Coming of Age

Four decades before Margaret Mead went to Samoa, two other anthropologists arrived at Zuni Pueblo in the New Mexican desert. One was male, one was female. Both were involved in projects of self-creation as well as ethnography. Matilda Stevenson befriended a Zuni berdache, a man who chose to live life as a woman. Stevenson was, in her own way, a woman who chose to live life as a man. Frank Hamilton Cushing insinuated his way into Zuni society, exploiting his own culture's confused association of Native Americans as, on the one hand, remnants of a truly manly warrior society, and, on the other, essentially female—beardless, long-haired, naïve. Stevenson accused Cushing of wrapping his hair in curling papers at night to achieve the "native" semblance he adopted most famously in a full-length portrait by Thomas Eakins. Neither of them seems to have been conscious or self-conscious about playing with American conventions of gender; the fledgling discipline of anthropology offered a context in which that play, while unusual, did not seem particularly transgressive.

In fact, playing with social conventions was, once anthropology moved from armchairs out into the field, part of both the theory and the methodology of the discipline. For Cushing, who carried with him the notion of cultural universalism, becoming primitive was the best way to explore the early stages of his own civilization. He worked out the meanings of Zuni practices and traditions physically, through his own body. He became Zuni, and then analyzed Zuni. It is a wonderful symbol of his approach that, back in Washington, he shed his clothes and posed for diorama models to be used in museum displays. Frank Cushing was the physical core of representations of these Native Americans in the nation's capitol.

By the time Margaret Mead arrived on the anthropological scene in the late 1920s, anthropology was more professional, less flamboyant, and less overtly imperialistic. But it still provided a context in which practitioners could play with the process of identity at the edges of social convention. And folks back home still gleefully indulged in that play vicariously, if often deriving very different meanings from it than it held for the anthropologist herself. What is fascinating about Mead, and about Nancy Lutkehaus' book about her, is the shift of locus. Mead found a way to bring anthropological shape-shifting home to New York.

Margaret Mead: The Making of an American Icon is neither a biography of Mead nor a history of anthropology, though readers in search of either will find much to like here. Lutkehaus has written a work of cultural history, an investigation into how a rather frumpy woman managed to read and ride the fast-moving currents of her own culture, creating not only an identity for herself, but a set of mirrors that allowed Americans to see themselves in her. Her tools were her astute intelligence, her gender, and her mastery of the fluid methods of the relatively new science of anthropology. Lutkehaus traces the interplay of these traits in Mead's construction of herself in the form of four modern American cultural archetypes: the modern woman, the anthropologist, the scientist, and the celebrity public intellectual. That Mead was able to create images that seemed to her admirers and critics alike to serve as reflections of her society, and that she did so not for one or two very different decades but for half a century, suggests that Lutkehaus has found a subject well worth her attention and ours.

Lutkehaus structures her book thematically, looking in turn at how Mead came to embody each of these four types. Though the book is not a chronological study, it does follow Mead's life, from her first journey to Samoa to her emergence as the grandmotherly conscience of small groups of individuals who wanted to change the world. As it does, we glimpse strands of the momentous world events against which Mead created herself...