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Chapter 3:Margaret Mead and the Professional Unpopularity of Popularizers
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31 3 Margaret Mead and the Professional Unpopularity of Popularizers Approval of those outside the specialist group is a negative value or none at all. . . . Scientists who attempt to find a wider audience for professional work are condemned by their peers. —THOMAS S. KUHN, The Essential Tension (1977:290, 347) No other ethnographer has ever been so widely read and publicly visible as Margaret Mead (1902–78) was. Untold throngs of those dismayed with how life is lived in these United States and/or intrigued with how life is lived elsewhere followed her vivid accounts of her voyages of discovery to Pacific islands to learn about the range of human possibility— knowledge to be applied to solving social problems in her homeland and for planning social change here and elsewhere. At least until an alien (Australian Derek Freeman) attacked American cultural anthropology as represented by Mead in her first fieldwork (1928, 1930), students who undertook professional education found that her prestige within her chosen discipline was not as high as nonanthropologists supposed. Because nonscientific audiences evidence a low tolerance for ambiguity and a total unconcern for statistical logic, seeking definitive answers that science does not provide, producers of science generally fail to consider that the members of the public might have a serious—if naive —interest in science. Scientists fail to apprehend how unintelligible research reports can be to those not trained to read them. Unaware of how much they routinely take for granted, scientists genuinely believe that anyone of reasonable intelligence who wants to learn about a line of work will be able to do so—and then reach the same evaluations of work they themselves have reached. This mistaken belief is enhanced by the tendency to forget that part of membership in a scientific community is knowing whose evaluations to credit. The internal hierarchies 32 Margaret Mead and the Unpopularity of Popularizers of status and professionally conceived boundaries of competence recognized (i.e., constructed and maintained) within a field of scientific endeavor are invisible to those outside of it. Authorities highly regarded within a research area are not distinguished from those judged merely competent nor even from those regarded as outright incompetent. Experienced with incomprehension when they try, most scientists do not usually try to tell anyone but colleagues what they do not already know. Trying to inform nonspecialists burns through time that might otherwise be devoted to research and building the store of knowledge (and prestige) in a field. Frustration is increased by the widespread failure of interested members of the public (and, often enough, of those writing sensational headlines and stories about new discoveries) to distinguish between a hypothesis and well-established, replicated findings. Moreover, “of the work [s/]he utilizes, no scientist personally checks more than a small fraction, even of that [s/]he is fully competent to evaluate ,” as Barnes (1972:287) noted. The norm of science that Robert Merton called “organized skepticism” operates at the superindividual level of science, not as an obligation incumbent on each and every individual scientist in regard to every scientific assertion she or he encounters. And what I call “scientific scorn” tends to be invisible: “Scientific communities rarely undertake public exposés of those they regard as incompetent ; informal communication usually ensures that their work is treated as suspect, or, in some cases, written off” (287). Informal evaluation is efficient within science. Laypersons (even scientists from other disciplines or specialties) are left to their own devices. Unsurprisingly, they often confuse what some credentialed scientist asserts with a scientific Truth that has been established. Dismayed by the way expert consensus is routinely cast aside and ideas ludicrous to specialists are propounded by those whom they consider cranks, scientists conclude that the public listens to what it wants to hear, so that there is no point in trying to devote time and energy to enlightening general publics. From very early on, Margaret Mead sought a prophetic mantle and aimed to enlighten an audience that she saw as seeking a message that “things”—in her first work, the tribulations of adolescence and gender expectations—did not have to be the way they were in (WASP) American society. If arrangements in other societies were different, American arrangements could not be accepted as the inevitable product of “human nature.” [44.222.149.13] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 07:14 GMT) Margaret Mead and the Unpopularity of Popularizers 33 The Boasian Paradigm(s) Attacking any and all proposed conceptions of a singular “human...