracy as their frame without
an acknowledgement of the even wider frame of capitalism and colonial-
ism. At the same time she defined variation in how children grow up in
different cultures, she generally failed to notice that her Samoa, her Bali,
her America, or any other place in the twentieth century cannot be talked
about without taking a systematic account of Western systems of significa-
tion that come with guns and money, certainly, and modes of self and
presentation, perhaps just as certainly. Inside the American frame, she
could challenge one category after another and make things more lively
and up for discussion, but she never developed a critique of the American
frame. She never developed a systematic critique of the capitalism and
colonialism that supported her version of either anthropology or public ser-
vice. We still have her work to do and then some. Perceived ideas of adoles-
cence get worse. Adolescence gets longer, school performance is increasingly
the only measure of the young person, and employment opportunities de-
nied to the young poor are matched only by employment opportunities of-
fered to educated adults to care for disenfranchised adolescents. Perceived
ideas of learning fare even worse as our sense of how to measure knowledge
and intelligence has been narrowed to fit the heightened competition that
A Century of Margaret Mead 859
allows children of plenty to continue to lord over the rest. Margaret Mead would
be terribly disappointed. The problems were more difficult to solve than she
had thought. As we get on with her work, we can appreciate that she always
brought a great deal for us to work with and reapply. She always came to help.
No wonder we miss her.
This paper exists because Denis Philips asked me to teach a short seminar on Mead to the
Continuing Studies Program at Stanford in 1993. Paula Fleisher helped to teach the class.
Richard Blot and Robert McDermott encouraged a write-up. Bernadine Barr, Eric Bredo,
Shelley Goldman, Meghan McDermott, Mica Pollock, and two seminar groups at Stanford
asked for changes in early drafts. If there is anything wrong with the paper, it is their fault.
Notes
1 To the Memory of Margaret Mead, in Children in and out of School, ed. Perry Gilmore
and Alan Glatthorn ~Washington, D. C., 1982!. Gilmore used She Came to Help as the title
for her paper on Margaret Mead at American Anthropological Association Meetings, 1990.
2 Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa ~New York, 1928!.
3 Murphy, The Body Silent ~New York, 1987!.
4 Boon, Affinities and Extremes: Crisscrossing the Bittersweet Ethnology of East Indies History,
Hindu-Balinese Culture, and Indo-European Allure ~Chicago, 1990!. Boon ends this book with a
fantastic Postlude called: Meads Mediations.
5 Margaret Mead: Some Personal Views, ed. Rhoda Metraux ~New York, 1979!.
6 With a Daughters Eye ~New York, 1984!.
7 Geertz, Works and Lives ~Stanford, 1987!.
8 Deborah Gewertz followed Mead onto the Sepik over forty years later, and she called
Mead and Reo Fortune ~Meads second husband! masters of ethnography; see her Sepik River
Societies ~New Haven, 1983!. Although there were only a few attacks on her work before she
passed away, Mead nonetheless spent her last decade reminding everyone of the value of her
fieldwork; see especially, The Evocation of Psychologically Relevant Responses in Ethnolog-
ical Fieldwork, in the Making of Psychological Anthropology ~New York, 1978!; and also Towards
a Human Science, Science 191 ~1976!: 903909; Letters from the Field, 19251975 ~New York,
1977!; The Sepik as a Cultural Area, Anthropological Quarterly 51 ~1978!: 6975.
9 The role of America in Meads theory and rhetoric is discussed brilliantly in Herv
Varenne, Introduction: America according to Margaret Mead, in Margaret Mead, And Keep
Your Powder Dry ~New York, 2000!.
10 In 1919, Elsie Clews Parsons taught a course at the New School on Sex in Ethnology.
Ruth Benedict was in that course, and a few years later Mead was in Benedicts course.
Parsons book on The Family ~New York, 1906! used ethnographic data to argue for a reorga-
nization of premarital sexual arrangements. The topic and mode of presentation were in the
air; see Louise Lamphere, Feminist Anthropology: The Legacy of Elsie Clews Parsons, Amer-
ican Ethnologist 16 ~1989!: 518533.
11 Franz Boas, Forward, in Coming of Age.
12 Social Organization of Manua ~Honolulu, 1930!; Growing Up in New Guinea ~New York,
1930!.
