Margaret Mead
Margaret Mead was an American cultural anthropologist, author and speaker, who appeared frequently in the mass media during the mid-twentieth century.
Mead's first ethnographic work, Coming of Age in Samoa, addressed adolescence and sexuality and catapulted her to national visibility. Her book Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, explored gender roles and personality based on fieldwork in Papua New Guinea. Mead also conducted fieldwork with the Omaha people; in Manus, Papua New Guinea; and in Bali. She wrote Keep Your Powder Dry, an ethnographic examination of American life, in the hopes of supporting mobilization for World War II. She coordinated two comparative studies on modern cultures in the 1950s, while focusing her own work on Russia. Her later work included returns to Papua New Guinea, Bali, and Samoa for longitudinal studies. She was curator of ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History from 1946 to 1969. Mead served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1975.
According to anthropologist Paul Shankman, "Mead was anthropology’s most significant public voice during the twentieth century." She is regarded as a founding figure in public anthropology and visual anthropology. Her ethnography of the South Pacific and Melanesia has been subject to vigorous academic debate. From the 1920s to the 1960s, her fieldwork was widely discussed in the press and she wrote a monthly column in Redbook magazine co-authored with partner Rhoda Métraux. Her reports detailing the attitudes towards sex in South Pacific and Southeast Asian traditional cultures influenced the 1960s sexual revolution. Mead's association with cultural relativism and the sexual revolution led to sharp criticism from conservatives.
Early life and education
Margaret Mead, the first of five children, was born in Philadelphia but raised in nearby Doylestown, Pennsylvania. Her father, Edward Sherwood Mead, was a professor of finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and her mother, Emily Mead, was a sociologist who studied Italian immigrants. Her sister Katharine died at the age of nine months. That was a traumatic event for Mead, who had named the girl, and thoughts of her lost sister permeated her daydreams for many years.Her family moved frequently and so her early education was directed by her grandmother until, at age 11, she was enrolled by her family at Buckingham Friends School in Lahaska, Pennsylvania. Her family owned the Longland farm from 1912 to 1926. Born into a family of various religious outlooks, she searched for a form of religion that gave an expression of the faith with which she had been formally acquainted, Christianity. In doing so, she found the rituals of the Episcopal Church to fit the expression of religion she was seeking. Mead studied one year, 1919, at DePauw University, then transferred to Barnard College.
Mead earned her bachelor's degree from Barnard in 1923, began studying with professors Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict at Columbia University, and earned her master's degree in 1924. Mead set out in 1925 to do fieldwork in Samoa. In 1926, she joined the American Museum of Natural History, New York City, as assistant curator. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1929.
Anthropological work
Methods
As an ethnographer, Mead's primary research method was participant observation through living in communities for extended periods of time. Beginning with her first field study in Samoa, she often concentrated her research on childhood, adolescence, sexuality, and kinship. In examining these topics, Mead created multivocal ethnographies that considered the lives of women and men, girls and boys alongside one another.During fieldwork with Gregory Bateson in Bali in the 1930s, she used still and motion photography extensively, creating one of the earliest film archives of anthropological research. Mead and Bateson's subsequent culture-at-a-distance work also involved studying films to characterize foreign cultures. These innovations led to her being called the "mother" of visual anthropology.
During World War II, Mead turned her attention to studying her own American culture and to conducting studies of national character, which she envisioned as being important both for the war effort and for an internationalist future after the war. She organized, along with Ruth Benedict until her death in 1948, the Columbia University project Research in Contemporary Culture. These studies involved reviewing cultural materials and interviewing nationals of the culture under study, methods more accessible under wartime conditions. The method and numerous studies conducted under it were published in The Study of Culture at a Distance, edited by Mead and Rhoda Métraux.
Mead was also concerned with studying social change and modernization, particularly in the context of prior research. She conducted return field visits of her own and oriented new ethnographers in Bali, Manus, the Admiralty Islands, New Guinea, and Samoa.
Research fieldwork
Samoa: ''Coming of Age in Samoa'' (1928)
Mead's first ethnographic work described the life of Samoan girls and women on the island of Taʻū in the Manu'a Archipelago of American Samoa in 1926. The book includes analyses of how children were raised and educated, household structure, sex relations, dance, development of personality, conflict, and how women matured into old age. Mead explicitly sought to contrast adolescence in Samoa with that in America, which she characterized as difficult, constrained, and awkward.Coming of Age tackled the question of nature versus nurture, whether adolescence and its associated developments were a difficult biological transition for all humans or whether they were cultural processes shaped in particular societies. In her introduction, Mead notes that American and European psychologists, educators, and philosophers have argued that the turmoil of adolescence in their societies is driven by biology. Her book takes a skeptical approach to the idea that
The physical changes which are going on in the bodies of your boys and girls have their definite psychological accompaniments. You can no more evade one than you can the other your daughter's body changes from the body of a child to the body of a woman, so inevitably will her spirit change, and that stormily.Mead instead believed childhood, adolescence, gender, and sex relations were largely driven by cultural practices and expressions. By conducting fieldwork in what she called a "simpler society" and among "primitive groups who have had thousands of years of historical development along completely different lines from our own," she sought to find a comparative case to answer the questions: "Are the disturbances which vex our adolescents due to the nature of adolescence itself or to the civilisation? Under different conditions does adolescence present a different picture?"
