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Three Boasian Women:
Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict,
and Ruth Landes
GERALD SULLIVAN
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Ruth Benedict, and Ruth Landes, Reviews in Anthropology, 37:2-3, 201-230
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THREE BOASIAN WOMEN: MARGARET MEAD,
RUTH BENEDICT, AND RUTH LANDES
Gerald Sullivan
Banner, Lois W. Intertwined Lives: Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict and Their
Circle. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003. 540 pp.
Caffrey, Margaret M. and Patricia A. Francis. To Cherish the Life of the
World: Selected Letters of Margaret Mead. New York: Basic Books,
2006. 429 pp.
Cole, Sally. Ruth Landes: A Life in Anthropology. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 2003. 298 pp.
Molloy, Maureen A. On Creating a Usable Culture: Margaret Mead and
the Emergence of American Cosmopolitanism. Honolulu: University
of Hawai‘i Press, 2008. 224 pp.
Young, Virginia Heyer. Ruth Benedict: Beyond Relativity, Beyond Pattern.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. 382 pp.
Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Ruth Landes each made significant
contributions to American anthropology that have been obscured by
enemies and by time. Recent reappraisals of their work suggest that these
women and their ideas are of much more than antiquarian interest. They
GERALD SULLIVAN is Professor of Anthropology and Archaeology at Collin
College. He graduated from The George Washington University in 1981 and
received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Virginia in 1998. In
1999, The University of Chicago Press published his book, Margaret Mead,
Gregory Bateson and Highland Bali: Fieldwork Photographs of Bayung
Gede´, 1936–1939. His work has also appeared in edited volumes, journal
numbers, and standard reference works. He is currently working on a second
book on Mead and Bateson’s scientific project.
Address correspondence to Gerald Sullivan, Collin College, 9700 Wade Blvd., Frisco, TX,
USA. E-mail: gsullivan@ccccd.edu
Reviews in Anthropology, 37: 201–230, 2008
Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 0093-8157 print=1556-3014 online
DOI: 10.1080/00938150802038950
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either prefigured or provided sophisticated visions on a variety of issues
including processes of embodiment, cultural selection, and improvisation
in the face of power. A reexamination of these women’s work and times
may yet provide anthropology with a cautionary yet useful past as well as
revivify the greater Boasian project.
Keywords: Benedict, cultural selection, deviance biology, improvisation,
landes, mead
SETTING THE STAGE
Between 1921 and 1940 the Anthropology Department at Columbia
University awarded 39 doctorates: 20 to men and 19 to women (Cole
2003:259 n6). No other department came close to this remarkable
feat; the University of Chicago, for example, granted only one doctorate
to a woman in those years, while Berkeley’s best-known female
student of the era, Cora du Bois, was a refugee from Columbia. The
books under review here concern three of the Columbia women: Ruth
Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Landes.
If one were to attend solely to the celebrity of Benedict and Mead,
one might conclude from this rate of degree completion that the
second-generation Boasian women were prominent and influential
within the discipline. Benedict, granted, taught at Columbia from the
early 1920s until her death in 1948; her students, among them
Mead, Landes, Eric R. Wolf, Sidney Mintz, Stanley Diamond, Victor
Barnouw, and one of our authors, Virginia Heyer Young, were
comparatively many and often enough prominent. Mead was continually
employed, but at the American Museum of Natural
History, rather than in an academic department; she did not teach
regularly, as far as I know, until the 1950s. Landes was for many
years employed sporadically, in ways that would be familiar to many
an adjunct or visiting professor working on a short-term contract,
before finally entering into permanent employment, which she thought
of as exile, at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
(Cole 2003:237ff). Like Landes, most of the second-generation
Boasian women were among the itinerant or underemployed for a
good number of years; male students, especially married men, fared
differently.
Benedict’s and Mead’s work included prominent books that
brought them to the attention of a broad public—and some scorn
within the academy—as well as many pieces written for specialist
audiences. Several of these books, for example: Coming of Age in
Samoa (Mead 1928), Patterns of Culture (Benedict 1934), Sex and
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Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (Mead 1935), and The
Chrysanthemum and the Sword (Benedict 1946), have been in print
more or less continually since their initial publication. For all the
publicity, Mead’s and Benedict’s ideas have not necessarily been well
understood within the discipline and, in my view, have been in some
significant cases unfairly attacked, at times for personal rather than
intellectual reasons.
I am not thinking here solely or even mostly about the so-called
Mead-Freeman debate. In 1983, Derek Freeman of the Australian
National University published Margaret Mead and Samoa: The
Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth. In this book,
Freeman made two sorts of arguments. First, in response to the
eugenicists, Franz Boas turned against all forms of biological
explanation. Mead, Boas’s student, followed her teacher, producing
in 1928 just the sort of argument Boas sought. The storms and
stresses of adolescence were not so much biological as cultural artifacts,
common among American but not among Samoan adolescent
girls. Second, according to Freeman, Mead was wrong both about
the Samoan ethnography and, along with Boas, about the preeminence
of cultural over biological explanations for much of human
behavior. In 1999, Freeman extended his argument claiming that
Mead had been hoaxed while working in Samoa by two of her
interlocutors. A young and naive Mead believed as she had been told
that Samoan adolescents enjoyed a life of casual sexual encounters.
By 1999, Freeman’s claims had long drawn serious scholarly
attention (see for example, Feinberg 1988; Coˆte´ 1994; Orans 1996;
Shankman 1996), much of it showing Freeman to have been a sloppy
and sometimes also a dishonest scholar. Nonetheless, Freeman is
often cited by those who wish to use Mead as an easily dismissed
stand-in for anthropology generally and especially for the argument
that culture’s powers are integral to human nature. The MeadFreeman
debate, therefore, is not without its importance outside the
discipline. Within anthropology, this debate stimulated a renewed
interest in Mead and perhaps in the history of anthropology as an
important part of anthropology yet again.
Rather than Freeman, however, I am primarily thinking about
enemies, detractors and simplifiers of argument. Darnell’s (2001:10)
characterization of Columbia and the Boasian communities as a
‘‘feminist haven’’ is ambiguous at best and on occasion they were
more poisonous than merely disagreeable. Mead and Benedict had
enemies, powerful and longstanding ones, within American anthropology,
notably a circle that formed around Edward Sapir. Despite
significant and obvious differences between them, Sapir (1994:181)
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began to treat Benedict and Mead as if they were interchangeable. A
criticism of one of them, whether appropriate or not, could be tendered
against the other without further scholarly efforts. At times this
sort of lumping of Mead and Benedict together has been undertaken
on the basis of partial use of secondary sources (e.g., Fischer
2001:xxii).
Landes, too, wrote innovative books, among them The Ojibwa
Woman of 1938 and The City of Women of 1947, both of which were
republished during the 1990s and are now available again in editions
with introductions written by Sally Cole, Landes’s biographer; these
books deserve a wider and appreciative audience. Much of Landes’s
work, however, was not published until decades after the research
and writing was completed. Reviewed by younger scholars raised in a
different era of anthropology, her books on Ojibwa religion, the
Sioux of Mystic Lake, Minnesota, and the Potawamoni of Kansas all
appeared dated when they were finally published in the late 1960s and
early 1970s. Landes, like Mead and Benedict, had enemies within
American anthropology and elsewhere, notably in Landes’s case,
Melville Herskovits.
