MARGARET MEAD

MARGARET MEAD--STUDYING CONTEMPORARY WESTERN CULTURE: METHOD AND THEORY
(New York: Berghahn Books, 2003)

Introduction—Margaret Mead: America’s Premier Analyst

William O. Beeman

The United States has never needed the insights of Margaret Mead as much as in today’s world. Born in 1901, Mead saw the outbreak and ending of two world wars, and more limited conflicts in Korea and Vietnam before her death in 1978. She also witnessed the McCarthy purges of the 1950s, the Cold War and the growing influence of American culture throughout the world, as well as the civil rights movement, the growth of women’s rights, the sexual revolution and the burgeoning culture of youth in the West.

Throughout all of this century of change, she had one driving impulse in her work and her life. This was to bring cultural understanding to the people of the United States—understanding of the people of the world, but also understanding of America’s own developing culture.

Few anthropologists today realize the pioneering role Margaret Mead played in the investigation of contemporary cultures. Although her professional reputation within anthropology rests on her work in Oceania, more than half of her professional life was devoted to the study of contemporary Western society—primarily the society of the United States.

Mead was clear about the need to bring the lessons of the field home to our own society. In her autobiography, Blackberry Winter, she makes this abundantly clear, even in her description of the writing of her first mass circulation book, Coming of Age in Samoa. Whereas she reported on her Samoan research in a number of professional venues, Coming of Age was designed to send a message to Americans—to get readers in the United States to consider their own society by contrasting it with that of the people of Samoa.

The same impetus prompted her other great works: Growing Up in New Guinea, Male and Female, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies and so many others. Always there was a clear message for the contemporary American reader, who was invited to make the contrast between American life and that of the varied societies Mead studied both alone and with her husbands and colleagues.

The World War II Watershed

World War II gave a new direction to Mead’s work. She and her then husband, Gregory Bateson, were actively involved in the War effort. Before the United States became involved, they wrote a number of works early in the conflict dealing with American society—with the morale of troops, with family relations in times of violence and increasingly with matters that had an impact on American relations with other nations.

During the war, Mead seemed intent on serving as a kind of national morale officer. She wrote on nutrition, on the status of women during the war, on evolving family life, and on a host of topics that anticipated the end of the war. Her insights on rebuilding community after conflict seem to prefigure the Marshall plan in Europe and Japan. In this effort, she joined her friend and mentor, Ruth Benedict, who was keen to help the United States win the war effectively in any way she could. Benedict founded Columbia University Research in Contemporary Cultures—the precursor of modern think tanks, in New York. Active during and after the War, the RCC group tried to generate insights on the contemporary cultures of Europe and Asia that Americans needed desperately to know more about. Upon Benedict’s untimely death in 1948, the leadership of the effort was assumed by Mead and Rhoda Métraux. Their methodology, which is outlined in a ‘manual,’ The Study of Culture at a Distance (reissued by Berghahn Books in 2000) shows how a group of seasoned researchers can study cultures if necessary, even without doing in situ fieldwork by using literature, film, interviews, child training manuals and a host of other secondary materials.

Having written the introduction to the reissued Study of Culture at a Distance, I will refer readers to that volume for much more detailed information on the effort. The RCC group later became the Institute for Intercultural Studies, which is still functioning today to carry out scholarly and public work in the spirit of the original group.

This volume collects and presents a variety of her essays on research methodology relating to contemporary cultures. Many of these essays were printed originally in limited circulation journals, research reports and books edited by others. They reflect Mead’s continuing commitment to searching out methods for studying and extending the anthropologist’s tools of investigation for use in complex societies. Essays on American and European societies, intergenerational relations, architecture and social space, industrialization, and interracial relations are included in this varied and exciting collection.

A return to roots

Although I have suggested above that Mead had taken a new direction in her work during and after World War II by turning to contemporary American society, in an important way, she was actually returning to her earliest work.

Occasionally when I have students studying the history of anthropology, I ask them to seek out the earliest published work by the greats of the field. Usually in a scholar’s first article are contained the seeds of their life’s work. Mead’s first published paper, included in this volume, was “The Methodology of Racial Testing: Its Significance for Sociology” from the American Journal of Sociology in 1926. At Columbia Mead was involved with a number of research efforts, and in this paper she skewers the notion that racial groups can be differentiated on the basis of intelligence. This is not only a methodologically sound piece of work, but it makes a bold political statement at an early stage of American consciousness about racial attitudes. Perhaps we should expect nothing less from a student of Franz Boas, but Mead was off and running in her insistence that Americans needed to learn from anthropologists about the cultural limitations of their own understandings about humanity.[1]

Anthropologists often do not know that Mead received an M.A. degree in Psychology before turning to anthropology. She also was a teaching assistant in sociology, and had been exposed to this discipline through her mother, who was an advanced graduate student in that discipline. These influences may have informed both her interest in helping Americans understand their own society, and her rigorous methodological training. In a way, Mead brought data collection and analytic methods from the psychologist and sociologist’s tool kit to her anthropological enterprise.

