Chapter 10
Coming of Age as a Woman in Popular Anthropology
Margaret Mead
Anthropologist (1901 – 1978)
(Excerpts
from writings: compiled by Saleem H. Ali)
Growing up in the Academic Milieu[1]
Fairly early I had a pretty good idea of how life was organized. Father was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania – known at home simply as “the University”
-- and he had an office
there which overlooked the morgue of the medical school. As I grew up within an
academic environment, I heard constant talk about university politics and
financing, about the stratagems and ruses adopted by ambitious men, and about
those who made their reputations by quoting, or almost quoting, without
acknowledgement from the work of others. Living in the midst of university
politics and academic disputes, I very early got a sense of what academic life
was like. I also came to recognize my father’s deep conviction as to the
necessity for trust between men and loyalty to the “organization.”
For a man who spent so much of his life in the academic
world, he was extraordinarily uninterested in the work that was being done by
other members of his discipline. Even the word “discipline” sounds odd as
applied to him for he never used it. After a few years of membership, he
stopped attending meetings of the American Economic Association. Instead, he
devoted himself to building the Wharton School and the Evening School, on the
one hand, and on the other, to understanding the contemporary realities of the
American economic system. One of the few comments he ever made about fame or
reputation was a remark that the amount of space accorded someone in obituaries
in The
New York Times was proportionate to the amount of good a man had attempted
to do, not to the amount of money he had made.
However, although teaching was at the center of his life,
he had a large number of other interests, a few of which Mother appreciated.
When she met and married him, he was a theoretical economist concerned with
such problems as the quantity theory of
money. But working on the quantity theory of money led him to look at gold
itself, instead of treating it as a mere abstraction with special concrete
properties. So he became interested in gold mining and even wrote a little book
on the whole sequence of processes connected with it, The Story of Gold.
Usually he tried to conceal from Mother the fact that he was short of money. But it was lack of funds, in 1919 that lay back of his unwillingness to send me to college. The reason he gave was that, since I was going to get married, I would not need a college education – he having married a wife who was working for her doctorate when I was born! And besides, he commented, I would have the same old-maid teachers at Wellesley who had been there when my mother was a student.
My first experience of fieldwork was through my mother’s
work among the Italians living in Hammonton, New Jersey, where we moved in 1902
so she could study them. But Father’s vivid accounts of how a street railway in
Massachusetts had failed and of the fate of the pretzel factory also gave me a
sense of the way theory and practice must be related. And it was his knowledge
both of the concrete sequences of activities necessary to carry out any process
and of the men involved – the workmen, for example, who alternately cursed and
made the sign of the cross over the recalcitrant machinery used to dredge the
‘creek’ – that gave me a sense of how important it was to link together the concrete and the
abstract.
Although he regretted it when my mother fretted because
he did not receive the academic recognition she would have valued for him or
when she raged because other men claimed his ideas, it mattered less to him. He
always had other arenas in which the battles were fiercer than they were in the
academic world and the stakes much higher. Year after year he played what were
substantially intellectual games with industrial enterprises that could not be
made to succeed but that could be made to fail less disastrously. But these
games too were marred.
Once he said to me, “It’s a
pity you aren’t a boy, you’d have gone far.” I think he only meant by this that
might I have become a titan of industry – something from which
he himself was debarred by the standards he had learned from his mother and had
accepted in his wife. However, the academic world was the real world to us,
even though father seemed to treat it as a mere shadow of the world about which
he taught. Books, galley proofs and new editions, lectures, students,
departmental challenges, marriages of professors to their secretaries, bachelor
professors who asked impertinent questions or kissed you when you didn’t want
to be kissed, awards and honors, and all the paraphernalia of academic life
were very real to us in a way they never were to my father.
However, we responded to the
reality of the academic world in very different ways. For my brother, at least
in the beginning, it was a burdensome reality. I remember that when he was a
young member of the Wharton School faculty, my father asked him whether a report
on which he was working was to be published. Dick replied that it was going to
be mimeographed, and when Father looked contemptuously, Dick flung angrily out
of the room. That night he walked in his sleep and tried to make a printing
press out of his wife’s hanging plants.