Benedict, Landes, and Mead all knew each other, but this should
not be taken to mean that they agreed. Despite their disagreements,
between them they raised matters concerning relations between
wholes and their parts; cultural selection; living with and within
myth; the unity and diversity of a single human species; how we
become the sorts of people we become; gender; power as well as
human resilience, innovation, and fragility. Between the efforts of
their enemies and the passage of time, these women and their work
have frequently become more honored than read. Hence their very
real contributions to anthropology’s grappling with enduring issues
have too often been obscured or even forgotten altogether, passed by
as others pursued the fetishes of recent research and more recent
vocabularies. Rereading these women’s books is not so much an
antiquarian exercise as a voyage of rediscovery of these matters,
which often enough Benedict, Mead, and Landes were among
the first, when not the very first, to broach in anthropology.
Reexamining their discussions may well help provide continued
coherence to American anthropology’s project comprised of four, or
five, interpenetrating sub-disciplines.
Two of the books under review here, Sally Cole’s on Landes and
Virginia Young’s on Benedict, appear as part of the expanding series
of critical studies in the history of anthropology, edited by Regna
Darnell and Stephen O. Murray and published by the University of
Nebraska Press. As a set of biographies and commentaries upon
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anthropologists by anthropologists, the series is an important,
if sometimes uneven, contribution to anthropology’s ongoing
reintegration of its past.
The centennial of Mead’s birth, celebrated with, among other
honors, two days worth of presidentially invited sessions at the
American Anthropological Associations meetings in Washington,
DC, in 2001, has also contributed to this reintegration of anthropology’s
past. The other three books under review here—Lois
Banner’s book on Benedict, Mead, and their circle in New York;
Margaret Caffrey and Patricia Francis’s selection of Mead’s letters;
as well as Molloy’s examination of Mead’s relation to Sapir and
several prominent New York intellectuals—are all contributions to a
revived interest in Mead and in her voluminous archives.
BEGINNING WITH BANNER
Lois Banner’s book (2003) was the first to appear after nearly all of
Margaret Mead’s papers became available for scholarly study at the
Library of Congress in November 2001. The book is an event of note,
for this if for no other reason. Banner, an historian at the University
of Southern California, has also examined materials in other archives
pertinent for the study of Benedict and Mead. The book ends rather
abruptly with Benedict’s death in 1948; Mead would live on for just
over three decades, dying in 1978. Of ‘‘their circle’’ between these
deaths, Banner wrote almost nothing.
Mead and Benedict are generally understood as having jointly
developed the so-called ‘‘culture and personality’’ or ‘‘configurationist’’
school of American anthropology. Often mythologized, their
work prefigured American engagements with semiotics and structuralism
as well as introduced the analysis of gender. Benedict in
particular deserves credit for developing a notion of cultural selection
to which I shall return below. Mead, perhaps the greatest student
Sapir did not want, developed a range of then largely unprecedented
methods to study individuals in culture, a notion Mead took from
Sapir (Sullivan 2005); she also understood psychology to arise in the
interactions of specific persons (Sullivan n.d.). Finally, along with
Gregory Bateson, her third husband, Mead developed her so-called
theory of the squares, a properly morphological theory, which
understood personality to arise and be reproduced in the ongoing
processes conjoining biological, hence psychological, disposition
(temperament), the accidents of life, culture, and the person’s
response to all of these (see Sullivan 2004a, 2004b, 2005, n.d.).
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Benedict and Mead were colleagues, friends and, at least early in
their relationship, lovers. Banner uses this latter element to develop a
pattern of emphasis upon homosexuality that, I suggest, should be
regarded as both a strength and a weakness of her book. For
example, well into the book, Banner (2003:349) wrote, ‘‘[W]hat
interests me about the Hanover Conference [of 1934] is a packet of
background materials for it on the subject of homosexuality, prepared
by Lura Beam, a well known sex researcher.’’ Banner says little
about these materials (her discussion is a paragraph long). To my
knowledge, this is the only place in her book where Banner used the
first person, rather than the ostensibly more inclusive ‘‘one.’’ The
Hanover Conference was Mead’s introduction to big-time interdisciplinary
social science. At this particular conference, Lawrence
Kelso Frank of the Rockefeller Foundation’s General Education
Division brought together a number of representatives of various
disciplines to work on an outline for researching the problem of the
relation between personality and culture. Mead wrote much but not
all of Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935) while
at the conference.
If what interests Banner throughout the book, and not just about
the interdisciplinary Hanover conference, is homosexuality; what
interested Mead while she was at the conference, at least enough to
write Bateson about it, Banner tells us, was a packet of materials put
together by Earl Engle of Columbia University’s Medical School.
Engle summarized then current research on hormones and so-called
constitutional types. Banner devotes two paragraphs to this, but does
not develop much further her suggestion that Engle’s exposition on
hormones and constitutional types had much connection to Mead’s
developing notion of gender (cf. Banner 2003:349ff, 402) or her
long-standing interest in the processes of human development. Nor
does Banner take up Mead’s subsequent 1935 meeting with C. H.
Waddington or Mead’s interest in Waddington’s emphasis upon
phenotypic development (see Waddington 1935, 1940). Granted,
Mead did not take up hormones or embryology directly in Sex and
Temperament, but that book does describe the formally similar
matter, as Bateson would have it, of divergent developmental
sequences in three cultural environments.
There is no question that Mead and Benedict engaged for
extended periods of their lives in serious, though not always
exclusive, same-sex relationships. Both women also wrote about
homosexuality. Banner hopes to show some formative or generative
relationship between Mead and Benedict’s same-sex relationships
and their scientific endeavors. To this end, Banner explores
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changing ideas about girls’ friendships between the 1880s (when
Benedict was born) and the 1920s (when Mead graduated from
college), as well as Mead and Benedict’s childhoods—to the extent
these can be known. This discussion of their childhoods remains
necessarily, even to my mind, annoyingly speculative. Many things
might have or might not have happened, but the limitations of the
available records mean we can know little about, say, Benedict’s
relations with her grandfather; we can not know one way or the
other whether this man molested his granddaughter, a possibility
that Banner (2003:59) suggests ‘‘can’t be ignored.’’ This is perhaps
the most obvious, even egregious, example of Banner’s speculation,
but it is not the only example. The word ‘‘might,’’ merely suggesting
possibility, appears frequently in the early portion of the book.
There is little or no reason to doubt, however, that Benedict’s father
died early, that she saw his body laid out, that her mother went into
lifelong mourning, that Benedict was fairly deaf from an early age,
that she found the sorts of activities deemed suitable for young,
intelligent women stultifying, that her marriage was not a great
success, and so forth, all of which could lead an intelligent person to
depression over the years.
We can know more about Benedict and Mead’s young adulthoods
in the era after they and those in their circle began writing letters or
keeping journals, or later, writing memoirs. Some of this material is
interesting; they were part of a vibrant New York-based world of
poets and intellectuals. Some instances are probably less interesting,
for example, that Mead’s first husband, Luther Cressman, showed
Mead’s friend, Marie Eichelberger, his penis because she asked to see
it as she had never seen one before (Banner 2003:221).
