How Like a Leaf: An Interview with Donna J. Haraway, and: Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict: The Kinship of Women, and: Grit-Tempered: Early Women Archaeologists in the Southeastern United States (review)

How Like a Leaf: An Interview with Donna J. Haraway by Thyrza Nichols Goodeve. New York: Routledge Press, [1998] 1999, 197 pp., $17.95 paper.

Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict: The Kinship of Women by Hilary Lapsley. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999, 351 pp., $24.95 hardcover.

Grit-Tempered: Early Women Archaeologists in the Southeastern United States edited by Nancy Marie White, Lynn P. Sullivan, and Rochelle [End Page 202] A. Marrinan. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999, 416 pp., $49.95 hardcover.

Together, these three books give a remarkable picture of women in American intellectual life through much of the twentieth century. They also provide a complex picture of anthropology as an interdisciplinary field. The differences in the personal and intellectual orientations of both the subjects and the authors of these books are also striking and effects the presentations and the issues considered. Moreover, while Donna J. Haraway is currently an active scholar, as are most of the archaeologists discussed in Grit-Tempered Women, Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict can only be seen in terms of history and of their lasting influences.

How Like a Leaf is a lengthy interview-conversation that covers aspects of both Haraway's life and work. Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, Haraway's former student, identifies herself as a freelance writer. Born in 1944, Haraway is the youngest of the fourteen women discussed here, and her own voice is most clearly and extensively heard. Professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, she is identified as a "feminist historian of science," whose dissertation dealt with the history and philosophy of biology (176). Strictly speaking, Haraway is not an anthropologist, but much of her work has been influenced by anthropology, as in her interest in primates, race, indigenous knowledge, and other matters of concern to anthropologists, and indeed, specifically to feminist anthropologists. Her work on primates centers on her interest in the work of primatologists, often women, studying free-ranging monkeys and apes (Haraway 1989). Haraway now recognizes that her understanding of this work would have been enhanced had she actually observed the work of the primatologists in the field rather than relying on interviews and documents, in the manner of historians. Her interest in biological and cultural evolution was similarly stimulated by the work of feminist anthropologists in the 1970s who reflected on the economic role of women and female primates in the evolution of a characteristically human mode of adaptation. Their critique of what has come to be known as the "man the hunter" hypothesis is key here. Going from primates to humans and on to cyborgs is only a further step for Haraway in thinking about the evolution of living systems. Standing as a postmodern historian at the margin of anthropology, she looks critically to both a technological past and future.

Lapsley's book on Mead and Benedict is altogether different. A psychologist and women's studies scholar, not an anthropologist, she is primarily interested in the personal relationship between Mead and Benedict and others close to them rather than focusing on their scholarly work. A lesbian herself, she is fascinated by the sexual as well as the personal relationships between these women, and indeed at what women's intimate friendships might have been like in the 1920s and 1930s. Moreover, as a New Zealander, her take on American society in the earlier part of the century is also that of an outsider.

The time of Benedict's (1887-1948) and Mead's (1901-1978) lives make them historical, even remote figures. Mead's life and work after Benedict's death are treated lightly. This includes the controversy that erupted after Mead's death...