A generation later it had a
very different reality for my eight-year-old daughter. Realizing that she had
not been fully appreciative of the book A Club of Small Men, which Colin McPhee
had dedicated to her, she decided, “I will write him a review of it.” She did
so, and Colin sent it to the Saturday Review. When I explained to her that the
review might not be published, she answered philosophically, “Well, anyway, I
will have written something that might have been published when I was only
eight.” However, they did publish it and paid her half-price because she was a
child. As she held the check in her hand, she said, “I think writers don’t make
much money.”
Throughout history it has been men, for the most part,
who have engaged in public life. Men have sought for public achievement and
recognition, women have obtained their main satisfactions by bearing and
rearing children and making homes for men and children. In Women’s eyes, public
achievement makes a man more attractive as a marriage partner. But for men the
situation is reversed; the more a woman achieves publicly, the less desirable
she seems as a wife.
There are, of course, certain exceptions. Women have made
distinguished careers on the stage, where a man can take pride in the acclaim
given a woman for feminine qualities of beauty and charm, and in those
professions which are regarded as extensions of woman’s domestic role and which
depend on womanly virtues of compassion and care – nursing, teaching and social
work. But in general, creative women are exposed to a constant pull between a
desire for and enjoyment of children and home and a desire to do creative work.
There are three possible positions one can take about
male and female creativity. The first is that males are inherently more
creative in all fields. The second is that if it were not for the greater
appeal of creating and cherishing young human beings, females would be as
creative as males. If this were the case, then if men were permitted the
enjoyment women have always had in rearing young children, male creativity
might be reduced also. The third possible position is that certain forms of
creativity are more congenial to one sex than to the other and that the great creative
acts will therefore come from only one sex in a given field.
There is some reason to believe that males may always
excel – by just the small degree that makes the difference between good
capacity and great talent – in such fields as music and mathematics, where
creativity involves imposing form rather than finding it. There is also reason
to believe that women have a slightly greater potential in those fields in
which it is necessary to listen and learn, to fund forms in nature or I their own hearts rather than to make
entirely new ones; these fields could include certain areas of literature, and
some forms of science that depend on observation and recognition of pattern,
such as the study of living creatures or children or societies.
It can be argued, however,
that though women have done good work in fields that fit the formula, the
greatest work has been done by men. Here we run into a new problem.. When women
work in a creative field, even one that is particularly congenial to the,, they
must generally work with forms that were created by men, or else struggle
against special odds to develop new forms. Until we have an educational system
that permits enough women to work within any field – music, mathematics,
painting, literature, biology and so on – so that forms which are equally
congenial to both sexes are developed, we shall not have a fair test of this
third possibility.
We do not know that what one sex has developed, members
of the other sex can learn – from cookery to calculus. In those countries of
the Eastern bloc in which women are expected to p[lay an equal part with men in
the sciences, great numbers of women have shown a previously unsuspected
ability. We run a great risk of squandering half of our human gifts by
arbitrarily denying any field to either sex or by penalizing women who try to
use their gifts creatively.
All the various forms of popular culture are becoming
more alike around the world. At any one time the same hit records, television
shows and newest dance steps can be heard and seen in New York to Indonesia.
There are, as well, highly standardized reactions against what is popular.
What is new and an intrinsic part of our present flat,
over simplified, worldwide mass-media culture is our handling of fads. Each new
one, as it sweeps the cities of the world, expands into a major portent of
disaster or an indicator of some significant change of heart. At the time, as
we look at ourselves and one another continually and anxiously, without
critical cross-cultural or temporal perspective, we see only our own
reflections magnified and infinitely multiplied, like people gathered in a room
of grotesque mirrors. Then we move on. For a fad is still what it always has
been – a fad.
On the one hand, we may achieve worldwide standardization
in those activities on which safety, health and some kinds of convenience in
international controls connected with air and sea travel, currency exchange and
protection against epidemics. On the other hand, with better communication
people may be led once more to care about and develop their own half-abandoned
traditions and also with respect and a deeper awareness to draw on the highly
developed traditions of other cultures, as in recent years architecture in the
United States has drawn on Japanese models in creating new forms.
