Anthro
500b, Part 4: American Revisions
Session notes for
North American
anthropology in the aftermath of Boas:
(Re)configurations,
from cultural pattern to cultural psychology
I. Introduction: Franz Boas and the
American Historical School
II. Alfred Kroeber, Robert Lowie,
Edward Sapir: culture, the individual, and the superorganic
III. Culture as "personality writ
large": Ruth Benedict and Abraham Kardiner
IV. Margaret Mead: public voice of the
discipline
V.
Mead, Boas, and the trajectories of American anthropology
VI. Defrocking a saint: the Margaret
Mead-Derek Freeman controversy
Franz Boas and the
American Historical Tradition
Boas insisted human diversity is cultural and historical,
not biological and racial—i.e., biology is a constant. He renounced the evolutionists' method
of comparison and substituted his own method of "controlled
comparison." His
configurational concept of culture was unitary and integrative—and for him and
his "people," the Pacific Northwest Coast groups, largely
reconstructed. However, his culture
concept was not seamlessly bounded and entirely consistent.
One
of Boas's major aims was "to reconstruct the histories of cultures which
have left no written records" [which for Boas required using archeology,
careful field work, and mapped geographical distributions]. However, Honigmann argues that this was
for him a way towards a more ultimate Enlightenment goal of discovering the
processes and causes of culture change and of understanding how culture
mediates peoples' relationships with nature, with themselves and with each
other. "By discovering the
dynamic factors operating in the histories of particular cultures, and then
comparing the histories, general laws governing culture history may be
found."
Boas
was made himself and his Department at Columbia University, a more dominant
single center for a much longer time than Malinowski, R-B, or E-P, or their
institutions in Britain. He trained
the vast majority of American anthropologists for two decades, including Alfred
Kroeber, Alexander Goldenweiser, Edward Sapir, Elsie Clews Parsons, Robert
Lowie, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead, and these students began training a
third generation.
However,
the history of this Boasian "American Historical Tradition" was
marked by several trends:
A. Among Boasians, there was a growing skepticism of finding any such
laws of historical development beyond the vague. Unpredictable inventions and unusual individuals
were too common in the histories.
Only Alexander Lesser continued to hold to a deductive methodology.
B. Still, most of them retained an interest in refining a vocabulary for
culture and in characterizing the nature of coherence and patterning that was
central to Boas's concept.
C. Finally, a number of his students expressed an increasing interest in
the individual, in relations between individuals and culture, and in
psychological processes. This
reflected a shift from long-term historical developments to a concern with more
delimited cultural processes like acculturation (in situations of culture
contact). It also reflected the
intellectual tenor of the period and the alienation felt by a number of
Boasians towards their own culture.
The
reading I have selected for this session is Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa,
and I want to put it in the context of her long and influential career—and to
put her in the context of several cohorts of rather illustrious Boasians.
Culture, the individual, and the superorganic
NB:
review the section in Eriksen and Hansen for some comments on Kroeber and Lowie
and the culture-as-superorganic debates.
See also the following for commentary on the interwar years in US
anthropology (full references on web page):
Robert F. Murphy "A Quarter of
a Century of the American Anthropologist"
George W. Stocking, "Ideas and
Institutions in American Anthropology: Thoughts Towards
a History of the Interwar Years"
George W. Stocking, "The
Ethnographic Sensibility of the 1920s and the Dualism of the Anthropological
Tradition"
John S. Gilkeson, Jr., "The
Domestication of 'Culture" in Interwar America, 1919-1941"
Prominent among
Boas's students were the following:
Alfred Lewis Kroeber (1876-1960) was born to
German-American parents in Hoboken, New Jersey. He entered Columbia at the age of
sixteen and majored in English, taking a M.A. in literature, which gave his
later work in anthropology a strongly humanistic bent. He took a seminar on North American
Indian languages from Boas soon after the latter's appointment, and became
Boas's first doctoral student at Columbia.
His 1901 Ph.D. dissertation was only 28 pages long, and when he
finished, Boas dispatched him to Berkeley to establish a department there. He presided over it and California
anthropology for five decades, retiring in 1946. By his 60th birthday in 1936, his
bibliography was some 306 works, but in the next quarter of a century it grew
to 532 publications.
His
lifelong research priority was the "salvage ethnography" of the
native peoples of California, His
monumental work was the 1925 Handbook of the Indians of California, a
thousand-page exhaustive summary of all California groups—every single one of
which Kroeber himself had investigated.
His salvage ethnography led him to a research strategy which came to be
known as the "culture element distribution list" (recall, by
comparison, the British Notes and Queries in Anthropology). These were developed into check lists for
surveying groups, eventually including between 3,000 and 6,000 separate
items. They were then plotted in
space to show diffusions and concentrations.
