Mead and the Trajectory of Anthropology in the United States

1. Mead’s History

Mandler begins with a chapter (1) charting Mead’s career up to 1939. While a student at Columbia, through Ruth Benedict, she encountered Franz Boas. Boas was a missionary for salvage ethnography; that is, the project of recording cultures the very existence of which was threatened by industrialization, assimilation, and other processes of change. ¹ Mead was much taken by this cause. Mandler briefly chronicles her pre-war fieldwork expeditions to Samoa and to New Guinea and the professional and romantic alliances that she forged with Reo Fortune, her second husband, and Gregory Bateson, her third. That only takes us to page 43 of 366 pages. The thick detail of historical research comes in the treatment of the next phase of her life, doing “anthropology at a distance” during the Second World War. Picking up on an unfortunate phrase—“culture cracking,” that is, breaking open the explanatory secret of a culture to make puzzling behavior intelligible and hence biddable—Mandler traces how Mead shifted into high gear as a saleswoman for what anthropology could contribute to the war effort. Building on the work of her teachers Boas and Benedict, she argued that cultural patterns held the secret to why armies and civilians behaved as they did, in combat, occupation, or home front situations. Hence, anthropologists could usefully help prepare soldiers for their encounters with the enemy, or for occupation duties, or for relations with allies, and contribute to “psychological warfare” in all of its forms.

Mandler divides Margaret Mead’s activities into those directed at Allies in general (chapter 2) and Great Britain in particular (chapter 3), and those directed toward enemies (chapter 4). He has trawled through archives that record Mead’s prolific activity. Much of this war work was never published in any form, but circulated as memoranda for background use in the preparation of policy documents, pamphlets for the troops, or leaflets for air drop. The most storied production of the culture cracking effort was authored not by Mead but by her mentor Ruth Benedict, whose wartime analysis of the Japanese national character was published right after the war as The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (Benedict 1946), at a time when the United States was the occupying power in Japan. It had a wide influence. And of course it was widely resisted and even derided.

During the Second World War, according to Mandler, Margaret Mead was careful not to get sucked into the secret state. She thought science needed to be public and she wanted all the research she was involved in to be publicly available. This may or may not have limited her, there being no clear evidence that she was ever offered work in the clandestine world. She had, it seems, no security clearance beyond the minimum; she was not in a military unit. Exhilarated by the role anthropology now played in government thinking, she wanted that to continue in the postwar world, a world in which American hegemony and responsibility was palpable. At first, things went well. Colleagues who could stayed in place in government; others relocated to the academy. There was money around for research as the military tried to cultivate academe.

Why did this continuing involvement end? Why were fewer and fewer anthropologists recruited; why did fewer seek to be recruited? As to the latter, it was thought that putting anthropological information in the hands of government put its subjects in danger. This goes to mistrust of the U.S. government and military that had interned Japanese-Americans and would later displace Pacific Islanders to test bombs. Another issue was that Mead was a cultural pluralist, if not an out and out relativist. She did not want a world in which all roads converged on the social system of the modern United States. Indeed, she wanted the United States to gain from anthropology some sort of perspective or distance on itself, as simply one possible configuration of human culture in a large field of viable possibilities. These are high-minded sentiments. But when the lines of the Cold War became more sharply drawn, not just a matter of great power rivalry but a fierce ideological clash, Mead’s outlook could itself be called into question. Was communism just another culture, another way of life, among the many options or possibilities? Mead was a liberal and in no way a friend of totalitarian control. Yet her relativism gave no clear reason for objecting to the socialist way of life the communists were trying to put into practice and export. This made her seem less than reliable as a Cold Warrior. Hence, proposals and projects gradually dried up. So eager was she to keep up the good work that she seems to have, finally, sought to enter the world of security clearance (249-250).