13 Kinship in the Admiralty Islands ~New York, 1932!.
14 All appeared in the Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History.
860 Teachers College Record
15 Stephen Toulmin, The Evolution of Margaret Mead, New York Review of Books ~6
December 1984!.
16 Concluding remarks, in Science and the Concept of Race, ed. Margaret Mead, Theodo-
sius Dobzhansky, Ethel Tobach, and Robert Light ~New York, 1968!.
17 A history of the issues and the times is available in Philip Bock, Psychological Anthro-
pology ~San Francisco, 1982! and Spindler, The Making of Psychological Anthropology. An example
of Mead at diaper wild is her 1951 film, Bathing Babies in Three Cultures, in which Balinese,
American, and New Guinea cultures are defined by small differences in how mothers in the
three cultures handle their babys bath. The bathing scenes do not deliver the differences
Mead points to, and her conclusions feel forced. This is unfortunate, because interaction
rituals are a great starting point for cultural analysis. Ironically, a good example is the still
photograph analyses Bateson and Mead produced with Balinese materials, discussed below.
18 Studying Cultures at a Distance, ed. Margaret Mead and Rhoda Metraux ~Chicago, 1953!.
19 Bateson and Mead, Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis ~New York, 1942!; for a
sample of the teams work, see Jane Belo, Traditional Balinese Culture ~New York, 1970!. Along
with Miguel Covarrubias, The Island of Bali ~New York 1936,1986!, Beryl de Zoete and Walter
Spies, Dance and Drama in Bali ~New York, 1938! and Colin McPhee, A House in Bali ~New
Haven, 1947!, the books make Bali in the 1930s a classic field site. For intercultural intrigue,
intellectual verve, and international politics, the group is worth a study. Meads own accounts
in her autobiography, Blackberry Winter ~New York, 1972!, and Letters are interesting, but not as
juicy as the stories in Jane Howards biography, Margaret Mead: A Life ~New York, 1984! or the
biting expos by Tessel Pollman, Margaret Meads Balinese, Indonesia 49 ~1990!: 136.
20 Stephen Lansing, Bali ~New York, 1995!.
21 Mead liked to stereotype members of a group with a partial account of their character
and its hardships. In James Baldwin and Margaret Mead, A Rap on Race ~New York, 1971!, she
picked on the Irish, because they get angry when theyre in love. It was one of the things that
I used to watch with my child when we shared a household with a family where the wife was
Irish. . . . So my daughter was beginning to learn that anger and love are the same thing,
which she wasnt supposed to learn, because she wasnt Irish, after all. Oliver Cromwell could
not have had a better reason to rid the earth of the Irish.
22 Pollman, Margaret Meads Balinese and Clifford Geertz, Negara: The Theater State of
Nineteenth Century Bali ~Princeton, 1980!.
23 Hildred Geertz, Images of Power: Balinese Painting Made for Gregory Bateson and Margaret
Mead ~Honolulu, 1994!.
24 For the demanding position that the past lives on in the present not because it is
determining, but because it is behaviorally recreated ad nauseum in present circumstances,
nothing is stronger than Gregory Batesons paper on Communication, in Natural History of
an Interview, ed. Norman McQuown ~Chicago, 1971!.
25 For a celebration of Batesons photography, see Dianne Hagaman, Connecting Cul-
tures; Balinese Character and the Computer, in Cultures of Computing, ed. Susan L. Star
~London, 1995!; for a heated disagreement on how to work with cameras, see Bateson and
Mead, For Gods Sake, Margaret, Co-Evolutionary Quarterly 10 ~1976!: 3244. For a restudy of
their careful photographic work, see Gerald Sullivan, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, and
Highland Bali: Fieldwork Photographs of Bayung Ged ~Chicago, 1999!.
26 While Bateson and Mead were working on awayness among the Balinese, in Finne-
gans Wake ~New York, 1939!, James Joyce coined the term attenshun to cover his experience
among the Irish. Batesons ideas on the push and pull of awayness or attenshun, what he
called schizmogenesis, were taken from his reading of Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh
~London, 1904!.