It is true, as McLuhan has so aptly put it, that we live
in a simultaneous world. That is, we are constantly exposed to news about
events taking place even in the most distant parts of the world. Wherever we
are, information about what is happening reaches us by television and radio
more quickly – and often more accurately – than the news that was passed by
worked of mouth from one village to another even in the recent past. In this
sense we are living in a shared – a simultaneous – world.
But in a village everyone knows everyone else. People
know the family history of almost every individual and children who have grown
up together know just what to expect of one another. True villagers speak the
same language, laugh at the same jokes, share the same expectations and
remember the same past. Their lives are inextricably interwoven.
In this sense I think McLuhan’s “global village” is
inappropriate and a deceptive metaphor. We may know something about many of the
world’s people, but we have face-to-face contact with only few. Wherever a
person travels, most people are strangers with whom there is ;little or no
possibility of real communication.
The news media bring the peoples of the earth within view
of one another. But the sheer numbers of people of whom we are made aware
diminish the possibility of any feeling of closeness and community. Seen from
space, our planet may look like a little, blue spinning top. But the world is not,
nor is it likely to become, a global village.
Society accords the academic community, as a while
special rights and privileges, and its members carry special responsibilities.
Universities and colleges are tax-exempt, endowed and supported in the public
interest. Young men and women wishing to work toward an academic career receive
fellowships and grants. Older members of the academic community, who are
trusted with the induction of the young into the intellectual traditions of
their culture, are treated with respect. And today, in a changing world, they
have the responsibility of developing new knowledge and applying it to the
basic problems of our lives.
I consider teaching and developing new knowledge to be the
primary responsibility of the academic community. Taking a stand or speaking
out without the appropriate knowledge is a betrayal of trust. I would indeed
criticize many parts of the academic community today for failing to do research
on critical problems, as well as for failing to alert the public to issues on
which members of certain disciplines have special competence, such as the
hazards of radiation; the dangers of air, water and land pollution; and the
vital necessity of controlling urban growth and overpopulation. But I would
also induct those members of the academic community who speak out without
special competence or who substitute political passion or individual conscience
for the competence they are believed to have.
The problem of acquiring and interpreting data on human
races illustrates what I mean. In the 1920s and the 1930s anthropologists
devoted very considerable research time and effort to certain problems and
puzzled the general public, such as the apparent association between skin color
and various forms of education and economic “inferiority” or “superiority.” One
outcome was the demonstration that members
of a racial group might make significant contributions to civilization
in one period, but in another period, when they were cut off from the main
stream of development, might sink into insignificance. Similarly it was
possible to demonstrate the critical importance of social expectation on
children’s achievement in situations in which invidious comparisons were made
in terms of racial heritage. The research and its application to everyday life
contributed materially to the creation of a new social climate of opinion
within which Americans could reformulate the goals of democracy.
More recently, however, younger anthropologists have concentrated
far more effort to :speaking out” than on careful research and critical
analysis of problems related to race. A few of tem have even denounced research
that undertook to explicate the relationship between long-continued malnutrition or endemic disease and poor
performance in groups defined as racially distinct or – as the case if American
Negroes – racially mixed. These anthropologists have been particularly vehement
in their denunciations of research which has demonstrated that the effects of
deprivation are real and lasting, though they are the result of conditions that
could be eradicated for a new generation of children. In doing this, they have
hindered the public understanding of the incapacitating effects of social
conditions that can be changed. This is a situation in which members of the
academic community have spoken out, but in doing so have failed in their
primary responsibility.
It appears to me that
wherever demonstrations, manifestoes, sit-ins, teach-ins and other similar
activities are treated as substitutes for the
search for new knowledge and ways of applying it to the living world,
the academic community is failing to take responsibility for its position of
trust. In contrast, when scientists have taken the initiative in organizing
their knowledge so as to make it really available and have worked on the
problem of how best t9 inform the public on areas of urgency and danger, I
believe they are meeting their responsibilities. The rapid dissemination of
knowledge about the dangers of atomic fallout and its effectiveness in leading
social action locally, nationally and even internationally is an outstanding
illustration of wholly responsible standing up and speaking out.