Underlying the historical problem upon which Mandler focuses, there are philosophical and methodological problems about anthropology. These range from the split in the profession over whether to explain by invoking culture or by invoking social organization, to the radical questioning of the project of studying others who are viewed as simpler, “primitive,” “pre,” and “homogeneous.” The radical view deconstructs anthropology itself as complicit in the exploitation and domination of their subjects by those who study them. Mead had a grasp of both the social organization and the cultural approaches and was strongly invested in the latter. The radical critique was formulated in new language but could only have struck her as old hat. From the beginning, she saw anthropology as a mirror, a way of getting Americans to look at themselves as just another tribe, and to gain a perspective distance on their own social life and cultural practices. Anthropology mediated between the exploited and exploiters by showing how the latter had a great deal to learn from the former. Her outlook made her, as the British would say, not “sound” on Cold War matters, at least to those vested with the power to decide.

2. Critical Assessment

The philosophical problem with anthropology that underlies Mandler’s historical project becomes especially prominent when Mead gives up on trying to advance the interests of anthropology in the Cold War and returns to the anthropological field. That problem is how to reconcile the cultural relativism to which she was committed as a cultural anthropologist with an affirmation of the universal and democratic values to which her (American) society was dedicated. Mead was cognizant of the problem and waffled about it. It was a contradiction she was loathe to resolve. The war and her war work could be construed as a pragmatic opting for absolute values. She gave every sign of trying not to face up to this concession.

Consider one of Mead’s final government-sponsored projects. Mead generalized Benedict’s (1934) approach in Patterns of Culture and labeled it, in a postwar publication she co-edited, The Study of Culture at a Distance (Mead & Métraux 1953). Relabeled Research on Contemporary Cultures, her unit obtained funding from federal government sources, including the Office of Naval Research, to join in the effort to make sense of the new, communist, enemy, including the Russians. In addition to the methodological and other problems of undertaking research on distant places, a new factor intervened: the positing of simplistic, even vaguely ludicrous explanations. Mead, Benedict, and Bateson, abetted by Geoffrey Gorer, had come to think that a few cultural patterns differentiated one culture from another and that one or more of these patterns would be the key to cracking the “cultural code” and explaining the other features of the culture. Heavily influence by neo-Freudianism, the explanations appealed to such patterns as toilet-training practices, swaddling of infants, child discipline, relations in the nuclear family, and so on. For Mead, such cultural patterns were the rock bottom level of human difference and explained higher level observable patterns of aggression, adolescent angst, and so on. This was particularly the case with Geoffrey Gorer’s idea that swaddling was the key to, the way to crack open the secret of, Russian culture. By contrast with her coworker, Nathan Leites, who used the written works of Lenin and Stalin for insights into Russian state behavior, Mead’s offering evoked mockery, not kudos.

In pursuing her objectives, Mead must have expected that where she led, others would follow. This, however, proved to be far from the case. Beginning already with Coming of Age in Samoa (Mead 1928) and only strengthened by such a work as her And Keep Your Powder Dry (an anthropological portrait of the United States, 1942), Mead was beginning to be criticized within anthropology for what were described as her impressionistic and intuitive methods, her culturalist reductionism, and her readiness to conscript anthropology to government service. While her critics may at first have been a small minority, their influence was far from negligible. For example, British social anthropology as a whole was hostile to Boas, Benedict, and Mead’s culturalist approach, the idea that there was a small set of “patterns” that differentiated one culture from another and which could be seen as the clue to human differences. The British were just as complicit as she was in being willing to serve governments, but they never saw societies as having codes to which they had found the keys.