27 In a pair of books, an American psychiatrist and a Balinese mental health worker have
critized Bateson and Meads description of awayness and other personality traits. They believe
A Century of Margaret Mead 861
national character traits to be ethnographically interesting, but think Bateson and Mead
failed to capture the Balinese from inside; see Gordon Jensen and Luh Ketut Suryani, The Ba-
linese People ~London, 1992! and Suryani and Jensen, Trance and Possession in Bali ~London, 1992!.
Bateson and Meads generalizations, particularly those relating Balinese character to schizo-
phrenia, left critics much to point to, but the depth of their observations remain unparalleled.
28 Geertz, Works and Lives, rejects Meads culture-and-personality speculations in Bali-
nese Character, but reports that they do not seem to detract very much from the cogency of her
observations, unmatched by any of the rest of us, concerning what the Balinese are like. To
this high praise, he adds that, though Mead believed Batesons photographs demonstrated
her arguments, hardly anyone, including Bateson, much agreed with her. Batesons half of
the book had little inf luence on the study of Bali or on anthropology in general, but was a
major inf luence on the development of behavior analysis.
29 Balinese Character is one of two landmark books for the study of body movement as
communication as practiced by Ray Birdwhistell, Kinesics and Context ~Philadelphia, 1970!, and
Adam Kendon, Conducting Interaction ~New York, 1990!. The second landmark is by another
student of Boas, David Efron, Gesture and Environment ~New York, 1941!, on the gestural world
of Jewish and Italian immigrants to New York City. After her rich experience with film in Bali,
Mead would often write as if it were simple to record, scientifically, the behavioral patterns
of a people. She sometimes knew the difference between a good description and a set of
pictures; see, for example, Margaret Mead and Paul Byers, The Small Conference ~The Hague,
1968!.
30 James Boon is more willing to celebrate the methodological importance of Bateson
and Mead: their extraordinary field methods ~involving photographs, filming, and several
varieties of simultaneous writing! deserve a study in their own right; see his Between-the-
Wars Bali, in History of Anthropology 4 ~1986!: 218247.
31 New Lives for Old ~New York, 1956!.
32 American Anthropologist 82 ~1980!: 262373.
33 Derek Freeman, Margaret Mead and Samoa ~Cambridge, 1983!.
34 The next year, biographies by Howard, Margaret Mead, and Bateson, With a Daughters
Eye, revealed some of the details of Meads sex life, including affairs with Edward Sapir and
Ruth Benedict. It is nice no one seemed to care about the revelations, and it is even nicer to
think Meads work on sexual mores in different cultures was in part responsible for the shift
in sensitivities. Imagine! Margaret Meads fieldwork methods were more important to news-
papers than her sex life. The Benedict-Mead relationship now has its own study: Hilary
Lapsley, Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict: The Kinship of Women ~Amherst, 1999!.
35 For a quick response from six Pacific specialists, see Ivan Brady, ed. Speaking in the
Name of the Real, American Anthropologist 85 ~1983!: 90847. A later collection by Leonora
Foerstel and Angela Gilliam, Confronting the Margaret Mead Legacy ~Philadelphia, 1992! is more
critical, as is the volume written by the Samoan Chief Malopaupo Isaia, Coming of Age in
American Anthropology: Margaret Mead and Paradise ~1999!. A insightful critique of the Boasians,
including the early work of Margaret Mead, is the important testament to long term fieldwork
by Paul Radin, The Method and Theory of Ethnology ~New York1933, 1987!; he accuses Meads
ethnography of a pretentious impressionism, and a counsel of perfection.
36 Freemans self-involvement in writing the book is revealed by the title of the second
edition, Margaret Mead and the Heretic ~London, 1995!. Recently, he has further documented his
complaints on Mead in The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis of her Samoan
Research ~Boulder, 1998!. Freeman has now spent about as many years critiquing Mead in
Samoa as she spent weeks in the field, and she is still more convincing. Even if Freeman is
right about Mead being the victim of a hoax, there is still no reason to accept the nave
realism of his biological arguments.