Much of Mead's text is devoted to describing the life course of Samoans, with a particular emphasis on girls and women. Mead stated that the community ignores both boys and girls until age 15 or 16, giving them little social standing but also effectively greater freedom. Mead also found that marriage is regarded as a social and economic arrangement in which wealth, rank, and job skills of the husband and wife are taken into consideration.
Aside from marriage, Mead identified two types of sex relations: love affairs among unmarried young people and adultery. Mead describes the psychology of the individual Samoan as being simpler, more honest, and less driven by sexual neuroses than the West. She describes Samoans as being much more comfortable with issues such as menstruation and more casual about non-monogamous sexual relations. Mead described Samoan youth as often having free, experimental, and open sexual relationships, including homosexual relationships, which was at odds with mainstream American norms around sexuality. The exceptions to these practices include women married to chiefs and young women who hold the title of taupo, a ceremonial princess, whose virginity was required.
Derek Freeman, a New Zealand anthropologist became the most prominent critic of Coming of Age in Samoa, publishing two books attacking her findings in 1983 and 1998. Freeman had lived in Samoa from 1940 to 1943, and studied missionary records from Samoa during his doctoral training at Cambridge. In 1965, he began fieldwork in Samoa, motivated in part by skepticism of Mead's research. He criticized Mead's work in a 1968 paper to the Australian Association of Social Anthropology, arguing that Mead had mischaracterized Samoa as a sexually liberated society when in fact it was characterized by sexual repression and violence and adolescent delinquency. The anthropological community has rejected Freeman's harshest criticisms, but the Mead–Freeman controversy greatly tarnished Mead's public image and played a part in debates about cultural relativism, multiculturalism, and nature and nurture.
In 1970, National Educational Television produced a documentary in commemoration of the 40th anniversary Mead's first expedition to New Guinea. Through the eyes of Mead on her final visit to the village of Peri, the film records how the role of the anthropologist has changed in the forty years since 1928.
Manus
In 1928–29, Mead and Fortune visited Manus for six months, now the northernmost province of Papua New Guinea, and traveled there by boat from Rabaul. She amply describes her stay there in her autobiography, and it is mentioned in her 1984 biography by Jane Howard. On Manus, she studied the Manus people of the south coast village of Peri on Shallalou Island. Her research resulted in Growing Up in New Guinea and a technical study titled, "Kinship in the Admiralty Islands" ; Fortune published Manus ''Religion. "Over the next five decades Mead would come back oftener to Peri than to any other field site of her career.'Mead wrote a study of social changes in Peri between her two field visits of 1928–29 and June to December 1953, published as New Lives for Old. Mead saw her return visit as a chance to study the impact of technological change, including the replacement of traditional architecture with "American-style" housing, and social transformation. Between the two visits, there had been several major social changes: The people of Manus became Catholics around 1930. Next, the Admiralty and Solomon Islands were occupied by the Japanese and then made into a strategic location for the American military and over a million soldiers had deployed through them. Finally, Manus society was roiled by the Paliau Movement, which called for a New Way, which repudiated many forms of traditional culture, innovated a new form of Christianity, and instituted village assemblies. The movement's leader, Paliau Moloat, advocated in 1953 for unity among villages and ethnic groups, working for village development rather than for Europeans, and eventual independence for Papua New Guinea. In New Lives for Old'', Mead interpreted the movement's millenarian religious component, "The Noise" as a component of the society's modernization:
the movement led by the native leader Paliau, which attempted to understand and incorporate the values and institutions of the Western world, to build a real modern culture of its own, complete with democratic government, schools, clinic, universal suffrage, money, individual and community responsibility, was the stuff out of which abiding, steady social change comes. Counterpointed to this, facilitating and retarding, was a nativistic cult, a 'cargo cult' called in Manus The Noise, in which men shook like leaves in the grip of a religious revelation that promised them all the blessings of civilization, at once, without an effort on their part except the destruction of everything they still possessed.
Mead was joined by researchers Theodore and Lenora Schwartz, and Leonora Foerstel. Schwartz published his own analysis of the Paliau Movement in 1962, which Peter Worsley describes as much more perceptive than Mead's.