Biographical Memoirs Volume 58 (1989) / Chapter Skim
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Margaret Mead
Margaret Mead
Pages 328-355
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From page 329... ...
The appearance in 1983 of the New Zealand/Australian anthropologist Derek Freeman's highly publicizecl wholesale attack on her first book, Coming of Age in Samoa, published fifty-five years earlier, began yet another round of intense and often bitter discussion, both popular and professional, whose end is still not in sight. She was the subject of a special memorial issue of the American Anthropologist in June 1980, in which eight of her students and coworkers contrib329
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From page 330... ...
. For a sensitive appreciation from outside anthropology, see Renee Fox, "Margaret Mead," International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York: The Free Press, 1979)
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and the technical Kinship in the Admiralty Islands (1934~. After a summer's work among the Omaha Indians in Nebraska in 1930 (from which a study, The Changing Culture of an Indian Tribe tI932]
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From page 332... ...
As early as 1926 she was appointed assistant curator of ethnology of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, a position she maintained (advancing to associate curator in 1942; curator in 1964; and curator emerita, but hardly retired, in 1969) until her death, and whose obligations as collector, documenter, conservator, and exhibition designer she took extremely seriously.
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From page 333... ...
She was, inter a great many alia, Jacob Gimbel Lecturer in the Psychology of Sex, at Stanford University ant! the University of California (19461; Mason Lecturer, University of Birmingham, England (19491; Inglis Lecturer, Graduate School of Education, Harvarcl University (1950~; Ernest Jones Lecturer, British Psychoanalytic Society (19571; anti Dwight Terry Lecturer on Religion in the Light of Science anct Philosophy, Yale University (19571.
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From page 334... ...
, and The American Association for the A(1vancement of Science (1975~. She was the moving force in the Research in Contemporary Cultures program at Columbia from 1948 to 1950, in which more than 120 people, including Ruth Benedict, Geoffrey Corer, Nathan Leites, Martha Wolfenstein, and Rhoda Metraux, participated, and from which a number of her own "national character" studies, notably Soviet Attitudes Toward Authority (1951)
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From page 335... ...
She started a great many hares and she caught a number of them. Even an attempt to demarcate the major areas, beyond Oceanic ethnography as such, in which Mead maple her main contributions is likely to prove controversial, for she had a way of making everyone from nutritionists to cinematographers fee!
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From page 336... ...
, as well as by the Samoan study, in which propose(1 universalities of psychological functioning were up-ended by particular counter-cases; the second, usually referred to as "culture and personality" research, in which particular cultural mechanisms (teasing, swaddling) were sought out to account for particular psychological traits (affectlessness, suppressed rage)
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From page 337... ...
. Meacl's concern with methoclological matters was with her from the beginning, intellectual daughter of Franz Boas that she was, but it was powerfully stimulated by attacks on her, as she became prominent, as "impressionistic," "intuitive," "subjective," ancl, to her the most painful cut of all, "unscientific." Mead was totally committee!
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From page 338... ...
Even Gregory Bateson was, or so at least he said to me, unconvincecl of some of Mead's claims for the probative value of their photographic work. Even a sympathetic observer must cock a quizzical eye at the oddly phrased claim (in her vita)
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From page 339... ...
Finally in her ambiguous relations in the last years of her life with the reborn feminist movement in the United States Mead was acclaimed by some as a heroine who had made it in a man's world on her own terms. Yet she was derided by others as a "Queen Bee" and an "Aunt Tom" who (as Betty Friedan, an ennemie amicate for many years, told Joan Howard)
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a half mile away where it will end, in a desperate attempt to "cover" it the enormous, tumbling crowcI, hundreds of people half-shroucled in heat anct dust, sullenly parts, as in a cleMille movie, and there stancling, leaning authoritatively on a stick, is Margaret Meacl. ~ thought: "If an anthropologist goes macI in the fielcI, this is the way it will happen hallucinating Margaret." ~ clidn't even approach her but went to find my wife ("Come and look.
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From page 341... ...
sites. She tract come only to invite us to clinner, three days hence, in the island capital, where there was a local Javanese art clearer married to a Balinese, whom she had known for years and whom it would be good for us to meet.
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From page 342... ...
(Reprinted in paperback: 1933, Blue Ribbon Books, New York: Doubleday; 1953, Mentor, New York: New American Library; 1962 (with new preface) , Apollo Editions, New York: Morrow; 1968, Laurel Editions, New York: Dell.)
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From page 343... ...
Arts and Supernaturalism, American Museum Science Books B l9b. Garden City, N.Y.: Natural History Press.)
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Garden City, N.Y.: Natural History Press.) 1942 With Gregory Bateson.
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Stream of Events in Alitoa. American Museum Science Books B l9c.
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The Record of Unabelin with Rorschach Analyses. American Museum Science Books B 19a.
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1953 Editor. Cultural Patterns and Technical Change: A Manual Prepared by the World Federation for Mental Health.
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Arts Lett., 2:286-93. Changing culture: some observationsin primitive societies.
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In: Social Science in Nursing, ed. Frances Cooke Macgregor, pp.
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The bark paintings of the mountain Arapesh of New Guinea. In: Technique and Personality in Primitive Art, pp.
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215-28. Garden City, N.Y.: Natural History Press.
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Garden City, N.Y.: Natural History Press/Doubleday. (Paperback edition 1970.)
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With Walter Fairservis. Kulturelle Verhaltensweisen und die Umwelt des Menschen (Cultural attitudes toward the human envi
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New York: Harper & Row. 1978 The evocation of psychologically relevant responses in ethnological field work.
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