862 Teachers College Record
37 A previous great controversy in anthropology, between Robert Redfield and Oscar
Lewis on Tepoztln, was mined by a next generation for accounts of how divergent methods
generate divergent results. Lewis was more interesting than Freeman, but the terms of his
debate with Redfield are echoed by Freemans attack on Mead. Read Lewis in a letter to
Redfield ~11 June 1948! and experience how Freeman might write to Mead: Much of the
unity and bonds of family life in Tepoztln f low from what might be called negative factors
rather than positive ones. . . . It would be missing many of the crucial aspects of Tepoztln not
to see the great amount of internal tensions and conf lict that exist, as well as frustrations and
maladjustments. . . . The idea that folk cultures produce less frustrations than non-folk cul-
tures or that the quality of human relationships is necessarily superior in folk-cultures seems
to me to be sheer Rousseauian romanticism. A subsequent letter ~13 May 1954!, in response
to a paper by Redfield, gives a more complete Tepoztln: It made me keenly aware of the
shortcomings in my version of Tepoztln with its accentuation of the negative aspects of life.
It is true that I had often thought of how far we had come compared to Tepoztln, especially
in terms of the potential of our civilization. But I was never really satisfied that I had conveyed
the wholeness of Tepoztln life and you have put into words and thoughts more beautiful
than I had ever conceived the very aspects of peasant life that I had left out. In my next
community study, if I should ever do another, I must strive for the good and the bad as you
have put it. Both letters appear in Susan Rigdon, The Culture Facade: Art, Science, and Politics
in the Work of Oscar Lewis ~Urbana, 1988!. Lewis next fieldwork stayed tuned to the hard side
of life, but rarely seemed as crass as Freeman.
38 Wayne Holmes, Quest for the Real Samoa ~New York, 1987!.
39 Richard Feinberg, Margaret Mead and Samoa: Coming of Age in Fact and Fiction,
American Anthropologist 91 ~1989!: 656663.
40 Malinowski, Coral Gardens and Their Magic ~London, 1935!.
41 What counts as sex in Samoa has been a recent point of controversy, as if the Freeman-
Mead debate were nothing more than an American Presidential scandal; see Nicole Grant,
From Margaret Meads Field Notes: What Counted as Sex in Samoa? American Anthropologist
97 ~1995!: 67882; and Paul Shankman, The History of Samoan Sexual Conduct and the
Mead-Freeman Controversy, American Anthropologist 98 ~1996!: 555567.
42 On Mead and Freeman not giving readers the detail to evaluate who is wrong or right,
see Martin Orans, Not Even Wrong: Margaret Mead, Derek Freeman, and the Samoans ~Novato, CA,
1996!.
43 Wise methodological advice aside, Benedicts wartime description of Japan ~New York,
1946! does not hold up. The Japanese do not behave as she suspected from a distance, nor do
they worry about it much; see Douglas Lummis, Ruth Benedicts Obituary for Japan, Kyoto
Review 12 ~1980!: 3469; for an intriguing reading of Benedict, see Herv Varenne, Collective
Representation in American Anthropological Conversations about Culture, Current Anthropol-
ogy 25 ~1984!: 281300.
44 It is not the ethnographers job to predict how people will behave, for they are always
too complex for that. The alternative is to predict when people might be surprised at each
other; see Charles Frake, Language and Cultural Description ~Stanford, 1980!.
45 Critical literature on Mead has moved beyond Samoa. Freemans attack was followed
by the complaints discussed above about her Balinese effort. The same year delivered Foerstel
and Gilliams Confronting, with complaints by the grandchildren of her New Guinea infor-
mants, some of them anthropologists, on how much she was a part of the America that has
constrained their lives unfairly.
46 Sapir, The Psychology of Culture ~The Hague, 1994!, corrects Meads enthusiasm: The
presumptive or as if psychological character of a culture is highly determinative, no doubt,
of much in the externalized system of attitudes and habits which forms the visible personality
of an individual. It does not follow, however, that strictly social determinants, tending, as they
A Century of Margaret Mead 863
do to give visible form and meaning, in a cultural sense, to each of the thousands of modalities
of experience which sum up the personality, can define the fundamental structure of such a
personality.
47 Boon, Affinities, once again, and again, all right always already.
48 Victor Barnouw noted that Mead had an unfortunate tendency, of which Freeman
takes advantage, to make stronger and broader assertions in later publications than she did in
her original study. Samoans are more uniformly peaceful and non-competitive in her latter-
day summaries than in the early ethnography. See his Coming to Print on Samoa, Journal of
Psychoanalytic Anthropology 6 ~1983!: 425433.
49 George E. Marcus and Michael M.J. Fischer, Anthropology and Cultural Critique ~Chica-
go, 1986!.