Banner also takes up Mead and Benedict’s relations with other
anthropologists, notably Sapir. For a time Benedict and Sapir
exchanged poetry; she was often around when Sapir and his young
children visited New York. Mead and Sapir had a short-lived but
fateful affair while Mead was married to Cressman. Sapir wanted
Mead to leave Cressman for a marriage to Sapir and a life raising his
children. Mead, however, wanted to go to Samoa, a fieldtrip that
Sapir tried to stop but which Mead, knowing Sapir had tried to do so,
undertook anyway. Relations between Sapir on the one hand and
Mead as well as Benedict on the other soured further, especially after
Sapir attacked Mead by name as incompetent in his New Republic
review of Franz Boas’s (1928) Anthropology and Modern Life and
published an essay on the then New Woman, which contained only
somewhat veiled personal criticisms of Mead and Benedict (Banner
2003: 280ff, 498 n108).
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Sapir, perhaps the most intelligent and accomplished of the first
generation of Boas’s students, was a formidable enemy in what was
still a very small community. In the late 1930s, after Benedict’s
Patterns of Culture was published, Sapir (1994:181ff ) used his Yale
seminar on the psychology of culture to launch an assault on
Benedict in particular and, by extension, Mead, arguing that psychology
only arises in encounters between persons. Against Mead,
this assault was at best ill-founded (Sullivan n.d.). That Sapir ([1933]
1949) held that phonemes have psychological reality for the speakers
of languages, his assault against Benedict, with her interest in the
patterns of events, myths, and ceremonies, seems at best mostly odd.
If phomemes are psychologically real for speakers, would not myths
be psychologically real for those who live with and within them? It
fell to Clyde Kluckhohn (1941:117) to defend Benedict in the Sapir
memorial volume. But by then, those of Sapir’s younger colleagues
who had organized the memorial volume—Leslie Spier, Irving Hallowell
and Stanley Newman—‘‘did not see Mead as relevant to
Sapir’s work or close to him personally’’ (Darnell 1990 429, n7).
Mead went undefended.
Banner’s account is convincing not so much about these scholarly
disputes as about Sapir’s palpable disapproval of the sorts of sexual
arrangements Mead and Benedict found congenial, to use a
Benedictine term. Mead and Benedict worried about scandal; their
knowledge of his disapproval no doubt contributed to their discretion.
Banner makes this last point, but Molloy (2008) extends it in her
observations concerning the ways in which Gregory Bateson,
Benedict, and Mead all went about the business of isolating Reo
Fortune through tales told about Fortune’s conduct on the Sepik in
1933 in order to protect Mead’s career. Perhaps they did so, but then
perhaps not.
To the extent that she reminds us that a people’s questions arise
from the fabric of their lives, Banner succeeds. The experience of
knowing one’s own actions will lead to trouble because others know
or because others would disapprove, along with one’s consequently
wearing a mask, has proved both chilling and enlightening for
many—Bateson, Benedict, and Mead included no doubt. This sort of
experience gave their attention to what Mead and Benedict called
‘‘deviance’’ real depth.
DEVIANCE, THE FIRST TIME, OR BANNER CONTINUED
For the moment let me note that some (e.g., Roscoe 2003) have
suggested that deviance is just a catch-all category for things that do
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not fit a Meadean or Benedictine over-interpretation of the patterns
of events, myths and ceremonies. This criticism would seem to accord
well with the notion that Mead and Benedict were each in their own
way cultural determinists of a rather naive sort. Mead and Benedict
were both more than enough interested in what we would now call
‘‘human agency’’ for this criticism to need some rethinking. Whatever
the quality of their analysis of various cultural patterns, Benedict and
Mead were interested in lives lived in and against the shadows of
those variable patterns at least from the time they began discussing
Mead’s Samoan researches. Mead credited Benedict with teaching
her to ask this sort of question. According to a more mature Mead
(1959:206), she and Benedict ‘‘spent hours discussing how a given
temperamental approach to living could so come to dominate a
culture that all who were born in it would become the willing or
unwilling heirs to that view of the world.’’
Deviance, as this notion appears in chapter nine, entitled ‘‘The Girl
in Conflict,’’ of Coming of Age in Samoa (Mead 1928:158) was a sign
that, at least in Benedict and Mead’s emerging thought, culture
would not so much be overdetermined and overdetermining as that
cultural forces (wholes) give shape to the meanings of behaviors,
events, and emotions (parts). Deviance, so understood, foreshadows
Benedict’s explorations ‘‘beyond pattern, beyond relativity’’ as
Young (2005) would have it. It also begs the question of why so few
care to unpack the trope of culture as ‘‘personality writ large’’ and
why rather many commentators have treated this trope as if it were
transparent.
Mead was a prolific and innovative ethnographer (see Sanjek
1990:215ff ), undertaking field researches in Samoa, Manus, among
the Omaha, Arapesh, Mundugumour, Tchambuli, Balinese, and
Iatmul before joining Benedict in the post-World-War-II ‘‘culture at
a distance’’ work. Benedict, as Young (2005) points out, was among,
if not, the first to transform diffusionist attempts at culture history
into comparative studies of cultural integration and disintegration.
Whatever the sources of their questions, Mead and Benedict
addressed those questions to particular ethnographic materials and
cultural worlds. Banner is much less sure when she comes to consider
such materials and worlds. An historian rather than an anthropologist
or a social theorist, Banner has read a good deal of anthropology.
Nonetheless, her accounts of anthropological ideas are oddly flat.
Her sense of how ethnographic factoids come together in the patterns
of cultural life at times confuses the important and the trivial, as
perhaps with the incident between Cressman and Eichelberger
alluded to above; those who want greater ethnographic and
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theoretical sureness should consult Molloy (2008) and, especially,
Young (2005).
This is perhaps clearest in the chapters Banner devotes to the years in
which Patterns of Culture and Sex and Temperament were written.
Relentlessly comparative in a style no longer, if ever, common, these
books will always raise questions for those who desire ethnographic
accuracyinallthingsaboveallelse,whateverethnographicaccuracymay
be, given the inevitably recursive nature of anthropological knowledge.
Being able to find fault with Mead’s ethnography might simply mean
that Marshall Sahlins, as myth would have it, is right to have considered
that inevitably we are all proved wrong, and that happiness is dying
before some young soul does so prove. No other anthropologist’s
ethnography has been so relentlessly critiqued as Mead’s; few
other anthropologists could survive such critique. On the other hand,
any anthropologist unable to find fault with Mead and Benedict’s
ethnographic analyses might not be the brightest button in the box.
But finding fault or not finding fault with Benedict’s and Mead’s
ethnography may also be beside the point. In Patterns of Culture,
Benedict uses ethnographic examples, no matter how badly drawn, to
set out a theory of cultural selection, analogous in its operations to
Charles Darwin’s ideas of natural and sexual selection; Benedict used
the word ‘‘selected’’ repeatedly to describe a cultural choice to borrow
some but not other traits as these traits diffused across a culture
area and a further choice of how to adapt those chosen traits to some
specific cultural purpose perhaps different from the purposes to
which others had put that particular trait. But despite this very
explicit argument, many are and have been drawn solely to her figure
of the arc of human possibilities. In Sex and Temperament, Mead
announced not just a notion of gender but implicitly (for Mead never
published her theory of the squares) an approach to the question of
the unity and diversity of our single human species, the processes ‘‘by
which . . . living persons . . . embody . . . culture’’ (Bateson and Mead
1942:xii; cf. Csordas 1995) and to the agency of children (cf.
Hirschfeld 2002:616ff). These were brave books written by brave
women, read, if badly, by many. These books were not read by those
many because the authors of these books were sometime or even
predominantly lesbian; many have found same-sex relationships
congenial, but only two such persons were either Benedict or Mead.