In her pre-World War II work, she always revealed her analytic process with detailed profiles of her interviews, copious catalogs of her photographic materials, and thousands of file cards and documents, all meticulously cataloged. She wanted to make certain that future generations would be able to work from her data, and build on it.

She wanted both for the public to learn from her experience, and for future generations of anthropologists to learn how to educate the public. Because her lifelong career position was at the American Museum of Natural History, she never had a primary university appointment. She did teach, of course. She taught at least one course a year at different institutions, pioneering the explicit teaching of field methods.[2] She worked occasionally with graduate students from Columbia University, but never sustained an ongoing program of graduate education. Therefore, her own personal ‘craft’ was conveyed primarily through her writings, and for ten years or so, through the workings of the RCC group.

She also provided advice to anyone who had the sense to ask her for it. An apocryphal story has an exasperated Senator asking her during a hearing, “Dr. Mead, is there anything on which you do not have an opinion?” There may well not have been. However, her boldness in addressing both the mighty of the earth, and the middle class American readers of Redbook magazine, stemmed from the same desire to bring cultural understanding to as many people as possible, for their own benefit.

Mead’s Purpose

Mead captured the public’s attention, I believe, because she was so obviously carrying out her work with their best interests in mind. She was in her earliest fieldwork, America’s precocious little sister, then its older sister, then worldly aunt, and finally wise grandmother, sharing her experience, always staying one step ahead of Americans trying to grope their way through a changing world.

She believed profoundly that one’s own experience was never adequate to develop a proper perspective on the world. In order to be an informed citizen, prepared for whatever might come, it was necessary to find a way to adopt the perspective of multiple ‘others.’

These might be the ‘others’ of distant societies with profoundly different ways of living. They might be the ‘others’ of a different generation than one’s own, or of a different race. This was an effective strategy for life, she believed, because she felt that people were capable of learning from each other. Interdependence was never seen as a weakness, but rather a great strength that allowed dissimilar people to combine strengths for the greater good of all of humanity.

Mead had an abiding optimism in the ability of members of any given society to solve their own problems, provided they can gain sufficient perspective on those problems. This assurance was a manifestation of her basic belief in human plasticity, an extension of the training she received at the hands of her mentor Franz Boas. The key to this process is engagement with the ‘whole.’ Human societies may solve problems by engaging with the whole of humanity. Human learning is facilitated by understanding that it is not just the mind that is trained, but the whole body. Problems in the natural world are best approached by understanding the relationship of human beings with their environment. Put all together, Mead believed that interrelationships between nations could be revised through a change in perspective. This question was of primary importance to her. As Mead pointed out, in speaking about human conflict:

Various modifications of our present conceptions of the nation state are possible. The present definition predicates the state upon its absolute right and continuing ability to make war on other states. This definition, supported by properly developed sanctions and accepted definitions, could be changed to an emphasis on nationhood, in which the identity and power of each state was a function of the identity and power of all other nations. . . .The definition of nations as owing their status to the existence and prosperity of other nations, their security to the security of other nations, and emphasis upon interdependence rather than independence, could result in concepts of nationhood replacing concepts of nationalism. (1968: 223)

She was fond of pointing out during the cold war that the Soviet Union was the most important guarantor of the safety of American children, and the United States government the most important guarantor of Soviet children.

Methodological Insights

When Mead began her career, anthropology was still very young as a discipline. Anthropologists were continually working to define the nature of anthropological praxis. In the first selection of articles for this volume, we have presented a selection of Mead’s views of the discipline at various stages of her career. In fact, she wrote extensively on this topic, having produced not only a textbook, but also a reader. “Anthropology as a Discipline” is an article-length treatment of the subject, in which the familiar canons of cultural relativity, fieldwork, and anthropological praxis are systematically laid out. It is a conventional summary that would be comfortable in many classrooms today.