50 Weiner, Culture and Our Discontents, American Anthropologist 97 ~1995!: 1421.
51 Newman, Coming of Age, But Not in Samoa, American Quarterly 48 ~1996!: 233272.
52 Gilliam, Margaret Meads Contradictory Legacy, in Foerstel and Gilliam, Confronting.
53 Foerstel and Gilliam, Confronting. Gilliam says Betty Lou Valentine said Mead said, at
a talk in the early 1960s, that African Americans have low self-esteem. The idea was in the air
in liberal circles, although it left obscure why there was so little self-esteem to go around and
why white liberals seemed to acquire so much of it. See, for example, Abram Kardiner and
Lionel Ovesey, The Mark of Oppression ~New York, 1951!, on the effects of poverty on the psychic
life of African Americans. At the same time, Martin Deutsch, The Disadvantaged Child ~New
York, 1967!, was writing essays about cultural deprivation as the reason for black children not
doing well in school, and Oscar Lewis, Anthropological Essays ~New York, 1970!, was pointing to
a culture of poverty to explain the psychic life of poverty across generations. For a critique,
see Charles Valentine, Culture and Poverty ~Chicago, 1968! and Meads unfortunate response in
Current Anthropology 10 ~1969!.
54 For an account of Landess harsh life in anthropology, see George Park and Alice
Park, Ruth Schlossberg Landes, in Women Anthropologists, ed. U. Gacs, A. Khan, J. McIntyre,
and R. Weinberg ~Urbana, IL, 1989!. Weltfishs life was only a little less difficult; see Ruth
Path, Gene Weltfish, in Women Anthropologists, and Juliet Niehaus, Education and Democ-
racy in the Anthropology of Gene Weltfish, in Foundations of the Anthropology of Education, ed.
Juliet Neihaus, Richard Blot, and Richard Schmerzing ~in press!. Hurstons story is as complex
as her talent was extraordinary. It is now popular to praise Hurston by pointing to how Boas
and Mead, by their style of work and their personally not lending a hand, suppressed her
talent. Some of the critiques go beyond the facts. Hurston should be praised, but no more so
than either Boas or Mead. Together, their strong points offer a three-part impulse for reor-
ganizing America. For one discussion, see Deborah Gordon, The Politics of Ethnographic
Authority: Race and Writing in the Ethnography of Margaret Mead and Zora Neale Hurston,
in Modernist Anthropology ~Princeton, 1992!.
55 Schneider, The Coming of a Sage to Samoa, Natural History ~ June 1983!: 4, 6, 10.
See also the excellent discussion in Roy A. Rappaport, Desecrating the Holy Women, Amer-
ican Scholar 55 ~1986!: 313347.
56 Mead, Male and Female ~New York, 1949!.
57 Mead grew up surrounded by a public discussion of the rewards and dangers of
co-education; for a masterful overview of the issue, see David Tyack and Elisabeth Hansot,
Learning Together: A History of Coeducation in American Schools ~Cambridge, MA, 1990!. Only a
glance at psychologist G. Stanley Halls ideas on the potentials of women would have kept
Mead firmly opposed to the biologically phrased essentialism of the time. Her slip back to an
essentialism was subtle, more the move of a person who had not given up on nature as an
explanation of individual behavior than the move of a person who thought there were things
that women could not do if they had to.
864 Teachers College Record
58 Wolf, American Anthropology and American Society, in Reinventing Anthropology, ed.
Dell Hymes ~New York, 1969!.
59 That nature and culture are contexts for each other and not an appropriate contrast
set was available to Margaret Mead in John Dewey, Art as Experience ~New York, 1934!: the true
antithesis of nature is not art @read: culture# but arbitrary conceit, fantasy, and stereotyped
convention. For Dewey, nature and culture are to be studied together as the setting for
relationships that determine the course of life. Mead shared a campus and milieu with
Dewey for decades, but with little direct inf luence. Their ideas are compatible, and it is hard
to believe Mead would not have read, as Benedict did, Human Nature and Conduct ~New York,
1922!; Howard, Margaret Mead, reports that Mead carried the book with her, and Sullivan,
Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, articulates Meads account of character in Bali with a passage
from Dewey. Lawrence Cremin, The Genius of American Education ~New York, 1965!, placed
Dewey and Mead on alternate pages of a work on educational theory in the U.S., and Eric
Wolf, American Anthropology, used them as twin icons of liberal reform. Virginia Yans-
McLaughlin says students of Boas were encouraged to read Dewey, but textual ties seem weak;
see Science, Democracy, and Ethics, History of Anthropology 4 ~1986!: 184217. At a memorial
for Dewy in 1952, the philosopher John Herman Randall, told a story about Mead reading
philosophy:
A few years ago, when Russells Human Knowledge had just come out, I had a phone call.