MOLLOY AND THE PROBLEM OF AMERICAN CULTURE
Maureen Molloy, an anthropologist and Professor of Women’s
Studies at Auckland University in New Zealand, makes a similar
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point about Banner’s analysis, noting with Michel Foucault that
sexuality has in the twentienth-century West often been taken to be a
privileged truth of life. For Molloy (2008), Mead, who acted as
educator, contributed to this sense of sexuality as truth of life. Mead’s
role in this becomes then a legitimate object of study.
Molloy also takes issue with Micaela di Leonardo’s (1998) characterization
of Mead, contending that di Leonardo’s excoriation of
Mead leaves her or other readers wondering if understanding Mead
anthropologically would require placing Mead in her time and place
as much as finding her an agent (morally deficient or otherwise) of
the American imperium. Rather than following either Banner’s or di
Leonardo’s lead, Molloy situates Mead in the world of New York
intellectuals and small magazines such as The New Republic, Seven
Arts, Atlantic Monthly, The Dial, and a host of others. Mead learned
to read such magazines from her father; she asked that copies of those
I have listed, and many others, be sent to her in the field.
These intellectuals, men like Herbert Croly, Van Wyck Brooks,
and Randolph Bourne, sought to diagnose a particular malaise. As
the United States became more prominent among the powers of the
West, how might Americans bring into being a culture worthy of such
prominence? As the population of the United States became more
urban, how could Americans make of that culture something authentic,
‘‘genuine’’ in Sapir’s (1924) terms, not just of the place but also
for its people, especially the intellectuals? How could they bring
themselves into alignment with their milieu and their milieu into
alignment with themselves? Part of this crisis, Molloy tells us, was a
crisis of masculinity for the high arts were not a realm of action and
were in that sense, for these men according to Molloy, effete or
feminine.
Molloy charts the relations between many of these intellectuals and
the circle of anthropologists around Boas. This is not, then, a question
of ideas being in the air; these sorts of ideas were prominent in
the very circles in which a young Mead and a somewhat older
Benedict moved. Molloy has in mind a deep similarity between
Croly’s and Brooks’s dream of a society in which the individual
develops into a miniaturized version of the nation while the nation
assumes characteristics of the individual, and an analogy drawn by
Mead and Benedict in which culture is ‘‘personality writ large’’ and
by implication, personality is culture writ small. The scare quotes are
Mead’s (1959:206); in Benedict’s (1932:12) original version, one finds
not only clear differences of time and scale between cultures and
persons, but also only a tendency toward, not an inevitable, internal
coherence.
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Having situated Mead in this world of intellectuals and small
magazines, Molloy then turns to four of Mead’s ethnographies:
Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), Growing Up in New Guinea (1930),
The Changing Culture of an Indian Tribe (1932), and Sex and
Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935). The first, second,
and fourth of these books were popular successes published by
William Morrow. Morrow asked Mead to use materials from some of
her public lectures to draw out the lessons for Americans to be found
in her description of Samoan female adolescence; with those final
chapters, Mead launched a career as commentator and public intellectual.
The third book, Mead’s only venture into the ethnography of
North America, and far less well known than the others, was brought
out by Columbia University Press. These books are not technical in
the fashion of Mead’s Kinship in the Admiralty Islands (1934), itself
written in response to professional criticisms. The four books Molloy
focuses on all display a flair, an accessible, even popular style, a
breadth of generalization, and a mass of detail.
In four chapters, each devoted to one of Mead’s books, Molloy
discusses Mead’s fieldwork; she thinks, on the basis of Mead’s notes,
that Mead was a better fieldworker than her books might lead others
to suppose, though Molloy is apparently not as impressed by Mead’s
methodological innovations as Sanjek (1990:215ff ). Molloy touches
on the ways, beginning with Mead and Fortune’s trip to Manus, that
Mead collaborated with another and divided labor both in the field
and subsequently in the writing. She also takes up the reviews Mead’s
four books received. The three books brought out by Morrow
received good, even excellent, reviews in the popular press and small
magazines; they fared less well in the scholarly journals, with opinion
being mixed—some like Benedict being very supportive and others
being quite disparaging. Mead took the bad reviews hard. Molloy
suggests that it is possible Mead and Fortune’s marriage began to
suffer when she found it necessary to write Kinship in the Admiralty
Islands, thereby changing the division of labor between herself and
Fortune.
The Changing Culture of an Indian Tribe fared quite differently,
receiving good reviews in the academic press. However, without
Morrow’s expertise, this book received less publicity and slowly
faded even from professional view, except perhaps among North
Americanists, though it does not appear in Darnell’s (2001) bibliography.
Mead certainly did not write the sorts of popular pieces to
go along with it that she wrote, for example, to accompany Balinese
Character (Bateson and Mead 1942; see, for example, Mead 1939).
Nor did she write the sorts of chapters that discussed the implications
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for American life—how to ameliorate the tendencies towards stormy
adolescent or how to educate America’s young—that brought Mead’s
ethnography out of the exotic distance and made it pragmatic.
Molloy contends, and with good reason, that this book also came too
close to America’s internal empire in a time of Depression, even if
Mead’s history of the Omaha could have been better.
At this point Molloy’s account again incorporates yet another
theme she has been developing, that is, the relative shortness of the
Progressive era, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, and the
persistent problem of race—understood not just as a matter of white
folks over and against blacks and Amerindians, but also nativists
opposed to immigrants, for example Italians. Molloy is thinking not
just of the Italians of Hammonton, New Jersey—the subject of studies
by both Mead’s mother and of Mead’s Master’s thesis—but also
of Sacco and Vanzetti. Molloy is also thinking of another element of
Mead’s thought, which she contends appears explicitly for the first
time in The Changing Culture of an Indian Tribe: biology.
BIOLOGY AND DEVIANCE
Molloy’s Mead begins as a cultural determinist in Coming of Age in
Samoa. Mead’s Samoans, according to Molloy, remain a people
without history, a people whose temperaments are at ease with their
cultural surroundings, a people and place undamaged by their
encounter with the colonial powers; such an account of Samoa
accorded well with the dreams of the New York intellectuals. Over
the next seven years, Molloy’s Mead evolved into someone who
increasingly found culture oppressive. This process is not yet
apparent in Growing Up in New Guinea, but rather emerges in The
Changing Culture of an Indian Tribe and reaches a full expression in
a book that Molloy thinks is primarily about deviance: Sex and
Temperament in Three Primitive Societies.
All during this process, Mead was acutely aware of the milieu of
New York intellectuals. Towards her wider readership, she took the
position of educator, but an educator who tailored her lessons to that
audience and its changing concerns as prosperity gave way to harder
times. Because she tailored her lessons, Molloy considered that Mead
let both her audience and herself down.
But that is only part of Molloy’s tale. Throughout this period,
according to Molloy, Mead considered any given culture as an isolated
set of traits, traits that nonetheless can be separated from the set
to which they previously belonged. Given this view, Molloy tracks
what she takes to be Mead’s changing valuation of culture from
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benign (Samoa) to oppressive (Omaha, Mundugumour). Molloy
contends that Mead’s thought lacked a theory of change from within
and without and that Mead was, therefore, ironically unable to
account for rage and desire within the confines of her initial cultural
determinism. It follows that Mead had to look elsewhere—outside of
culture—to biology. This is a provocative thesis with much to be said
for it, if also a bit overdrawn.