Fieldwork practice was a key point of difference. Malinowski had preached that the fieldwork ideal was to live among the natives, utilizing their language without intermediaries, and to extend the stay to cover one complete cycle of the seasons plus some overlap. This to be followed by a period back in the academy, writing up the notes and findings, and then, in the best case, by a revisit for an extended time to double-check the results. Not everyone could or did follow this lengthy and expensive ideal practice, yet each component of it had a powerful rationale. Using the language allowed for direct contact without intermediaries, so that the anthropologist would see things for herself and use the language for casual socialization as well as formal investigation. Staying at least one cycle of the year was to give the anthropologist experience of people who lived by the rhythms of nature, and how they responded to them in work, play, ritual. Not every ritual or festival occurred annually. Some ceremonies might be infrequent, separated by several years. Anthropologists who knew this in advance might try to arrange their fieldwork to overlap with such major events. Living among the natives was a means of compelling the anthropologist to interact with the natives for all purposes: food, shelter, friendship, gossip, and so on. It also enhanced the command of the language. The revisit was to check first impressions. Yet Margaret Mead had in her classic study of Samoa been in the field approximately 8 months, had at all times lived in naval or missionary accommodations, had unknown linguistic competence, ² and had cut her expedition short for reasons which are obscure. She had gone to Samoa to test a hypothesis: was adolescence a universal developmental stage or were there cultures where it was merely a chronological phase?

Without rehearsing the controversy over her claims in this matter, the cultural approach was inimical to the Malinowskian ideal. A good Baconian inductivist, Malinowski wanted fieldworkers to keep an open mind, to avoid confirmation bias, and to be ready for and accessible to the surprises a simple society would offer to the inquiring Western scientist (Jarvie 1964). Such fieldwork took time and a kind of total immersion in the people and their ways, plus a readiness to face the fact that the most interesting aspect of a newly explored society might be quite different from what one expected. Both Malinowski and Evans-Pritchard wrote candidly (the former mainly in his posthumously published diary) about how pesky the natives could be; sometimes there was the suggestion that fieldwork was an ordeal submission to which made for a real anthropologist. Hard times and low moments tested the anthropologist’s mettle.

Mead’s approach was more like a flying visit. Come in, on limited time and budget, find ways to get at whatever information you have decided you want to find, then back home to study and typewriter to “write it up.” Social anthropologists were quite scornful of a modified culturalist model adopted by some expeditions, where several fieldworkers went in together, each with a cultural specialty, for example, a linguist, a medical anthropologist, an area specialist, a woman (because access to women is restricted in many societies), an economist or a development specialist, a geographer, and so on. What such a team would fail to accomplish is the intimacy with every detail of the way of life of those being studied that could only be achieved by solitary and prolonged fieldwork. There may have been a puritan exaggeration to all this, but it was an undoubted difference and would give a thickness to the acquaintance with the overall society that could hardly be achieved otherwise. This method would also mean that the anthropologist could paint a portrait of a simple society as a whole, covering its major institutions, the family, the tribe, the clan, the spiritual beliefs, the means of livelihood, the art, and leisure. Hence, it was a true salvage anthropology not a partial one by instant experts.

Mead tried in her work to bridge the social anthropology/cultural anthropology split. She showed her mastery of social organization in her second book, Social Organization of Manua (1930), that was social anthropology straight, published as a Museum monograph. ³ Her first book, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), was culturalist and explicitly directed at American readers and their perspective, hence its subtitle: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization. She was devoted to Boas’ project of “salvage anthropology,” that is, anthropology conceived of as a last-ditch attempt to record and catalog societies and ways of life that were being destroyed by contact. Claiming that contact involved exploitation and domination was something with which Boas would heartily concur. Mead also, in her autobiography, used the phrase, “onslaught of modern civilization” (Mead 1972, 137) to characterize the threat driving salvage anthropology. Easy to see then how a case could be made that she was no apologist for imperialist hegemony.