This is Margaret Mead. I am reading Russells book, and I wonder whether you could
tell me brief ly just what is the difference between Russell and Dewey. We poor pro-
fessors all get calls like that. But Margaret Mead is an intelligent girlthough she puts
too much faith in improved diapers for my tasteso I made the attempt to answer her.
His answer might have been to Meads liking: Deweys contribution was to work out the
implications of taking experience as primarily the social experience of human communities.
This makes experience all that the anthropologist includes as belonging to human cul-
ture. See John Dewey, 18591952, Journal of Philosophy 50 ~1953!: 513. Bertrand Russell
might have been required reading in Meads relationship with Gregory Bateson who was using
Russells theory of logical types in his work on double binds and schizophrenia. For an
account of the differences between Russell and Dewey, see Tom Burke, Deweys New Logic
~University of Chicago, 1994!. On the importance of culture in pragmatism, see John J.
McDermott, The Culture of Experience ~New York, 1976! and Stream of Experience ~Amherst, 1986!;
R. W. Sleeper, The Necessity of Pragmatism ~New Haven, 1986!; and J. J. Stuhr, ed. Philosophy and
the Reconstruction of Culture ~Albany, 1993!.
60 As on most matters of importance, Jonathan Swift said it well, this time in his 1726
account of Gullivers third voyage: new Systems of Nature were but new Fashions, which
would vary in every Age; and even those who pretend to demonstrate them from Mathematical
Principles, would f lourish but a short Period of Time, and be out of Vogue when that was
determined; see Voyage to Laputa, in Gullivers Travels and Other Writings, ed. M. Starkman
~New York, 1981!.
61 On the use of natural categories to divide the social field in line with established
power distributions, see the essays in Sylvia Yanagisako and Carol Delaney, ed., Naturalizing
Power ~New York, 1995!.
62 Mead did write a great deal on education, although programmatically; for a summary,
see Gay Reed, Deprovincialization: Margaret Mead on Education, a paper for the American
Educational Studies Association, 1993. Although her criticisms of education were mostly cor-
rect, Mead was strangely harder on schools than she was on the business community or the
military; for an example, see Mead, Thinking Ahead: Why Is Education Obsolete, Harvard
Business Review 36 ~1958!: 2330.
63 Margaret Mead and Frances Macgregor, Growth and Culture ~New York, 1951!.
A Century of Margaret Mead 865
64 The phrasing of this question comes from Bateson by way of a story told by Ray
Birdwhistell, Some Discussions of Ethnography, Theory, and Method, in About Bateson, ed. J.
Brockman ~New York, 1977!. Near the end of a lifetime of claiming all organisms make sense
if one knows their code, Bateson was asked what question he would put to any organism if he
knew its code. Bateson answered: Id ask that animal under what conditions, in what setting,
with how many and what organization of his fellows, and what order of duration of commu-
nication would be required for him to be capable of telling the truth. If Bateson and Mead
agreed that all organisms make sense according to a specific code, they likely had a point of
disagreement as well. Mead thought that cultures were supposed to make sense, if not now,
then after some reform, whereas Bateson suffered no such illusion. In her memoir, With a
Daughters Eye, Mary Catherine Bateson tells the story of looking at a William Blake watercolor,
Satan Exalting over Eve. The daughter wanted to know, if Satan had just had his way with Eve,
why did he not look happy. The fathers answer is an anthropologists version of original sin:
Because he has started the process that produced congressman and schizophrenia and pic-
nics and policemen on the corner, and the whole bag of tricks called culture, and its that
vision that gives him the look of agony.
65 Mead took a masters degree in psychology at Columbia before she switched to work-
ing with Boas.
66 Mead, Growing Up.
67 Mead, Group Intelligence Tests and Linguistic Disability among Italian Children,
School and Society 25 ~1927!: 465468.