At
the other end of abstraction, however, Kroeber was interested in the
"style" and "pattern" and "configurations" of
entire cultures. That is, Kroeber,
even more than Boas, wanted to show how the elements of any culture form patterns,
by which he meant setting aside factors arising from biology and history, and
concentrating on the internal links within the culture. He formulated such notions as a
culture's "intensity" (its level of creative activity) and
"climax" (the focal center of a culture). [Indeed, his particularistic and
abstract poles were connected through such concepts--e.g., climax could be determined
by plotting the distribution of cultural elements.] Kroeber did believe that culture was a
product of history: "the accumulation of countless innovations made by
many successive generations... Item, element, trait, trait-complex, form,
style, and pattern are the concepts they used at the basic level"
(Honigmann, 200). Pattern,
especially, was a guiding concept, used in both a structural and processual
sense. [This was pushed even more
broadly in the notion of configuration, e.g., by Benedict]
Kroeber is
particular known for formulating a notion of culture as
"superorganic." In part,
this was a turf-war tactic—carving out a space for anthropological theorizing
beyond and "above" biology and psychology. His early and succinct statement was in his
1917 American Anthropologist article on "The Superorganic."
Robert Lowie (1883-1957) was the second Boas
student to receive his doctoral degree (in 1907). He worked at the American Museum of
Natural History for ten years, during which time he did extensive fieldwork on
Plains and Great Basin Indians; after a short return to Columbia, he moved to
the UC-Berkeley department for the rest of his career. He was an articulate and ardent
proponent of Boasian anthropology, and his book on Primitive Society (1920)
was a highly critical attack on Lewis Henry Morgan and evolutionist
perspectives.
Alexander Goldenweiser: taught at the New School and
introduced anthropology to large numbers of business executives, office
workers, and housewives (including Ruth Benedict)
Clark Wissler, another of Boas's students, came to occupy a key
position on the staff of the National Research Council at a time (check) when
foundation support for the social sciences exploded: from $200,000 in 1921 to
$7.8 million in 1927. He helped
promoted anthropology's culture concept into other social sciences, especially
history and sociology (see Gilkeson).
Wissler was also
important for his elaboration of the culture area concept, which
reflected the Boasian tenet that cultures were rooted in natural settings and
that this insight could be used to discern geographical-cultural regions of
cultures. Wissler described the
"horse complex" for the Plains Indians, a regional combination of
tipi, travois, buffalo hunting, mounted warfare, and the Sun Dance. Later Melville Herskovits was to apply
it to Sub-Saharan Africa.
Edward Sapir (1884-1939) was the most prominent of Boas's
students to follow his highly innovative focus on language, which Boas treated as far more central to culture analysis than other
anthropologists, including Malinowski.
Language and linguistic patterns were taken to be patterned and
revealing not of natural categories but of cultural categories
(recall Boas's plan for study of North American Indian languages).
Sapir was born
to a Jewish family in Prussia in 1889 and came to the US at age five. He graduated from Columbia when he was
twenty. Even as an undergraduate,
his interest in language and literature had led him to Boas's course on Native
American languages. He immediately
began doctoral studies with Boas.
On finishing in 1909, he went to Kroeber's shop at Berkeley for a year,
then to University of Pennsylvania.
He then spent fifteen years with the National Geological Survey of
Canada (1910-1925), a period of extensive field research and literary writing
but intellectual isolation. In
1925, he was given a position at the University of Chicago (one of his students
was Robert Redfield), and in 1931, he joined the newly reorganized department
at Yale, where he began work immediately with Benjamin Whorf. Review the Regna Darnell article for
more on Sapir, including his time here at Yale. He died at the age of 54 in
1939 (Whorf died several years later at the age of 44).
Sapir was also
critical of Kroeber's superorganic concept and he developed a theme of the
individual in and of society. He was fascinated, for instance, by James
Dorsey's account of the contrarian Omaha Indian, Two Crows, whom Dorsey quoted
as often dissenting from various conventional Omaha beliefs ("Two Crows
denies it");
Sapir used this case to speculate on the meaning of dissent and
heterodoxy in and as culture in a 1938 article on "Why the Cultural
Anthropologist Needs the Psychiatrist."
Thirdly, Sapir was
also thinking at level of culture, most famously in his romantically tinged
essay on "Culture, Genuine and Spurious." This was a subtle meditation on culture
and a forceful critique of contemporary North American society (we were not
genuine, "harmonious, balanced, self-satisfying": An "Indian's salmon spearing was a
culturally higher type of activity than that of a telephone girl or mill
hand."). George Stocking calls
it "a foundational document for the ethnographic sensibility of the
1920s" (1992:289)—that is, for the Apollonian trio of Benedict, Mead, and
Redfield.
III. Culture as
"personality writ large":
Ruth Benedict and Abraham Kardiner
NB:
see Stocking's discussion of Benedict in 1992:292-301 as part of his
characterization of the Apollonian sensibilities of 1920s ethnography.