When accused of
being a “polymath” and thinking that she is an authority on everything Mead
responded as follows:
If one puts oneself in a
position to be asked questions in a public forum, one must stand up to the
questions that are asked, whatever they may be. A speaker can avoid this by
accepting only written questions and selecting those it is convenient to
answer, or by giving a carefully prepared statement to the press instead of
holding an open press conference. I like neither of these methods. As a result,
I am sometimes asked questions I would not have elected to discuss, mainly
because I do not feel myself well enough informed to do so.
My second comment is that the anthropologist’s one special area of competence is the
ability to think about a whole society and everything in it. This is what we
have learned to do in our years of hard work in areas where disease is rampant,
nutrition is poor and comfort is nil. Working in tiny primitive societies, we
learn to think about the way a lullaby is related to a funeral dirge, a way of
handling tools is related to a way of looking at the universe; and we bring
this training back to our own society. We cannot know the details of each facet
of our complex culture, but we can keep our eyes on the way the different
facets are related one to another. In this sense an experienced anthropologist
is perhaps the closest thing we have to the “world’s greatest authority on
everything – a polymath.” And in this sense I feel a responsibility at least to
think seriously about questions that are proposed to me.
When I sailed for Samoa, I
realized only very vaguely what a commitment to fieldwork and writing about
fieldwork meant. My decision to become an anthropologist was based in part on
my belief that a scientist, even one who had no great and special gift as a
great artist must have, could make a useful contribution to knowledge. Would I
be able to say the things that would make what I wrote intelligible to those
who had lived in a different world,
either because they did not do the kinds of works in which personal relations
and working relations are inseparable, or because they have never been in any
situation remotely resembling field work, in which one lives isolated for
months, alone or with one companion, among a strange and initially
incomprehensible people? And would the life I had lived be intelligible to
young people born since World War 2, reared in the shadow of the bomb,
alienated from the life of their parents, and nurtured on television, which has
made so much that was high adventure for me into the trivia of a morning
newscast?
When I wrote a biography of
Ruth Benedict, An Anthropologist at Work,
I tried to meet these different and sometimes conflicting demands. But of
course there was no way of being certain I had done so. For better or for
worse, the biography of Ruth Benedict was one expression of my responses to
those who had already died and who, in their lifetime, had left their mark
forever on my life and on the lives and work of American anthropologists.
But more often no than in
the past I am asked what I would choose to do if I had my life to live over
again. About this there is no doubt in my mind. WI would elect to be an
anthropologist. However, there are also those who ask me a different question:
If I were twenty-one today, would I now elect to become an anthropologist?
The real question that is
being asked, it seems to me has to do with the future of anthropology. Won’t
all the primitive people in the world soon be extinct? Or won’t the cultures of
the surviving peoples be so changed, so transformed by contact into various
versions of the emerging worldwide culture, that they no longer will be of
interest? In a strange way, I feel that this is where I came in. For even now,
when for fifty years intensive field work on living primitive societies has
been carried out with sophisticated methods, relatively few human scientists
understand what our aims have been.
Fifty years ago very few
people knew the meaning of the word anthropology, and a liberal reviewer could
protest Goldenweiser’s choice of a title, Early Civilization, for his book
about the cultures human beings had so laboriously built up. But even then it
was clear that anthropologists must work on contemporary problems using
contemporary tools while there still were primitive peoples relatively
untouched primitive peoples, among whom we could work. When I was a graduate
student I used to wake up saying to myself, “The last man on Raratonga who
knows anything about the past will probably die today. I must hurry.” That was
when I still dimly understood anthropology as a salvage operation, and knew
that we must get to the old men and old women who alone knew about the old ways
which, once destroyed, could never be reconstructed.
But I did not got to Samoa in 1925 to record the memories of old people about the way titles had once been distributed or how hieroglyphic taboos had been pit on trees or to collect still versions of the tables of Polynesian gods. I did not go as an antiquarian or as a representative of a discipline whose members were chiefly preoccupied with the peculiarities of kinship systems or with constructions based on primitive myths in which primitive peoples, treated as fossilized ancestors, served to prop up contemporary beliefs about the superiority or degeneration of Western society.