Mead’s Samoa was more idyllic in the versions it took in the
reviews found in the popular press that Mead’s own text, especially
chapter nine, ‘‘The Girl in Conflict,’’ really allows for. That chapter
begins, ‘‘Were there no conflicts, no temperaments which deviated so
markedly from the normal that clash was inevitable?’’ (Mead
1928:158). Mead’s affirmation of the presence of such temperaments
and conflicts extends to some twenty-six pages. We saw, above, how
Mead later recalled discussing precisely this matter with Benedict.
But Molloy’s trend is generally accurate. For Mead, deviance was
temperamental, that is in the social psychologist and Torres Straight
Expedition member William McDougall’s sense, a matter of innate
predisposition or of indwelling attitude (see Sullivan 2004a). By
contrast, Benedict’s idea of deviance concerned behavior at odds with
the locally prevailing moral order. In Coming of Age in Samoa and
Growing Up in New Guinea, Mead did not develop her notion of
temperament. Over the next several years, however, Mead became
more and more concerned, not only with the relations between the
individual and culture, but also between human biology, human
development, and cultural form. Influenced by both Benedict and
Bateson, Mead attended, to the extent then possible, to morphological
processes which lead to the genesis and reproduction, under
some circumstances, of particular albeit not necessarily stable or over
determined types; I write ‘‘to the extent then possible’’ because the
biology of the day (mid-1930s) did not yet include the so-called
modern synthesis of evolutionary and genetic theory (Dobzhansky
1937; Huxley 1942), a description of DNA, a developed notion of a
genome along with the technical capacity to study that genome, or an
idea of a flexible brain.
The biological sciences were in a ferment in the years prior to
Dobzhansky’s and Huxley’s publications, as yet unable to join two
important elements of biological theory: Darwinian evolution and
Mendelean genetics. The study of hormones and the realization that
men and women might share certain of them, albeit in differing
proportions, was recent. Certain psychologists, for example Ernst
Kretchmer (1925[1921]), were advancing notions that body or constitutional
types were likely systematically related to psychological
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propensities. Others, the gestaltists Kurt Koffka (1924[1921]) and
Kurt Lewin (1935) primary among them, were seeking a dynamic
psychology of human perception and development grounded in but
not reducible to biological processes. Mead and Bateson sought out
people, materials and ideas they thought might prove useful,
including Engle and Waddington, the gestaltists and Kretchmer’s
book (1925[1921]). Mead’s thought, therefore, should be studied not
only against the background of her sexual practices, the New York
intellectuals and their concerns, the psychologists whose theories
Mead studied as an undergraduate and a Master’s candidate or
sought out later, the various peoples she lived and worked among,
but also as a part of this intellectual ferment within biology.
Molloy’s exploration of Mead’s pursuit of a theory incorporating
biology, personality, and culture, beginning with The Changing
Culture of an Indian Tribe is a contribution. My own work on this
subject has effectively begun with the 1932–1933 New Guinea
researches and Mead’s ‘‘Summary Statement of the Problem of
Personality and Culture.’’ The original of this document can be found
in Mead’s field notes on the Tchambuli researches. To my knowledge,
only Banner (2003:328ff), Molloy (2008), and myself (Sullivan 2004a)
have written anything about the document and its place in the
development in Mead’s thought.
It is in great part, as Molloy insists, a curious document, perhaps
insanely so. But it is firmly lodged in Boas’s (1911) distinction
between family lines, which have biological existence, and putative
races, which do not. Mead’s initial innovation was to separate
temperament from sex by reference to Boas’s distinction; women
were and are not all alike any more than men were and are. For
Mead, the concept that we would now call gender followed from this
observation. So too, given a notion of cultural selection, did
the possibility, but not the inevitability, of a temporary cultural
stabilization of preferred temperamental type. From this notion of a
culturally preferred temperamental type flowed the idea that there
would be particular psychological and cultural difficulties for those
persons whose temperament—and therefore the likely path along
which their character would develop—was at odds with the temperamental
order or, in Batesonian terms, the ethos of their culture.
In my reading of this material and all that followed from it, Mead
did not become theoretically a biological determinist, as Molloy
suggests, or develop a theory of a human biology beyond the influences
of cultural selection. Many look to the character of the parents
when choosing a spouse. Populations do become isolated or overrun.
Populations have more powerful neighbors. Ecologies and patterns of
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disease change. These were all matters of which Mead and Bateson
were aware by the mid 1930s and further, all matters where biology
can be and has been substantively culturalized. But Mead did develop
a theory that reviewers who, by Molloy’s account, increasingly
missed significant elements of Mead’s arguments, could have taken to
be biologically deterministic and which could have aided less
intellectually scrupulous agents of racist ideologies.
For this reason, Benedict and Boas prevailed upon Mead not to
publish the theory of the squares. Both Molloy and I agree that such
a decision was prudent, given the circumstances, political and scientific,
then prevailing. Now that several scholars have taken up the
squares theory itself with some seriousness, we who have done so
shall have little choice but to attend to the difficulties and ambiguities
that come not just with Mead’s scientific, as opposed to pedagogical,
project, but with our own as well. Looking back, Mead may have
provided a way to bring the four sub-disciplines of Boasian anthropology
together, though I doubt that her thought would please either
those who think cultural anthropologists should learn more and be
more respectful of biology or those who think that biological
anthropologists should become more sophisticated about culture.
I have my disagreements with Molloy. Mostly minor, they concern
anachronisms in Molloy’s account about matters where she is still in
some ways correct. Mead could have been more concerned about
history in the sense that anthropologists are now interested in the
history of colonial and postcolonial asymmetries of power, rather
than in the sorts of reconstructions prevalent in American anthropology
when Mead entered the discipline and from which she distanced
herself. She found the ‘‘ropes’’ among the Mundugumour, but
misunderstood them (see McDowell 1991:28). I wonder whether
anyone else working in the period 1925 through 1935 attended to
such matters as well as Mead did. I intend to reread Molloy’s book,
perhaps several times. Anyone wanting to understand Mead should
do so as well.
BENEDICT: BEYOND PATTERN, BEYOND RELATIVITY
Virginia Young, Professor Emerita at The University of Virginia,
studied at Columbia under Benedict. She took part in the post-war
‘‘culture at a distance’’ projects, working as part of the China group.
For some time, or so I understand, Benedict’s typewriter was in
Young’s possession. For her book, Young (2005) contacted others
who studied under Benedict. Eventually she had four sets of
notes from Benedict’s late-life graduate seminars: Marion Marcovitz
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Roiphe’s, Eric R. Wolf’s, William S. Willis’s, and her own (Young
2005:xi). These notes form the basis, not only for the stimulating
appendices recreating Benedict’s lectures, but also for a significant
reappraisal of Benedict’s thought and teaching.
The initial portion of the book contains three important chapters:
one on the search for a successor to Boas as head of Columbia’s
Anthropology Department; a second on Benedict’s friendship with
Mead; and a third on Benedict ‘‘beyond relativity, beyond pattern.’’
Benedict first encountered anthropology as taught by Alexander
Goldenweiser after Goldenweiser’s exile from Columbia to the New
School for Social Research. Goldenweiser had run afoul of powers at
Columbia because of his opposition to American entry into the First
World War; later, he would depart for Oregon in the wake of a sexual
scandal. Through Goldenweiser, Benedict came to the attention of
Boas. Under Boas’s direction, Benedict wrote her dissertation on
guardian spirits in western North America; along with Hallowell’s
(1924) contemporaneous dissertation on bear symbolism, Benedict’s
thesis helped begin a decisive shift from studies emphasizing the
diffusion of traits to the variable positioning of those traits from
society to society.