Even
among the cohort of brilliant students around Boas, Ruth Fulton Benedict (1887-1949) occupied a special place. In 1905, she had entered Vassar, a
preeminent women's college, where she studied poetry and literature and was
especially fond of Nietzsche. In
1914 she married Stanley Benedict.
This proved an unsatisfying union, and as a thirty-one-year-old
housewife, she enrolled at the New School for Social Research, where she was
introduced to anthropology by Elsie Clews Parsons (who taught a popular course
on "Sex in Ethnology") and by Boas's student, Goldenweiser. She was taken uptown and introduced to
Boas by Parsons in 1921. She turned
to anthropology fulltime (she later claimed) when she realized she couldn't
have children. She tried to keep up
her marriage and was a dutiful wife, but gradually agreed to separate from her
husband Stanley. Boas waived credit
requirements for her, and she took her Ph.D. in three semesters in 1923 at the
age of 36. She had begun teaching
with and for Boas even before receiving her degree, and became indispensable to
him and the department. When her
divorce was formalized in 1930, Boas got her appointment at Columbia converted
to a regular tenure-track position.
Sadly, when Boas retired in 1937, Columbia would not consider a woman as
department chair, and Ralph Linton was brought in. Linton had been turned away by Boas as a
student, and had gone to Harvard to get his degree. He and Benedict (and other Boasians) had
a very strained relationship.
Linton, a difficult person and a large ego, probably did try to
marginalize Benedict. Her position
did not improve until 1944, when Linton left for Yale. She was a longtime assistant professor,
even as department chair. She
wasn't even made full professor until 1946, and died in 1948.
It
was Benedict who put pattern and personality together, most famously in her Patterns
of Culture, which was conceived while doing fieldwork in 1927 among the
Pima in the American Southwest, who seemed to have very different emphasis than
the adjacent Pueblo cultures. The
book contrasted the style and ethos of the ceremonious, dignified, and gentle
Pueblo peoples (Hopi and Zuni), the suspicious, treacherous, and prudish Dobu
Islanders, and the prestige-driven, conspicuously-competitive, and
"megalomaniac paranoid" Kwakiutl. The core lessons were the causal primacy
of culture and the claim that "cultures are more than the sum of their
traits." Benedict was
influenced by gestalt theory to
capture a society's existential values as integrated in and by its personality
configuration
"A
culture, like an individual, is a more or less consistent pattern of thought
and action. Within each culture,
there come into being characteristic purposes not necessarily shared by other
types of society. In obedience to
these purposes, each people further and further consolidates
its experience, and in proportion to the urgency of these drives the
heterogeneous items of behavior take more and more congruous shape."
Benedict (1934:53)
This
was not unlike Alfred Kroeber, who was later to write:
"Within
any one civilization, the various styles constituting its value component not
only coexist in the same society, region, and period; they also tend toward a certain
consistency among themselves... This assumption seems validated by the simple
consideration that consistent and coherent civilizations would on the average
work out better and get farther, and presumably survive better, than
inconsistent ones dragging on under malfunctions and strain."
(1951:621)
Patterns
of Culture was an
immensely popular and influential book, taking patterns beyond Kroeber and
Wissler. It was also a sharp
critique of US culture.
Abraham Kardiner (1891-1981) was not a Boas student,
but a psychoanalyst who had studied with Freud but came to think that Freud's
model of the psyche was too ethno-centric.
He assembled a group of anthropologists at Columbia in 1930s that
included Benedict, Ralph Linton, Cora DuBois, Ruth Bunzel, and Clyde Kluckhohn,
to develop a cross-cultural "psychodynamic" that he called
psychological anthropology. He
formulated this on the basis of three related concepts. Primary institutions were those like
forms of feeding, sleeping, and weaning of infants that were constituent of
child rearing. Secondary
institutions were the broader structures of society, like schools, political
organization, and economic production.
Basic personality structures were formed in and by early primary
institutions and this basic modal personality was
"projected" on to the secondary institutions of the society. The effect was that their shape and
tenor then reinforced the basic personality of the individuals who passed
through them. See Manson 1986 on
Kardiner
This
psychodynamic approach was not unlike structural-functionalism in seeking those
elements of society that gave coherence and integration. The difference was that
structural-functionalism looked for institutions (organized rule-governed
activity with hierarchy of personnel), while psychological anthropology
attended to enculturation as the process of becoming competent in one's
culture. [NOTE that they meant by this more than socialization, which referred
more narrowly to early childhood).
See Cora DuBois's ethnography of The People of Alur (1944) as the
best example of the Kardiner approach.
However, the approach also underpinned the wartime efforts of
anthropologists to analyze enemy "cultures at a distance" and produce
studies of national character. Some
had enduring, if mixed, value, like Ruth Benedict's study of Japan, The
Chrysanthemum and the Sword (published in 1946). Worse, though, were such polemics as
Geoffrey Gorer's characterizations of Japan as "obsessive-compulsive"
because of premature toilet training and of Russia as
"manic-depressive" because of prolonged infant swaddling (see
Erickson 1998:83).