Mead’s multitasking may have been her own worst enemy. Mandler says that she found her own profession no longer taking her seriously and so she reconnected to fieldwork to reboot her credentials. She set off for Manus in 1953 to study the impact of WWII on that remote area. What resulted was the optimistic New Lives for Old: Cultural Transformation—Manus, 1928-1953 (1956), a manifesto for “self-determined modernization” (280). A leading British journal for anthropologists assigned it for review to an Australian PhD student at Oxford, Murray Groves, whose critique was savage. He found its prose rhetorical, sensational, impenetrable verbiage. He called its sociology slovenly. He goes out of his way to commend her earlier monograph on kinship. He ends,

If Dr. Mead wants to be taken seriously by those of her colleagues who “bloom on the outmoded tree of European history,” she may profitably read again her own earlier study of Manus kinship to discover what a good anthropological monograph is like. And . . . she would do well to take with her on her next field trip some interest in sociological theory as well as the cameras, tape recorders, short-hand techniques, stopwatches and research assistants that she apparently considers the necessary conditions of what she calls “fine-grain” fieldwork. (Groves 1957)

Admittedly this is a hostile critique. As it was published under the auspices of the Royal Anthropological Institute, it was clearly political and it clearly suggests that Mead’s anthropological credentials are on probation. She knows how to do it but she chooses not to. Hence, she has no authority and her new work can be set aside. Yet almost as nasty things were said earlier about the “diaperology” of the swaddling hypothesis and the various attempts at national character studies including her own of the American national character. What were seen as the intellectual shortcomings of her work was detracting from her ability to lead, even to be taken seriously. So, despite achieving high institutional positions in the Society for Applied Anthropology and the American Anthropological Association, she did not command the troops and was denounced in 1971 when she attempted to exonerate an anthropologist accused of complicity in counterinsurgency work (289).

3. Reflections

Mandler’s subtitle “How Margaret Mead Won the Second World War and Lost the Cold War” is very odd. Margaret Mead did not fight the Second World War, so how could she win it? Her contribution to the Cold War was non-existent, so how could she win that? She tried to sell anthropology to the government while preaching cultural relativism, and while cooperating with fellow scholars whose politics ranged from cold warrior hawks to fellow-travelers. Is it any surprise that she was in the end cold-shouldered and decided to rededicate herself to doing fieldwork anthropology in remote places?

The final part of Mandler’s book narrates how anthropology became adversarial, how it resisted involvement with U.S. policy, refused cooperation with the government, and cried mea culpa for ever having acted differently. Thus, Mead and her aspirations for anthropology morphed from something positive in her own eyes to something very negative in the eyes of her critics. And of course in the process of dethroning her as a leader her work itself was dissected and sometimes disrespected. ⁴ She complained in a letter to Robert Lowie in 1956 that she had “got accustomed to being treated as anthropologically non-existent.” ⁵ This was written in the year her New Lives for Old came out. She goes on in the letter to ruminate that one of her faults was to put theoretical ideas into monographs. Only papers in anthropological journals, clearly labeled theory, got intellectual traction.

To an extent, Mandler’s story is a sad one of great expectations and shattered hopes. Mandler’s thesis is that Mead’s ambitions came a cropper because of the Cold War—one more example of the damage done in America to the academy and to scholarship by that series of events. The more usual lament is that the Cold War corrupted the social sciences in general and anthropology in particular. Margaret Mead was accused of leading anthropology into complicity with the military industrial complex, a charge which she greatly resented since she had, as a matter of fact, tried hard, even amid the certainties of the Second World War, to keep her intellectual independence, steering clear of governance and policy as well as black ops and secrecy. Mead firmly opposed demonizing the Soviet Union, noting that any vilification was bound to boomerang back on some hyphenated Americans or other. RAND was not pleased, severed relations, and her reports “disappeared into the bowels of the secret state, never to resurface” (249). She advocated government work for anthropologists because she thought they were a force for enlightenment, for cultural protection, for good. Powerful people, however, thought of her work and her outlook as a bit cranky (“diaperology”), a bit ambivalent about the enemy, not quite the right sort of thing. Meanwhile some of her very own colleagues were scuttling her for political reasons (the academic left), others for reasons of lack of sociological purity. Yet when she and cultural anthropology were criticized by Derek Freeman after her death, there was a closing of the ranks and a fierce haka was mounted in her defense (Jarvie 2013). In her later years, she was an odd spectacle: for all intents taking on the mantle of a prophet.