Sapir thought very highly of Benedict’s thesis. Boas thought well
enough of Mrs. Benedict, as he called her in formal situations, that he
brought her into Columbia’s Department to teach, albeit because she
was married and could therefore count on her husband for support,
without pay for several years. Boas would also find Mead her
position at the American Museum of Natural History, but with pay,
as she was in need of support. These positions were signs of favor.
By the early 1930s, Boas’s health required that he withdraw from
the day-to-day running of the department. Benedict, already there,
took on more and more of these responsibilities. Asked by the Dean
who might succeed Boas, Benedict opined that the two best candidates
were women, with Benedict succeeding Boas and Mead succeeding
Benedict. Despite the Dean’s apparent support, this was not
to be. After a series of temporary appointments, Ralph Linton
replaced Boas. Relations between Benedict and Linton deteriorated;
he would later not only claim to have killed Benedict utilizing sorcery,
but would also complain that she would not even die of a feminine
complaint. Through all of this, Young points out, Benedict was at
pains to respond with great politeness.
The argument of Benedict’s thesis and her study of visions (1922)
would be turned inside out, as it were. Under the influence, to varying
degrees, of the Gestalt psychologists as well as Wilhelm Dilthey and
Oswald Spengler, that argument became Benedict’s (1934:47ff)
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notion of cultural pattern, of wholes which were more than and not
reducible to the sum of their parts. The local significance of any given
trait—guardian spirits or visions or, as shall prove pertinent later,
homosexuality or prostitution, being but examples—then became
relative to its position within the cultural configuration or organization
of the whole. In the 1920s and 1930s, this was a new thought
and led to an unusual pedagogical practice: reading ethnographies
from beginning to end rather than consulting the index to find what
one was directly interested in.
Societies could borrow ideas, technologies, ceremonies and so on
from their neighbors or their neighbor’s neighbors; thus traits diffuse,
while those who borrow diffusing traits put those traits to their own
disparate purposes. That is, societies select and redefine traits; given
enough time, time well beyond individual life spans, and relatively
benign circumstances, each society could obtain its own particular
coherence much as a person, given proper circumstances and intent,
might over the course of a life time cultivate her or his personality
(Benedict 1932:24). This is part of the trope of culture as personality
writ large; the trope’s other major portion, social pressure to conform
and resistance thereto, Benedict and Mead knew personally all too
well.
According to this view, individuals knowing their own world
would often find in the order of that world the wellsprings of
themselves. They would live relatively easily with and within the local
mythos, that is, all save the deviants whose behavior would put them
at odds with the good as locally understood. In Patterns of Culture,
Benedict provided a set of shorthand terms—Apollonian, Dionysian,
Paranoid, Megalomaniac—to identify the distinctions between each
of the various patterns she discussed. While there followed a fad
among some to speak of cultures using shorthands of this sort,
Benedict was also criticized for using these means of summation and
subsequently would refrain from doing so. In this discussion about
shorthands, Benedict’s notion of cultural selection largely receded
from view.
Benedict’s version of relativity was primarily concerned with the
meaning or significance of things within a multiplicity of cultural
patterns rather than a moral relativism as such. We should not forget
that Benedict (1942, 1945) wrote scathing attacks upon racism in
which she provided cultural accounts of the logic of racism as well as
refutations thereof. Neither should we conclude that either Benedict
or Mead were what we might think of as naive relativists.
Young’s comments upon the differences between Benedict and
Mead, primarily found in her third chapter, are instructive.
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Occasionally they misunderstood one another or missed each other’s
point. More importantly, Benedict continued to see a wide variety of
possible patterns whereas Mead, especially while she was working out
her theory of the squares, tried to develop theories involving small
sets of dialectically related patterns to which Benedict was always
opposed. In this, Mead was closer to Goldenweiser’s (1933[1913])
notion of the convergent evolution of social forms than Benedict was.
Benedict and Mead’s two approaches, therefore, lead to different
kinds of comparisons between cultures. In Benedict’s thought, these
comparisons lead on to considerations of the sorts of conditions
conducive to human freedom as a positive good and a realm of study
that she herself termed as being beyond pattern and beyond relativity.
Later she would also turn her attention to human development, again
beyond pattern and relativity; in a minor difference with Young, I
sense Mead’s influence here.
A history which begins with Benedict’s concerns with realms
beyond pattern and beyond relativity, especially the conditions under
which freedom might flourish, and moves on to her students, perhaps
Eric R. Wolf (1982) and his extended examination of the nature of
power and people considered by some to be without history, or
Sidney Mintz (1985) with his study of the transformation of diet as a
part of the transformation of production, would be very interesting; I
am as yet unaware of such a study. But Young has laid the
groundwork for this type of an approach, and more, with her detailed
and fair-minded book. Anyone wanting to understand Benedict’s
enduring relevance for anthropology would do well to begin with
Young’s work.
RUTH LANDES
When first employed as an academic, Sally Cole was briefly part of
the Department at McMaster University. Ruth Landes, then at the
end of her life, was also about—a presence in the department but one
Cole more sensed than knew.
Landes was born in New York City to immigrant Russian Jews.
Her New York was a cosmopolitan place; as a young woman in 1928
she was drawn to small groups of Black Jews in Harlem. This
encounter led her to Boas who introduced Mrs. Landes to Mrs.
Benedict in September 1931.
Landes studied under Benedict and was part of the seminar taught
by Mead that culminated in the publication of Cooperation and
Competition among Primitive Peoples in 1937. Landes contributed an
essay on the Ojibwa to the volume. Benedict had arranged, with the
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assistance of Diamond Jenness and Irving Hallowell, for Landes to
work among the Ojibwa. Her account of these people, based on her
conversations with Maggie Wilson in the early 1930s lead to Landes’s
first book, The Ojibwa Woman of 1938.
For reasons which escape me, Cole makes greater claims for the
originality of Landes’s methods in this study than seem to me warranted.
Mead had been developing methods to study elements of
social life often neglected in the work of her colleagues since she went
to Samoa in 1925; facing criticism within the profession, she would
publish a defense of her own methods and critical of the limits of the
more usual methods then in use, at least, by American anthropologists
in 1933. Most of the graduate students who took part in
Mead’s seminar which led to Cooperation and Competition among
Primitive Peoples listed the study of methods as their primary reason
for taking part in the seminar on the small pieces of paper Mead
passed around; the originals can be found in the Mead Papers at the
Library of Congress.
Landes’s contribution, and it was not a minor one, was to examine
the ways in which Wilson and those around her improvised a life, an
Ojibwa life, in the presence of substantial Canadian influences. With
this study, Landes’s work began to take on a trajectory following
from one example to another of shamans and the like whose
encounters with spirits generated a social space around these adepts
in which they and others could improvise a life in the face of greater
secular powers. Explained this way, Landes’s work has a more contemporary
feel—seen in respect to the issues with which Landes was
concerned—than many would attribute to Mead or Benedict.
Landes would develop this approach further in her fieldwork in
Bahia, Brazil, and in her The City of Women (1947). In this book,
Cole’s Landes provided a study of candomble´ spirit possession and
the social worlds that surround it, which emphasized the social
creativity not only of the women at the center of these spirit cults, but
also of homosexual men who obtained important roles therein.