“Toward a Human Science” was a version of her presidential address for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, late in her life, published just two years before her death in 1976. Her teacher, Franz Boas, was the last anthropologist before her to hold the AAAS presidency, and it was undoubtedly a great honor for her to be elected to that office. In the address, she both situates anthropology firmly within the realm of the sciences, and extends the range of anthropology. She makes it clear that a truly human science should be addressing matters of contemporary importance. She cites Brown vs. the Board of Education, the launching of Sputnik, and a range of other highly contemporary issues. The purpose of the essay is to try to forge a new philosophical statement about a fusion of the methods of science with their application for the good of humanity. She additionally points out the essential importance of understanding how humans function in conjunction with each other as essential for developing an understanding of the universe. Science in her view, therefore, cannot take place outside of a closely examined human framework.

As a first step in this direction I suggest that it is necessary to recognize that our knowledge of ourselves and of the universe within which we live comes not from a single source, but from two sources—from our capacity to explore human responses to events in which we and others participate through introspection and empathy, as well as from our capacity to make objective observations on physical and animate nature. (1976: 905)

She goes on to insist that these two areas of learning are complementary and supportive of each other, rather than antagonistic, and that just as the understanding of human processes is not easily incorporated into the science laboratory, the methods of the physical sciences can become “stultifying and dangerous” when applied to the investigation of human behavior.

In an effort to bring the anthropologist's methodologies closer to that of the laboratory scientist, she promoted a series of methodological advances in recording and documentation. At the beginning of the article, she notes that the presidential address was a multi-media presentation, and regrets that this cannot be reproduced in the printed version, though she uses a number of photographs to good advantage.

Two other papers in this initial section, “What is a Culture? What is a Civilization?” from Charles Madden’s collection, Talks with Social Scientists, and “Anthropologist and Historian: Their Common Problems” grapple with the most fundamental concepts of anthropology, applied to complex contemporary societies. In sorting out the notion of culture and society, in this post World War II discussion, she grapples with the difference between those concepts and ‘nation,’ which in the context of the German state had gained an unpleasant overtone. Mead modulated the concept of 'nationhood' to emphasize the interdependency of nations as contingent cultural unit. Overall she champions the treatment of “each nation as a unit of dignity of its own,” and makes the interesting observation that civilizations no longer will rise and fall as in the past, because they now exist in an interconnected world.

Finally, in “Changing Styles of Anthropological Work,” written for the Annual Review of Anthropology, and published just 5 years before her death, Mead makes a complete assessment of anthropology and its development to that date. She notes the effect of the McCarthy era on anthropology, discouraging many from working in government service, but notes an important trend in which they

. . .learned that their skills could be applied fruitfully to problems affecting modern societies and the deliberations of national governments and nation states. They had learned to apply themselves to problems they had not themselves chosen, and to work with members of other disciplines (1973: 1)

She is not all complimentary, scoring anthropologists for residual ethnocentrism in both theory and methodology in many cases, urging the field to find more universal nomenclature and a broader palate for expressing their concerns. These criticisms are still trenchant today.

She advocates for her most influential methodological innovations in this article. These are the use of multi-disciplinary approaches to the study of human culture, fieldwork using teams of investigators, group generation of methodology and analysis, and the extensive use of the most modern methodologies in visual and sound recording. These ideas are so commonplace today, we rarely attribute them to Mead, but we also fail to acknowledge her mastery of these ways of going about this work. Her example both as an organizer of research and an advocate for these methodologies sets her apart from others, although she notes with pleasure the complex and fruitful fieldwork increasingly undertaken by teams of researchers, as opposed to individuals working in isolation.

She discusses such modern trends as computer analysis, general systems theory, the ecological movement, and gender equality as important ideas that anthropology must embrace. She notes too, the trend in anthropology toward the study both of complex civilizations and of sub-groups within contemporary Western societies such as occupational or sexual minorities. In doing this she makes an explicit break with Franz Boas, who was wary of studying one’s own society for fear of an inability to sustain ‘objectivity.’ Mead’s answer is as fresh as yesterday, and sounds like a pronouncement from cultural studies:

However, this achievement of a scientific objectivity, and even the achievement of the ethically desirable stance of tolerance, looks very different today from the way it did 50 years ago. Those who are studied, whether they be members of other races, other ethnic groups, the poor, the oppressed, the imprisoned, feel that to use their lives to obtain a kind of objectivity is to treat them as objects, not as subject. And all over the world the previously dispossessed and ignored are actively demanding an identity which the rest of mankind must respect. (1973: 13)

Social Theory

In the following section, I have chosen a number of articles that apply some of Mead’s best-known concepts in social theory to contemporary culture. Her first article, “Methodology in Racial Testing,” has already been mentioned above. Her final paragraph serves to make the further point that with different cultural groups, a single, standardized written test alone will never yield uniform objective results. It is fascinating that this same criticism has been leveled against the SAT and other tests of intelligence and intellectual achievement in recent years.