There
had been precedents in relating culture and personality, including Freud's Totem
and Taboo (1913), whose claims of universality Malinowski had attacked in
his argument that a boy's hostility in the Trobriands was to his mother's
brother, not to his father. Then in
the 1920, Sapir had argued for the importance of the unconscious patterning of
behavior and the role of the individual in transmitting behavior across
generations.
IV. Margaret
Mead: public voice of the discipline
We
have talked about Boas as a public intellectual, and his impassioned attacks on
evolutionary thinking, racist policies, eugenics, immigration laws, and war—in
the name of and in terms of anthropology.
This was in fact a sense of obligation that he passed on to many of his
best students. Many of them were
active in national and metropolitan progressive politics and public commentary,
writing for such intellectual weeklies as The New Republic, The
Nation, Dial, and The American Mercury. They were proselytizing
"culture" and speaking out against racism, eugenics, anti-immigration
legislation, Fascism, and other national and world problems. Their actions had enormous effect—on
other social scientists (note sociology), on the public, and on intellectuals
generally (cf. Warren Susman and "Americanism" of the 20s and 30s)
But
of all of them, none had greater effect than Margaret Mead (1901-1978). Margaret Mead was the best-known
American anthropologist in the country for fifty years, from the late 1920s
through the late 1970s, a popularity that is hard for younger people today to
appreciate. The "Strangers
Abroad" video provides an informative account of Mead's life and of the
place of her more important writings in its course. [Note, though, that it
presents little of her US career, but rather is organized around her field
trips, from the eight months she spent in Samoa in 1925 through the postwar
trips to Manus.] Coming of Age
in Samoa was her first book, written in her twenties, and perhaps her most
influential. It is most likely the
best-selling and most widely-read anthropology ever. Mead was a prolific writer and constant
public speaker in a broad range of forums.
She wrote for all major academic journals and for the popular press
(e.g., Mademoiselle, Parents Magazine, and Redbook Magazine). She testified before Congress on many
occasions and was also a frequent guest on television and radio. Her 1976 bibliography lists over 1400
published works. More than Boas or
any other anthropologist of this century, she was a public intellectual, always
pressing her anthropological views and using her insight to advocate social
change.
In
Redbook Magazine, for instance, she wrote a monthly column in the last
two decades of her life that answered readers' queries: on school prayers,
telepathy, happiness, John Paul Sartre, school busing,
why people like to have their hair stand on end. Is housework easier than it
was fifty years ago? Is Shakespeare
really Shakespeare? What is the
fatal fascination of baseball?
Mead
was born in 1901 in upper-middle class professional family. Her father was a U Penn business school
professor, and her mother was active in suffrage and civil rights
movements. She transferred from
DePauw University to Barnard College in 1920, where she majored in English and
psychology. She took Boas's
anthropology course in the fall semester of her senior year and, impressed, she
enrolled in other anthropology courses.
She was especially taken by his Teaching Assistant, Ruth Benedict,
fourteen years her senior, with whom she quickly developed an intense, lasting
friendship (and brief affair). It
was Benedict who encouraged her to enter anthropology and who became her mentor
and an advocate as well as teacher and confidante.
On
graduating from Barnard, she married Luther Cressman, to whom she had been
engaged since sixteen and who became archeologist, and she entered Boas's
doctoral program. Her Ph.D.
dissertation was on a library topic assigned by Boas on Polynesian material
culture. [Jane Howard, on page 64
of her biography, describes the three-minute interview with Boas that settled
her Ph.D. topic!]
But
she was anxious to get to the field, and persuaded Boas to support her funding
to go to the Pacific; Judith Modell, on page 149 of her biography, describes
her 1925 field trip to Samoa. Boas
had given her only thirty-minutes of instruction on doing fieldwork, the main point
of which was that she should stick to her problem and not waste time
"studying the culture as a whole."
In
total, between 1925 and 1939, she made five field trips to the Pacific that
cumulatively, gave Mead her central theme: "that specific child-rearing
practices shape personalities that in turn give specific societies their
essential natures" (Moore 1996:104).
1. Samoa: 1925-6, eight months. A detailed study of 68 girls between the
ages of 8 and 20 in three near contiguous villages on the west coast of the
island of Ta'u, the largest of the three islands that
compose the Manu'a group, easternmost in American
Samoa.
On
her return to the US, during the long Western voyage via Europe, she met a young
New Zealander, Reo Fortune, who was going to study anthropology with
Malinowski. After a winter with
Cressman and a month in German with Fortune the next summer, she demanded a
divorce from the former to marry the latter.
2. Manus: 1928, six months with Reo Fortune. Together, they studied the settlement of
Pare (Pari); as the documentary video shows, she
collected 35,000 children's drawings to explore their mind and
imagination--another of her methodological innovations. She was interested here in cultural
transmission and to what extent younger generation had an open-ended human
nature to develop in any direction.