While its animating vision has withstood the tests of time and
critique, this fieldwork and this book would bring Landes more than
a little grief. Melville Herskovits, the leading Boasian student of the
African diaspora and a supporter of the idea of the survival of
authentic Africaness within that diaspora, would belittle Landes’s
work in a review of her book, which appeared in the American
Anthropologist in 1948. He had earlier also unfavorably reviewed
Landes’s work for Gunnar Myrdal’s project on race in America in
1940. Herskovits’s opposition to Landes’s thesis was exacerbated by
an exchange of letters between them after Landes returned from
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Brazil in the late 1930s. Landes also faced opposition from Arthur
Ramos, a leading Brazilian scholar.
Cole’s treatment of Landes’s difficulties with Herskovits and
Ramos, as well as the probable consequences of those difficulties for
Landes securing reasonable employment, is judicious and convincing.
These were powerful men with established positions in a relatively
small community. In the late 1930s and early 1940s there were few
anthropology jobs available. Even if there had been easier access to
employment, their opposition to Landes would have been a formidable
obstacle.
Cole saves much of her ire, however, for Benedict and Mead, a bit
unfairly I think. After Benedict’s death, Landes turned to Mead for
whatever assistance she could provide. In Cole’s opinion, this was a
mistake; I agree, for in 1950 Mead wrote Landes a letter of recommendation
that contains a warning about problems that Landes’s
beauty might pose for departmental tranquility (Cole 2003:232–233).
Landes learned of the contents of this letter and was justly angry.
This was not Mead at her best or most attractive by any means. Nor
is Mead’s letter made more palatable by Mead’s subsequent efforts
on Landes’s behalf, which did result in Landes securing employment
at McMaster. Nor again can Mead’s letter be excused away by the
difficulties she faced securing an academic position, as opposed to her
museum job. Not only did the possible job at Columbia fall through,
despite Benedict’s presence and apparently the Dean’s approval, but
jobs at Princeton and later Harvard—in this last case with Clyde
Kluckhohn’s active support for Mead—failed to materialize, in the
Harvard case, simply because the then president did not want female
faculty. Nor finally might Mead’s letter be made palatable by the
rush of men, with their sense of entitlement, back into the academy
after the Second World War, or by Benedict’s lack of support on
Landes’s behalf, or by any disapproval—justified or otherwise—on
Mead’s part of Landes’s behavior.
But this letter is only part of Cole’s case against Mead. Mead
complained to Benedict that she found Landes difficult. There were
also differences, both personal and theoretical, between them. At a
crucial point in her discussion, however, Cole (2003:201–202) simply
misunderstands Benedict and Mead.
On 5 October 1939, Benedict sent Mead a letter describing
Landes’s observations concerning why and how, in the context of
Brazil and the candomble´, certain ‘‘passive [male] homosexuals’’ and
prostitutes, ordinarily viewed in Brazil with a degree of contempt,
were able to ‘‘rehabilitate’’ themselves in the eyes of others, and also
in their own eyes, by taking on positions within candomble´ terreiros,
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or ritual centers, otherwise appropriate for women but not for men.
Cole’s (2003:201–202) discussion of Benedict’s text neglects to
consider Benedict’s express positioning of such activities in Brazil
amongst practitioners of candomble´. Both Benedict and Mead
had been thinking about the defining capacities which wholes
(cultural patterns or configurations) exert upon parts (traits, in this
case homosexuality and prostitution, but elsewhere, in my discussion
above, guardian spirits and visions) since at least 1932 and
very probably for some time earlier, perhaps even since 1925, when
Mead introduced Benedict to Kurt Koffka’s The Growth of the
Mind (1924 [1921]); on Mead, Benedict, and gestalt psychology, see
Sullivan n.d.).
There is no question here of Benedict abstracting homosexuality or
prostitution from these particular cultural contexts, as Cole very
explicitly does in her interpretation of Benedict. Cole’s imputations of
hypocrisy over homosexuality, ethnocentrism, or subsuming Landes
within some generalized notion of deviancy simply miss Benedict’s
explicit point in her letter. Cole miscontrues Benedict’s by then longstanding
theoretical positions about the nature of significance arising
out of the relationship between wholes and part as well as Mead’s
invocation of that position. To the extent that she then builds her case
against Mead, in particular, and Benedict upon this foundation, she
is misleading and misunderstands the criticisms she made of Mead
and Benedict’s conduct towards Landes. This is a blot on an otherwise
interesting and convincing book.
LETTERS AND ARCHIVES
In her introduction to Caffrey and Francis’s (2006) volume of
selected letters by Mead to a wide range of people, Mead’s daughter,
Mary Catherine Bateson (2006:xviiff), notes that not only did her
mother live in an era when letter writing was common but also that
her ‘‘mother was an archivist’s dream.’’ From very early on, Mead
made multiple copies of nearly everything she wrote, both letters and
field notes, as well as keeping copies of the many letters she received.
This vast accumulation of materials, not including the film Gregory
Bateson took among the Balinese and Iatmul (which are housed
elsewhere), forms the single largest collection in the Manuscript
Division of the Library of Congress. In a very interesting way, Cole
(2003:8ff) made the inverse point. One of the reasons we can know so
relatively little about many of the woman who graduated from
Columbia was because they were itinerant and because collections of
papers can soon become very bulky.
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I do not know precisely where the idea of a book of Mead’s letters
came from. The younger Bateson certainly must have played a role.
The late Mary Wolfskill, long time head of the Manuscript Division,
often spoke to me of editing a complete collection of Mead’s letters as
a post-retirement project. Caffrey, as I understand it, was for some
time contemplating a biography of Mead, based no doubt in large
part on Mead’s letters. Francis has been working with Mead’s papers
for longer than anyone, except perhaps Mary Catherine Bateson and
Virginia Yans-McLaughlin; Francis’s encyclopedic knowledge of the
papers and of the letters served her well when she curated the
Library’s exhibit celebrating the centennial of Mead’s birth.
This collection is far from exhaustive. Francis has informed me
that she and Caffrey, at the publisher’s insistence, had to delete letters
out from the selected materials up until just before the book went into
press. For example, Mead’s letter to Reo Fortune, in which she
decided to forgo a second trip to Samoa, is among those removed
from the selection at a late date. So too is a letter to Mead’s sister,
Priscilla Rosten, in which Mead discussed relations between mothers
and children as a part of the child’s development and as communication.
In this letter as elsewhere, Mead emphasized that the mother’s
attitude had greater importance than any specific childrearing technique
(see Sullivan n.d. for a discussion of this letter and of the
swaddling hypothesis which also emphasized the communication of
an attitude over technique per se).
Caffrey and Francis’s collection does not include any of the letters
found in Mead’s Letters from the Field of 1977. It thus expands the
volume of Mead’s letters available in print. Specialists will, of course,
continue to visit the Manuscript Reading Room of the Library of
Congress. But others likely will find this collection a useful addition.
The collected letters are divided up into six categories: family,
husbands, lovers, friends, colleagues, and family again. Within each
chapter the letters appear chronologically. Letters to individual
recipients may be found in several chapters. The editors have also
provided short commentaries contextualizing each letter.
