New York: Berghahn, 2021. x, 186 pp. (B&W photos.) US$24.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-80073-143-1.
This new biography of Margaret Mead, an American anthropologist celebrated in the twentieth century, aims to succinctly contextualize her contribution to anthropology within the history of the discipline. From a generally sympathetic perspective, Paul Shankman focuses on the trajectory of Mead’s ideas and their origins, her status as a public intellectual, and the legacies of her theories and methods in anthropology. Mead was a graduate in social psychology and began her career in anthropology as a student of Franz Boas, who founded the discipline of cultural anthropology in the US. Her first fieldwork was in Samoa and, following the publication in 1928 of Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization (William Morrow and Company, New York), its portrait of untroubled sexual promiscuity among teenaged girls in an idyllic setting made her famous and is still in print almost a century later. It asserted that culture rather than nature shaped the psyche of adolescents, in a Boasian retaliation against notions of the time about biological determinism.
After the two chapters on the Samoa work, Shankman takes the reader on a well-researched journey through her subsequent fieldwork and writings on Manus Island and among three peoples of the Sepik Province in Papua New Guinea, in Bali in Indonesia, and among the Omaha of North America. From these works and with the foundational influence of her prior academic training in social psychology, Mead popularized ideas about the ways culture influences personality to become a revered public intellectual in her time. Much of her popular work held up “her” peoples as a mirror for Americans to see themselves in and to compare their social norms with those of “primitive” people, making the concept of cultural relativism mainstream. As Shankman shows, some anthropologists did not take seriously her popular works claiming that biology did not account for storm and stress among teenagers or that strict child-raising was socially harmful; however, her less well-known ethnographies—of Manu’a in Samoa, the Mountain Arapesh in Papua New Guinea, and others—won her more respect. During World War II Mead took part, as did many other anthropologists, in applied research within government programs, and later contributed to postwar prognostications on “national character,” which evoked some academic criticism because applied anthropology was and is ethically controversial in the academy, but which did nothing to lessen her public stature.
Although Mead wrote extensively about male and female personality differences and cultural variations, she never had much to say about gendered power differentials in the societies she studied. Shankman’s excellent chapter on Mead’s 17 years in the 1960s and 1970s as a columnist for Redbook (an American women’s magazine) demonstrates that, “[f]or Mead, there was no contradiction between her own life and her belief in appropriate women’s roles” (131). She also saw the increasing departure from traditional gendered roles in Western societies—made possible by the breaking down of barriers to women’s employment outside the home—as a mixed blessing, with risks to women’s feminine identity as mothers and to men’s sense of masculinity.
A second-to-concluding chapter addresses the “Mead-Freeman” controversy. Derek Freeman, a professor of anthropology and Samoa expert, wrote a blistering refutation of Mead’s conclusions about Samoa. Published in 1983, five years after her death, it revived Mead’s name in public and academic minds. In the subsequent storm in the media and the academy, Shankman, who has also done fieldwork in Samoa, became well known as a critic of Freeman. This reviewer, also a “Samoanist,” thinks that although Freeman overstated some of his conclusions, he presented a far more accurate portrayal of Samoan culture and society than Mead did. However, Shankman does a very good job of demolishing Freeman’s subsequent claims and efforts to prove that Mead was “duped” by her interlocutors.
Anthropologists no longer speak or write of “primitive” people and Mead’s use of the term is no longer accepted, being deeply anchored in the beliefs of her time about social evolution. As Shankman shows, Mead found with new ways of studying small-scale societies subsumed by colonial regimes that those societies were more interesting for their cultures than as remnants of a vanishing “primitive” world, or as comparative evolutionary models of social structure. There are many books about Margaret Mead but this one will make an excellent text for teaching undergraduate students aspects of twentieth-century anthropology, as well as being of interest to students of American popular culture of that era.
Penelope Schoeffel
National University of Samoa, Apia