68 Lewin, A Dynamic Theory of Personality ~New York, 1951!; and Erik Erikson, Childhood
and Society ~New York, 1950!.
69 One of Batesons first papers was about learning to play the f lute among the Iatmul
and its implications in the social organization of gender; see Music in New Guinea, Eagle 24
~1935!: 425433. After Iatmul, Bateson turned to the problem of learning to be a body in Bali
and then the problem of learning to be schizophrenic in Palo Alto. Rich accounts of learning
across such diverse settings appear in two collections of his essays; see Steps to an Ecology of
Mind ~New York 1972! and A Sacred Unity ~New York, 1991!; the first volume contains the
systematics paper, The Logical Categories of Learning and Communication.
70 Michael Cole, Lois Hood, and Ray McDermott, Ecological Niche Picking: Ecological Inval-
idity as an Axiom of Experimental Cognitive Psychology. Laboratory of Comparative Human Cog-
nition, Working Paper 14 ~New York, 1978!; Denis Newman, Peg Griffin, and Michael Cole,
The Construction Zone ~New York, 1989!.
71 In this way, they were like Lev Vygotsky and G. H. Mead in the first third of the
century and like Michael Cole and Jean Lave in the last third; see The Collected Works of Lev
Vygotsky, vol. I: Problems in General Psychology ~New York, 1987!; G.H. Mead, Mind, Self, and Society
~Chicago, 1934!; Cole, Cultural Psychology ~New York, 1996!; Lave, Cognition in Practice ~Cam-
bridge, MA, 1988!. To the exciting new work on situated cognition, we can add a century of
neglected work in American pragmatism; see Eric Bredo, The Social Construction of Learn-
ing, in Handbook of Academic Learning, ed. G. Phye ~New York, 1997!.
72 Yeah, yeah, but, really, arent people differentially able? Sure, why not, but that does
not mean we know how to discern those differences or how to make the most of the variation.
Worse, in thinking that we know how to sort people out, we can get a great deal wrong. Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe, in Maxims and Reflections ~London, 1998!, said it better: Maybe there
are people who are by nature not up to this or that business; precipitation and prejudice are,
however, dangerous demons, unfitting the most capable person, blocking all effectiveness and
paralysing free progress. This applies to worldly affairs, particularly, too, to scholarship. ~This
line is from 1823.!
73 Colin McPhee showed how Balinese children are effortlessly absorbed into gamelan
groups by adults who sit behind them and guide their hands until they begin to play notes that
866 Teachers College Record
contribute to the overall musical pattern; see Music and Children in Bali, in Children and
Contemporary Cultures, ed. Margaret Mead and Martha Wolfenstein ~Chicago, 1955!.
74 Vygotsky, Collected Works.
75 Balinese Character.
76 At her worst Mead would write of Bali as a single set of forces that would produce a
single kind of child. Contrast that version of Bali with the multi-layered, perspectival wonder
in Boon, Affinities:
What has come to be called Balinese culture is a multiply authored invention, a his-
torical formation, an enactment, a political construct, a shifting paradox, an ongoing
translation, an emblem trademark, a nonconsensual negotiation of contrastive identity,
and more. Its evidence is, to employ a bookish figure, well-thumbed. To make matters
still more layered, practices and ideas associated with Balijust one complex position
in the so-called Malayo-Polynesian worldcut across different historical identities and
classifications. They include for the foreseeable future Indonesian ~alias Dutch East
Indies, Indian Archipelago, etc.!; from the fourteenth century onward Hindu; and in
part ~the Sanskritized part! what scholars call Indo-European.
77 For theories of school failure, see Herv Varenne and Ray McDermott, Successful
Failure ~Boulder, CO, 1998!.
78 Wallace, Anthropological Contributions to the Theory of Personality, in The Study of
Personality, ed. Edward Norbeck, Douglas Price-Williams, and William McCord ~New York,
1968!.
RAY McDERMOTT is professor, School of Education and, by courtesy,
Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology, Stanford University. He
is the coauthor, with Herv Varenne, of Successful Failure: The School America
Builds ~Westview Press, 1998!. He is working on the history of the very ideas
of disability and genius and their role in American educational politics.
A Century of Margaret Mead 867