She wrote up the research as Growing Up in
New Guinea
3. a brief investigation among the
Omaha Indians in the summer of 1930, which was the only fieldwork she ever did in North
America.
4. Sepik River: 1931-1933, with Reo Fortune, among Arapesh,
Mundugumor, and Chambri. Here she
took on another fundamental question, how gender "temperament"
("the social personalities of the two sexes") was conditioned. Her strategy was to compare attitudes
and practices among three distinct groups, living within one hundred miles of
each other in the Middle Sepik River:
the "gentle mountain-dwelling Arapesh, the fierce cannibalistic
Mundugumor, and the graceful headhunters of Tchambuli." (ix).
a. Both men and women of the Arapesh were kind and gentle, given to
helping others. "They have
surrounded with delight that part of parenthood which we consider to be
specially maternal, the minute, loving care for the little child and the
selfless delight in that child's progress towards maturity."
(134) Mead claims that parenting is
so evenly divided that if someone comments about how good-looking a middle-age
man is, someone else is apt to reply: "good looking? Y-e-s? But you should have seen him before he
bore all those children!" (39)
b. Mundugumor are quite different, believing in
a "natural hostility" between members of the same sex. The child is born into a hostile world
of warring fathers and son, mothers and daughters. The child must become violent and
protective of his/her own interests.
The corollary is that women have no temperament different from men. "They are believed to be just as
violent, just as aggressive, just as jealous. They simply are not quite as strong
physically, although a woman can put up a very good fight and a husband who
wishes to beat his wife takes care to arm himself with a crocodile jaw and to
be sure that she is not armed" (210).
c. The Tchambuli presented yet a third variant of gendered
temperament: "As the
Arapesh made growing food and children the greatest adventure of their lives,
and the Mundugumor found greatest satisfaction in fighting and competitive
acquisition of women, the Tchambuli may be said to live principally for
art. Every man is an artist and
most men are skilled not in some one art alone, but in many: in dancing,
carving, plaiting, painting, and so on.
Each man is chiefly concerned with his role upon the stage of his
society with the elaboration of his costume, the beauty of the masks that he
owns, the skill of his own flute-playing, the finish and élan of his
ceremonies, and upon other people's recognition and valuation of his
performance" (245). And
while the Tchambuli men are preoccupied with art, women held the real power,
controlling fishing and the most important manufactures, looking on their menfolk "with kindly tolerance and appreciation"
(255).
She
wrote up her study as Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies
(1935). Note that she was not only prolific and popular, but also always on
schedule. She wrote quickly and
gracefully. One can imagine the
impact on American readers, who held as an article of faith certain
characteristics of gender personality to be as natural and inevitable as the
stress of adolescence.
5. Bali: 1936-1938 and 1939 (with a trip
to the Iatmul in 1938). Mead met
Gregory Bateson on her Sepik trip and soon divorced Fortune and married
Bateson. With her new husband, she
immediately started planning and took off on another extended field research
project, this time to the elaborate civilization of Bali. They spent much time in the mountain
community of Bajoeng Gede. Again, her motivating question was how
culture influences child development.
Mead and Bateson were imaginative thinkers and innovative researchers
and they were determined to try to capture in something approaching the
scientific those subtle aspects of communication and socialization that artists
were able to represent but which social scientists had more trouble
rendering. To this end, they
experimented with combining field observations and interviews with
photography. Bateson shot over
22,000 feet of 16mm film and 25,000 still photographs. It is an
unparalleled archive, which they themselves never fully exploited, nor have
others since (though a monograph of their photographs appeared in 2000).
Their general
thesis was that the central orientation of Balinese society was just that,
"orientation in time, space, and status" (1942:11). Everyone had a place in local society
and knew that place, as it was expressed in space (the superior person slept on
the higher, inland side of the inferior person), vertical elevation (higher
chairs for higher status individuals), language (using honorific polished
language), posture and gesture.
This sense of
position was instilled from birth: "When the Balinese baby is born, the
midwife, even at the moment of lifting him in her arms, will put words in his
mouth, commenting, 'I am just a poor new-born baby, and I don't know how to
talk properly, but I am very grateful to you, honorable people, who have
entered this pig sty of a house to see me.' And from that moment, all through
babyhood, the child is fitted into a frame of behavior, of imputed speech and
imputed thought and complex gesture, far beyond his skills and maturity."
(1942:13) This
imputation was largely non-verbal, and this is what the photographs and movies
were intended to capture.
Mead's only
child, Mary Catherine Bateson, was born in 1939, just after their return from
Bali. Mead sought out Dr. Benjamin
Spock as pediatrician because he had been psychoanalyzed. She designed her child rearing and
extensively documented Mary Catherine's childhood behavior and
development. Mary Catherine was breast-fed
and demand-fed; Mead figured out her feeding patterns, and organized her work
schedule around it. Dr. Spock was
impressed and influenced by this, and as his own writings influenced millions
of postwar baby-boom families, Mead's preferences became national tendencies!