I went to Samoa – as later,
I went to the other societies on which I have worked -- to find out more about
human beings, human beings like ourselves in everything except their culture.
No amount of experimental apparatus, however, complex, can simulate what it is
to be reared as a Samoan, an Arapesh, a Manus or a Balinese. Today, there are
those who are willing to search the literature, like mediaeval scholastics, and
then to submit there fragmented findings to all the modern complexities of
computer analysis. There are those rebels in search of a “natural” life, who
would like to try the experiment of living in the midst of some primitive
group. Here are the sentimentalists who would like to put fences around the
remaining groups of primitive peoples and treat them like wild creatures in a
game preserve. And, increasingly, there are those who are attempting to turn
primitive peoples , living on the edge of modern civilization, into tourist attractions
– as if they were exotic animals set out
for public view in a zoo.
But how many social
scientists are there, today, who are trying to think out ways in which
primitive peoples where they still exist, can become our partners and coworkers
in the search for knowledge that may, in the end, save their children and ours?
In certain respects we might still be living in the 1920s, even to the images
that come into our minds then when we read Edna St.Vincent Millay’s poem, The Blue Flag in the Bog, in which she
wrote “All the things I ever knew / Are this blaze in back of me.” The
difference is that things we dreamed of and feared in those days are realities
today.
Using modern techniques for
making sound films, for example, anthropologists could provide the materials
for far more detailed analysis, far more securely-based than ever could be made
as long as we were dependent on what a single observer could see only once, an
observer who had only a running pencil to record what he could catch in
passing. Unlike the piles of notes in some personal shorthand that do not
survive the original observer, such records as now can be made would form a
reservoir beyond price for generations for newly-trained observers.
It is true that beautiful work has been done in the years since Gregory Bateson and I realized what could be done by studying primitive behavior photographically and made a quantum leap from the two to three hundred still photographs usually taken merely to illustrate a study to twenty-five thousand still photographs that incorporated our observations. But if anthropologists today made full use of the magnificent new technology and went to the field prepared to build into their research the new conceptions about evolution, about man’s instinctual equipment, and about the functioning of the brain as well as all we have learned about the embodiment of patterning and the development of the individual personality, they could come back with materials that would immensely expand what we could do.
But only a handful of people
are at work. What meager funds there are for research go more often to research
laboratory experiments or fashionable dead-ends done to further significant
field research. Yet, human scientists must have new and appropriate materials
to think with. And we must have the best materials we can assemble to educate
young human scientists of another generation who will be thinking about
the nature of man when, I truth, there
will be no more primitive societies, and indeed, no society whose members do
not embody some version of a worldwide culture.
For anthropologists there
are, however, other possibilities as well. During the War we learned how to
take our knowledge and experience, gained from fieldwork among primitive
peoples, and use it in studies of cultures in the modern world that were
complementary to studies made by those disciplines that work only within modern
societies and lack the illumination of comparison and the practice of learning
from the observed behavior of living beings. Then what we knew was put to
wartime use; now these anthropological skills are sorely needed to work on
problems that are worldwide in their dimensions – that no nation, no society,
can solve independently of all others. Research among isolated primitive peoples
is still the most rewarding for the individual anthropologists and for the
sciences of human behavior. But we must also understand the societies within
our growing knowledge is put tow work.
What is there for young
anthropologists to do? In one sense, everything. The best possible work has not
yet been done. If I were twenty one today, I would elect to join the
communicating network of those young people the world over, who recognize the
urgency of life-supporting change – as an anthropologist.
But even so, I speak out of
the experience of my own lifetime of seeing past and future as aspects of the
present. Knowledge joined to action – knowledge about what man has been and is
– can protect the future. There is hope, I believe, in seeing the human adventure
as a whole and in the shared trust that knowledge about mankind sought in
reverence for life, can bring life.
[1] From Margaret Mead, Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years. New York NY: Morrow, 1969.
[2] June, 1967. From Margaret Mead, Some Personal Views. A volume edited by Rhoda Metraux. New York NY: Walker & Company, 1979.
[3] From Margaret Mead, Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years. New York NY: Morrow, 1969