The result is a sympathetic portrait of Mead. But it is, as the
editors know, incomplete, though not just because their collection is
but a selection. The Mead Papers, like any archive or indeed like a
field site, are a multiplex confluence of cultural engagement produced
and organized according to a variety of logics and purposes. The
Mead Papers are also full of gaps, some of them quite subtle even for
someone very familiar with the Papers. For example, Mead wrote
many letters for a wide variety of reasons, but generally to people at a
distance. Caffrey and Francis’s collection does not contain materials
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recording conversation, though the archive does contain some such
materials and not just in field settings. Many formative conversations
with Benedict and others while Mead was in New York City went
entirely unrecorded. Later in Mead’s life, as telephone calls became
less expensive, she might have had reason to call instead of write.
Anyone working in archives, especially an archive as large as Mead’s,
must soon become aware that while nothing is transparent and
context is everything, that that very context can be maddeningly
difficult to sort out.
Still Caffrey and Francis’s collection illuminates the changing
range of Mead’s interests and contacts. Some may find the letters to
and about Mead’s family to be of particular interest. But others,
myself included, will find Mead’s assessment of colleagues and the
development of her ideas in correspondence with her husbands,
other colleagues, and her sister, Priscilla Rosten, of greater pertinence.
The final section, a collection of letters written well after
Mead’s position was firmly established in the academic stratosphere
seems to me to be an overly long discussion of mostly family news
and itineraries. Granted Mead was by that time busy with her many
projects, a point this section emphasizes, but perhaps some of the
space could have been given over to other subjects. The letter to
John Dollard of January 12, 1935, in which Mead wrote that the
concept of ‘‘the infinite malleability of the human organism ha[d]
been overused’’ (Margaret Mead Papers Box I8 file 6) or certain of
the letters she wrote to Geoffrey Gorer from Bali or her 1942 letter
to Erik Erikson in which she plainly states how she used the term
temperament in Sex and Temperament or any number of others
might then have been included (my thanks to Pat Francis for
bringing the letter to Dollard to my attention). Otherwise, the
editors have been prudent in their selection and judicious in their
comments; I do not envy them their chosen task.
This collection contains a range of references to Sapir, whose
intellect Mead respected long after it was apparent that their personal
relationship would not be repaired. It contains no letters from Mead
to Sapir or from Sapir to Mead. While she was in Samoa undertaking
the fieldwork he had attempted to stop, Mead seems to have burnt
the letters she had received from Sapir; I do not know what Sapir did
with her letters. From these letters it is clear that Mead saw several
similarities in her relationships with Sapir and Fortune as well as her
father. Looking back, Mead concluded that she withdrew from Sapir
because it would have meant, among other things, that she would
find herself of protecting his, and eventually perhaps their, children
from elements of his overwhelming presence. Still Sapir moved her,
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and remained a significant influence on her thought; her work would
be the first to significantly develop his notion of the individual in
culture (see Sullivan 2005).
Mead only consented to marry Reo Fortune once she came to
think she could not become pregnant (see Mead’s letter to Rhoda
Metreaux of January 23, 1949, Caffrey and Francis 2006:43). Equally
important, both Sapir and Fortune, rather unlike Mead’s father, were
temperamentally monogamous. She found monogamy uncongenial,
often but not always preferring ‘‘a freedom from constraint’’ (Caffrey
and Francis 2006:xxii) and the possibility of several ongoing loving
relationships. Sapir used his knowledge of Mead’s attitudes against
her in print. If Mead’s comparison between Sapir and Fortune is
accurate, then her marriage to Fortune contained difficulties long
before Mead wrote Kinship in the Admiralty Islands (1934).
Those interested in Mead’s version of her relation to Fortune will
find much of interest the letters to Benedict. These letters do not, to
my mind, wholly support Molloy’s (2008) contention, mentioned
above, that Mead, Benedict, and Bateson put about stories, presumably
false ones, about Fortune to protect Mead’s position. But
they do not undermine such an idea entirely. They do show a
relationship in decline and later mended with a truce in the late 1940s.
Fortune has recently found a biographer, Caroline Thomas, now at
Waikato University in New Zealand, so presumably there will soon
be a fuller account of this relationship from Fortune’s vantage as well
as a reappraisal of his sadly neglected work (see Thomas n.d and
Lohmann n.d.).
Perhaps the most consistently intriguing element of this collection
is that the Mead they show was not so much insecure as someone
seeking ways of talking, of framing issues. Mead could be very
insecure, especially when she was far from her lovers, friends, and
companions, wondering when the post would arrive by boat. But she
could be self-critical. More importantly, she was drawn to ideas and
to those who developed them: Sapir, Benedict, Fortune, and
Bateson most prominently among them; I understand that Virginia
Yans-McLaughlin is contemplating a volume on this aspect of
Mead’s life and work, a volume I will welcome. Caffrey and Francis’
volume is no replacement for a decade or longer spent among Mead’s
papers, but then no collection could be.
CONCLUSION
Nancy Parezo (2007:575) has recently observed that knowing about the
lives and careers of anthropology’s ‘‘highly charismatic foundational
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figures and intellectual leaders . . . helps us to reflect on how
anthropological knowledge and theory have been produced.’’ Such
reflection allows for an anthropology of anthropology, itself a useful
form of reflection for two sorts of reasons. First, it allows for
anthropology to consider its relations to the people whose lives
provide the stuff of our work. Second, it allows us to consider and
reconsider how we have come to form the questions that have animated
anthropology. Thus, when we work in anthropological
archives we enter a particular sort of field site, which takes us into the
pasts of both anthropologists and their interlocutors and allows us to
render that past useful once again.
The books under consideration here are part of this process of
devising an anthropology of anthropology, of devising a useable past.
These three women, Benedict, Mead, and Landes, each made
remarkable, if now often misunderstood or underappreciated, contributions
to the discipline. Each had enemies within the discipline
who distorted their pioneering work. More recently, many have taken
their work as read without necessarily going back and rereading these
foundational texts. In some cases—for example Mead’s examination
of the processes of embodiment or Benedict’s proposing notions of
cultural selection and realms of beyond culture or Landes’s vision of
people improvising positions for themselves in the face of larger and
unfriendly worlds—these women either anticipated later concerns or
put forth what are really more sophisticated versions of ideas and
concerns than those which have followed.
If we consider that they were working in a time without notions of
the flexible, reorganizing brain and the like only strengthens their
claims upon our consideration and invites us to reexamine the sources
and contexts—ethnographic, intellectual, and personal—of their
ideas. Taken in conjunction, the books under review here should
stimulate a rethinking—warts and all—of these most complex
mothers of current American anthropology and all those others
whose lives and work gave rise to that anthropology. It may also help
resolve some of the current disputes in ways that may revivify the
greater Boasian project, at least I would hope so.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank Roger Lohmann for asking me to write this
review and for his response to an earlier draft. Matti Bunzl and
Pauline Kent reviewed an earlier version for this journal. Sharon W.
Tiffany and Virginia Yans-McLaughlin also read that version of this
226 G. Sullivan
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review. The current version is better for their comments and editorial
suggestions. Any mistakes are mine alone.
The quote from the Mead Papers appears courtesy of Mary
Catherine Bateson and the Institute for Intercultural Studies. I
have never met Cole. I studied under Virginia Young and
worked closely with Pat Francis over the years and consider Pat a
good friend. I have also met Banner, Caffrey, and Molloy on
several occasions. Banner edited an essay of mine that appeared in
Banner and Janiewski (2004). I first met Maureen Molloy in the
reading room of the manuscripts division of the Library of
Congress. She subsequently took part in two sessions I organized;
in both sessions she presented early versions of work that made its
way into her book.
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