When the war
broke out, Mead was sent by the US government to Great Britain to study
misunderstandings over presence and behavior of US troops. Why, in particular, did US GIs and
British women see each other as "immoral"? [If time, we should
consider more broadly the contributions of anthropologists in the war effort,
contrasting WWI and Vietnam].
Mead divorced
Bateson after war, and returned to Manus to study the effects of the war. After her first trip, she always worked
together, and this time brought Ted Swartz and others. She made a total of seven field trips to
Manus, the last in 1975 (note the video's lingering conclusion on her final
farewell and response of islanders to her death). That is, this speaks to another of
Mead's emphases, on what came to be called "applied anthropology"—the
effects of rapid change on "traditional peoples" and the resulting
challenge to their "culture." In one of her final essays, she wrote:
"National
states are closing their doors to anthropologists, the jungle is being
bulldozed and roads are being built through the Kalahari Desert and the Ituri
Forest. However much an
anthropologist may be interested in exploring or demonstrating some point which
has arisen in the course of conventional experimental work in psychology
[NB: she was writing for a collection on psychological anthropology], he or
she will in the end, I believe, do better to accept conditions as they come,
learn to use every possibility within a given field context, make do and mend
with givens, rather than spending months looking for perfect sites, different
sized populations or predetermined contrasts." (1978:90)
This
is quoted by Nancy Scheper-Hughes (1987:452), who understands Mead's vision of
the anthropologist as culture broker, "as a mediator between the collision
of cultures and the clash of interpretations."
V. Mead, Boas, and the trajectories of American
anthropology
Where,
then, does Mead fit into the development of American anthropology? There are many who argue for an enormous
distance between Boas and Mead.
Compare, for instance, their prose styles and strategies. There is an apparent chasm between Boas's
text-driven description and Mead's much more breezy, generalizing, and
psychological style. Richard Fox
(1991:106) sees an early phase of Boasian culture history replaced by
Mead/Benedict cultural psychology, which depended on a synchronic
integration of culture. [His
chapter begins with the debates among Boasians about this culture history and
how much real history it should include.]
However,
in many ways Boas and Mead shared essential features:
1. They both begin from a premise of the
cultural basis of behavioral variations: they were cultural relativists,
not cultural determinists
As
with Boas, however, Mead's psycho/biological baseline seems endlessly
malleable. "Each primitive
people has selected one set of human gifts, one set of human values, and
fashioned for themselves an art, a social organization, a religion, which is their
unique contribution to the history of the human spirit" (1928:25)
2. They were both public advocates for
anthropology and for using anthropology to address their own society's
problems. The ultimate aim was
"anthropology as cultural critique." For Boas, anthropology had to attack
racism, the race concept, and eugenics; for Mead, its duty was to combat
universalistic psychologizing.
One
of Mead's biographers, Jane Howard, quotes a letter of Marvin Harris, who argued
that Mead's greatest accomplishment was to make people aware of cultural
differences. "[T]hat
success had great historical effect," Harris wrote. "If the public in America today
is less parochial and ethnocentric than it was when the Immigration Act was
passed, sixty years ago; if Americans are now more self-critical about their
prejudices and practices--and one has to say 'if' because it is not yet certain
if the changes are irreversible--we owe those improvements to Margaret Mead's
efforts more than to anything else."
Still,
the extreme relativism of Boas and Mead raised serious questions. Can extreme relativism permit drawing
lessons from culture A to culture B?
And does "cultural" relativism entail "moral
relativism"?
3. Boas and Mead also shared a focus on
cultures in the plural rather
than an interest in elaborating an analytical conception of Culture.
4. Finally, they were both fascinated by a
culture's configuration, its integrative pattern:
Mead
simply took Boas to a logical extension.
Boas studied a culture in regional historical context to see how it
emerged as a distinctive entity; Mead studied the socialization of
individuals to see/show how their society maintained and reproduced its
distinctiveness. With Mead, such a
culture concept was put together with the "personality" concept from
psychology (especially Freudian psychology). The search for patterns became more
interior in seeking for the psychological patterns shaping culture. The transmission of culture
became intriguing and problematic. Socialization
or enculturation became the mediating concept, and was roughly parallel
to ritual in British structural-functionalism. In this, Mead was influenced by both
Abraham Kardiner and Ruth Benedict.
Note
that here we have the puzzle of Mead's rhetoric. She emphasizes the simplicity of
small non-Western societies; she writes, for instance, in Sex and
Temperament that "here we have the drama of civilization writ
small, a social microcosm alike in kind, but different in size and magnitude,
from the complex social structures of people who, like our own, depend upon a
written tradition and upon the integration of a great number of conflicting
historical traditions."
The puzzle is just how these societies can be "simpler" than
ours, but equally "complex"?