All these considerations should suggest extreme caution in any attempt to draw conclusions concerning the relative intelligence of different racial or nationality groups on the basis of tests, unless a careful consideration is given the factors of language, education and social status, and a further allowance is made for an unknown amount of influence which may be logically attributed to different attitudes and different habits of thought. (1926: 667).

Mead was closely associated with the study of national character. She wrote about it extensively and used it as a research focus throughout her life. Anthropologists frequently misunderstood the concept and its associated methodology, although it was widely discussed and debated. In the introduction to the reissued version of The Study of Culture at a Distance by Mead and Rhoda Métraux, I have written extensively about the parallels between the concept of national character and contemporary theoretical formulations that surround such post-modern fields as cultural studies, feminist studies and queer studies. Mead’s essay, “National Character,” when read carefully, gives the psychological underpinnings for this analytic concept, and shows the careful way in which Mead employed it. Far from being an all-purpose over-generalization, the term was aimed at a specific level of specificity in dealing with any given society. Mead proved its utility in its application to contemporary society in highly accurate characterizations of French, Soviet and American societies.

She comes to the defense of Geoffrey Gorer for his use of the “swaddling hypothesis” as a method of explaining certain aspects of Great Russian culture. While acknowledging its limitations in her article, “The Swaddling Hypothesis: Its Reception,” she also is able to make a convincing case for looking at child-rearing practices such as this as important formative elements in the analysis of adult behavior and patterns of thought. She points out that in no case can a single custom be determinant of the cultural traits of a society, but taken in conjunction with a multiplicity of other factors, a complex of dominant factors can be seen as highly significant indicators of dominant cultural attitudes and practices.

Mead was deeply concerned with communication and communication processes, and two papers are included here that show how anthropologists consider these processes in complex modern societies.

In “Some cultural Approaches to Communication Problems,” Mead defines communication, explaining its different purposes in different cultures. She explores various methods of communicating, the diverse intentions and ensuing responses, such as prompting emotional response, getting attention, and formulating propaganda. Often in the United States, she claims, irresponsible people exploit communicative symbols for their own ends—showing how the image of Florence Nightingale was used in World War II and the post-war period. In “A Case History in Cross-National Communication,” Mead applies her observation to the analysis of British and American opinions of each other around the period of World War II. Many of the difficulties experienced by the two cultures: perceptions of American ‘boasting’ and British ‘arrogance’ can be seen as differences in communication styles. A famous case study outlining differences in expectations regarding romantic relationships between British girls and American soldiers is one of the features of this article.

The final three papers in this section deal with the topic that Mead is perhaps best noted for, namely the study of children and youth. Robert Levine, in a lecture given at Brown University in honor of Mead’s Centennial, credits her with the founding of a sub-field, “the anthropology of children and adolescence.” This is certainly not hyperbole. Mead was deeply concerned that Americans learn about their own youth through contrast with other systems. In this manner, Americans could see the value in their own systems, but likewise the weaknesses, though having a point of contrast. For example, emphasis on independence in youth yields self-reliance, but at the price of uncertainty, rebelliousness and anxiety.

In “Adolescence in Primitive and Modern Society: The New Generation,” Mead extends the main finding of her immensely popular book, Coming of Age in Samoa. The distinction between ‘primitive’ and modern society vanishes when we consider the period surrounding puberty as “the growth period of personality,” the form and nature of which will vary from culture to culture. Seen this way, ‘adolescence’ becomes a specific Western cultural category—a function of complex society, not merely of the human life cycle. She points out in “Our Educational Emphasis in Primitive Perspective,” that our educational system, emphasizing novelty and innovation, contrasts with the traditional emphasis in less technologically advanced societies on the need to learn that which is fixed and traditional.

Today, owing to the meeting and mingling of peoples among whom superiority was claimed by one as over against another, our concepts of education have been shaped by the will to teach, convert, colonize or assimilate adults. From the observation of this process in the next generation, we have come also to believe in the power of education to create something new, not merely perpetuate something old. But not until the dogma of superiority of race over race, nation over nation, class over class is obliterated can we hope to combine the primitive idea of the need to learn something old and the modern idea of the possibility of making something new. (1943:633)

In “Early Childhood Experience and Later Education in Complex Cultures,” she again returns to the underlying theme of Gorer’s swaddling hypothesis. Underscoring the basic tenets of psychology and psychiatry, Mead once again points out the interplay of cultural practice and character formation through a careful examination of childrearing practices. Here she reminds readers that the ways that members of Western cultures rear their children are distinct cultural practices, reflective of the cultures in which they occur.