This
is not to exaggerate the similarities between the two. Consider Mead's chosen role as
spokesperson for and popularizer of the discipline to mainstream America (and
the criticisms of her colleagues that she was not an original thinker or
theorist). Mead did choose an
opposite career location from Boas.
Whereas Boas gave up his museum primary appointment to locate himself
and anthropology within the university department, Mead returned to the
museum—indeed, Boas's museum, the American Museum of Natural History!—and from
her tower office engaged a far wider canvas than Boas. She lectured and testified and discussed
and counseled and refused to be contained by the structures of the academic
calendar and the obligations of university professors. This was to cause her no little
ill-feeling among her peers, who were suspicious of her popularizing.
Stephen
Toulmin expresses a common judgment: "For her ideas Mead relied largely
on teachers and colleagues like Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, and Gregory
Bateson. Historians will not
celebrate her for any important new conceptions of her own. She never did as much for the
improvement of the human sciences as she did for their advancement; and that,
after all, is what she herself had aimed for. She was the Bacon of anthropology, not
the Newton. As a public speaker, as
an active participant in the AAAS, as an impresario of countless stimulating
public conferences, she threw herself into the task of opening America's eyes
to the diversity of cultures, and everything else that followed from that
momentous fact." [in his short piece on "The Evolution of Margaret
Mead," NYRB c. 1984].
E-P
was more caustic, dismissing Mead's writing as belonging to the "rustling-of-the-wind-in-the-palm-trees
school" (Social Anthropology, p. 96; see also Behar
1993:311)! This unsympathetic view
was certainly the judgment that I was taught in graduate school in the 1970s,
but I have come to a more rounded appreciation of Mead's contributions in
American anthropology. In
particular, I think she had a rather more subtle view of the relationship of
individual and culture than she is sometimes given credit for. "Culture is not just the individual
writ large"; culture shapes the infant and child in common but particular
ways. Humans learn to be humans
through and within a culture, but humans of very distinctive sorts. The interaction of culture and
individual is a dynamic and mutual process. Jerry Moore sums up Mead's place among
the central Boasian thematic:
"Like
her colleagues Kroeber, Benedict, and Sapir, Mead attempted to discover what it
was that made cultures distinctive but coherent. How is it that human societies can be so
incredibly different, not just on the surface but at their very cores, and yet
within a particular society there can be such unanimity as to values and
practices? For the Victorian
evolutionists, the answer was easy:
societies were so different because they represented stages in the
'nearly uniform channels' of human progress. The Boasian critique demolished that
easy answer, yet put nothing in its place; the best Boas could suggest was to
keep collecting good ethnographic data and some day, perhaps, the laws of human
culture would be evident.
"But
that apparently did not satisfy Boas' students, at least not Kroeber, Sapir,
Benedict, and Mead. Each sought a
different way to explain the coherency of culture: Kroeber turned to the
superorganic, Benedict to the core values of culture, Sapir and Whorf to the
conceptual categories embedded in language, and Margaret Mead to the processes
of human development: the way an infant is bathed, the shared intimacies of
husband and wife, or the small gestures that teach a child its place in the
world." (Moore
1996:110)
VI.
Defrocking a saint: the Mead-Freeman
controversies
A. Derek Freeman's attacks
on Coming of Age in Samoa
We are here
dealing with one of the most spectacular events of the intellectual history of
the 20th century.
Margaret Mead, as we know, was grossly hoaxed by her Samoan informants,
and Mead in her turn, by convincing others of the 'genuineness' of her account
of Samoa, completely misinformed, and misled virtually the entire
anthropological establishment, as well as the intelligentsia at largec That a
Polynesian prank should have produced such a result in centers of higher
learning throughout the Western world is deeply comic. But behind the comedy there is a
chastening reality. It is now
apparent that for decade after decade in countless textbooks, and in university
and college lecture rooms throughout the Western world, students were
misinformed about an issue of fundamental importance, by professors who by
placing credence in Mead's conclusion of 1928 had themselves become cognitively
deluded. Never can giggly fibs have
had such far-reaching consequences in the groves of Academe. (Derek Freeman, "Paradigms in
Collision," Skeptic 5(3):68 [1997])
The continuing
attack by Derek Freeman on Mead's Samoan research is actually only one--albeit
the most sustained and divisive--of a number of controversies in post-Boasian
American anthropology that have been prompted by restudies. See, for instance,
the final sections of George Stocking's essay on "The Ethnographic
Sensibilities of the 1920s," where he relates how all three of his
Apollonian exemplars came under attack. Ruth Benedict's Zuni work was roundly
criticized in restudies by Ester Goldfrank, Li An-che,
and John W. Bennett (Stocking 319-321); Robert Redfield's Tepotzlan
village was restudied by Oscar Lewis (ibid. 322-325), who painted a very
different picture of local social relations and community ethos; and Margaret
Mead's first fieldwork on Samoa was the last to draw fire, from Freeman (ibid.:
325-341). [Note too that other
ethnographic exemplars have also generated contentious restudies, including the
Yanomamö and the !Kung San.]
Derek
Freeman, a New Zealander, had worked in Western (British) Samoa from 1939-1943
and again in 1965-1967. He had
begun anthropology with Raymond Firth at LSE after the war; he fell out with
Firth and switched to Cambridge and worked with Meyer Fortes. He took his Ph.D. in 1953 with work on
the Iban in Borneo. By 1955 he had
a position at Australian National University (see Appell and Madan 1988). As Stocking
details (1992:327), Freeman underwent something of an intellectual conversion
in the early 1960s towards a "naturalistic" view of anthropological
science, embracing Karl Popper, studying ethology under Konrad Lorenz and
undertaking a year's training at London Institute of Psychoanalysis. He rejected cultural determinism.
Rereading
Mead on his way home from London to Australia in 1964, he realized the depth of
his disagreement with her anti-biological reasoning and decided to reexamine
her evidence. He went back to his
site in 1965 and to Tu'a in 1967. Stocking notes that Freeman submitted a
proposal in 1971, but decided on further research in light of sharply negative
reactions from reviewers. He sent
Mead one of his papers in 1978, but she was already in her final illness; after
her death, he says he decided to wait "a decent interval" (and for
further documents from the American Samoa archives) before sending off the
manuscript. [Note that George
Stocking was a reviewer of Freeman's book manuscript for Harvard University Press.]
Freeman
charged that Mead had been naive in ignoring the local political
situation and in thinking she had found a "tropical Eden"; she was methodologically
incompetent in having poor Samoan language ability and in limiting her interviewing
to adolescent females; and she was theoretically dishonest in going with
a prior commitment to "refuting biological explanations of human
behavior and vindicating the doctrines of the Boasian school"
(1983:282). Consequently she
ignored evidence that ran counter to her pre-conceived aims.
Freeman
charged, thus, that Mead was ethnographically wrong. Samoans were highly
competitive for status, aggressive in personal relations, brittle, sexually
hung-up, and strongly passionate.
Children were subject to strict discipline. They emphasized a cult of
virginity, not sexual permissiveness; combined with male aggressiveness, this
produced one of the world's highest incidences of rape. And theoretically, Freeman emphasized
what he claimed Mead had downplayed—the biological factors underlying
human behavior
Many aspects of
this spat are highly charged.
Freeman was, and remains, blunt and vitriolic, but he published his book
only after Mead had died (although he had had the materials since at least the
1960s). There is some irony in the
defense of anthropology's most well-known and, to the public,
most beloved figure by a discipline that had itself long regarded her with much
ambivalence. Moreover, Freeman's
book came out during a decade of nervous self-reflection about a crisis of
ethnography and representation—and at a time in which sociobiology was making
inroads in anthropology. Thus it is
difficult to separate the personalities and conduct of the debate; the
questions about research design and fieldwork competence; and the theoretical
issues of biology and culture.
B. Who is right?
The debate of
the merits of Freeman's case has been heated and convoluted, and there is no
consensus view within the discipline.
There are now at least two thick readers that reprint papers on the
controversy. Nancy Scheper-Hughes,
to take just one of the tens of anthropologists who have weighed in, has
observed that Freeman was wrong in attributing Mead's principal influence as Boas—e.g.,
his insinuation that she "needed" to please her fatherly mentor. Benedict, she feels, was a much more
powerful mentor.
In a sense,
though, she thinks they're both are right—about Samoa. She cites another ethnographer of Samoa,
Bradd Shore, on the contradictory tendencies of Samoan culture, the
"mysteries" as he puts it, by which there can be a strong cult of
virginity, which nonetheless many adolescents reject and avoid. He also suggests a "temporal
double-standard," a formal daytime morality and a more free-wheeling
nighttime morality, suggesting a distinction between public ideology and
private belief. We can expect these
differing results as a function of the ethnographer's position. Freeman went as an older male and
primarily talked to the chiefs, Mead as a young unmarried woman.
Scheper-Hughes
also thinks that the weight of scholarly opinion finds Freeman more right about
Samoan aggression and Mead more correct about Samoan sexuality. Perhaps, S-H suggests, both Mead
and Freeman err in presuming that culture must be about one tendency, a single ethos, under which all aspects of
"Samoan" culture must fit into a single tight pattern. [The difference is that Mead later
realized that-and also gave up talk about hypothesis testing and societies as
laboratories, but Freeman still insists on an either/or and on anthropology as
positivistic science.]
Mead resisted
later requests (from Americans and Samoans alike) to do a restudy (see her 1973
Preface). I suspect this was due to
her ongoing commitment to Manus and to her knowledge that with Holmes and
Freeman, any restudy was bound to be caught up in controversy, with the
object/subjects themselves lost in the fray.
The controversy
will not end soon. In the fall of
1998, Freeman published a second book of charges that both revises and extends
his earlier volume. If time, I'll
talk some about this new line of argument.