Perspectives on American Life

In the final section of this volume, I collect a few of the best of the papers Mead wrote about American life and its cultural dynamics. Mead published more than a hundred studies of every aspect of life in the United States following World War II, from food habits to children’s playground equipment. The range of her interests was astonishing. In every case she provides some cultural insight which informs the reader of some twist or wrinkle in a commonplace aspect of daily life that is generally unanticipated.

In “From Plight to Power: Youth as a Political and Economic Force,” Mead virtually defines the baby-boom generation. She anticipates the effect this segment of the population will have on American society in the following decades. In “Religion in the Melting Pot: Religion and our Racial Tensions,” she anticipates the tension between organized religious groups and progress in racial equality. Her sketch of the American family in “The Contemporary American Family as an Anthropologist Sees it,” prefigures the complex move away from the basic nuclear family, and the range of activities and forces pulling the members of the modern family apart. Two prescient papers on sexuality in the United States could have been written by Foucault. “Sex and Censorship in Contemporary Society,” explains why Americans feel compelled to enforce moral standards over literature, film and other artistic products. “Sexual Behavior: An Anthropologist Looks at the Kinsey Report,” is a brilliant attack on the report itself, much in the same way that Mead attacked standardized intelligence testing for racial groups and others that might have varying cultural standards as minority communities within the majority. Finally, in “Jealousy: Primitive and Civilized,” Mead shows that feelings of jealousy, far from being personal emotional expressions, are in fact conditioned by social and cultural institutions. Just as earlier in her career, she debunked the idea that adolescence necessarily leads to trauma, so in this discussion does she demonstrate that jealousy, as we understand it, is by no means universal for humankind.

Compiling these papers for modern readers was a pleasure, but it was also difficult because there were so many others that might have been included. Many of the very best papers appeared in surprising places. Mead felt she had a mission and a message. She was eager to speak to many audiences and could not wait for the tedious process of professional peer review for everything she wrote. There is no question of her excellence as a scholar, or the professional respect with which her work was regarded. Although there is hardly a year of her life when she did not publish in the standard peer-reviewed professional journals of anthropology, she was as likely to publish something about which she cared in the School Lunch Journal , The Futurist, The Saturday Review, or through her monthly column in Redbook magazine, written with her friend and colleague Rhoda Métraux.

Never boring, she spoke to her contemporaries in a way that would help them, but she also spoke to a whole generation of anthropologists, psychologists, social scientists and others who needed to understand contemporary complex societies as intensely as they needed to understand less-developed societies.

Mead's kind of understanding is as vital as ever—perhaps more so. Suddenly the United States is the world's sole superpower. It no longer faces the rivalries it did as an underdog fighter earlier in the 20^th Century. Now the opposite problem exists—

becoming a bully. As a result, the U.S. is undergoing an identity crisis on the same scale as at the beginning of World War II when Mead turned her primary attention to the study of contemporary western cultures. It is my hope that rereading her vibrant work will rekindle the spirit that brought so much wise understanding to the American People.

The United States bears a special responsibility in the quest for world peace and well being. With an understanding of how cultural predilections shape behavior, it may eventually find itself fit to operate in the world in a worthy manner. As Mead said at the end of And Keep Your Powder Dry, first published in 1942: [3]

As a people it has taken us almost four centuries to weld ourselves into what is now 'almost' a united nation. Much of what we have accomplished has come about through the pressures of the outside world. Strong, wealthy, and powerful, we must now turn toward the rest of the world ready to accept a responsibility that is bound not to the duties, the loyalties, and hopes of earlier years, but to the whole world, the only world in which we can act today and carry out our highest hopes for the future. We have no other. (2000: 197).

Reference

Commoner, Barry; Brode, Robert B., Byaerly, T.C.; Coale, Ansley J.; Edsall, John T.; Frank, Lawrence K.; Mead, Margaret; Roberts, Walter Orr; and Wolfle, Dael
1964 Science and the Race Problem (reply to Henry E. Garrett and Wesley C. George) Science, New Series 143: 3609 (Februarly 28) p. 915.

Notes