Return from the Natives: How Margaret Mead Won the Second World War and Lost the Cold War by Peter Mandler (review)

In the post-Vietnam era, historians have explored the relationship between social science and the U.S. national security state with an unrelentingly critical eye. As they have argued, many U.S. economists, sociologists, and political scientists made a fateful choice. Seeking new routes to prestige, funding, and authority, they aligned their ambitions with the imperatives of the Cold War, claiming scholarly objectivity and empirical advances while launching economic development plans intended to undermine peasant revolutions, implementing counterinsurgency schemes, generating propaganda to shore up right-wing dictatorships, and devising nuclear strategy that accelerated the arms race. In the process, social scientists also abandoned their own intellectual responsibility to expose the abuses of power by their own government, turned their back on democratic and progressive values, and forfeited their integrity. Although Peter Mandler acknowledges the value of that scholarship, he turns to Margaret Mead and the history of American anthropology to offer a different, more complex perspective. “Even this most ambitious and power-seeking of anthropologists,” he argues, “was thwarted by the nature of her fundamental moral and intellectual commitments to cultural relativism from securing her place at the table” (p. xiv). Mead was unable to reconcile her call for mutual understanding in a world of cultural difference with the increasingly strident emphasis on universal values and U.S.-sponsored visions of global modernization, and she therefore took a different path. As the Cold War accelerated, she “returned to the natives,” trading Washington’s corridors of power for a renewed devotion to fieldwork in the South Pacific.

Making intensive use of Mead’s papers and those of Mead’s closest associates, especially Ruth Benedict, Gregory Bateson, and Geoffrey Gorer, Mandler emphasizes the agency of the anthropologists themselves, exploring their professional choices, personal networks, and competing allegiances. Mead’s illustrious career, he explains, was profoundly shaped by the tension between her intellectual commitments and her professional ambition. The most famous student of Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict, Mead absorbed their emphasis on the study of cultural diversity and cohesion, as well as their emphatic rejection of arguments based on racial difference or cultural superiority. In the landmark studies she produced in the 1920s, most notably Coming of Age in Samoa (1929), she argued that exploring the broad diversity of cultural patterns in supposedly primitive, homogeneous societies should lead toward greater social toleration in advanced, heterogeneous cultures, promoting an “education for choice” and allowing the young to determine their own path from many different options. By the 1930s, Mead’s interest in how cultural patterns were created and maintained led her toward psychological theory as well, particularly toward a neo-Freudian emphasis on the impact of “ego” formation during childhood.

When World War II made South Pacific fieldwork impossible, she directed her ambitions toward the international emergency. Mead and her colleagues also turned to studies of “national character,” aiming to identify the most salient cultural characteristics of Americans, British, Germans, and Japanese. Hoping that books like And Keep Your Powder Dry (1942) would raise U.S. morale, Mead also imagined that national character studies would help generate broader, intercultural understanding. In addition to identifying vulnerabilities in wartime enemies, she expected that eventually the studies could lend themselves to the creation of a more harmonious postwar world based on the “orchestration of cultural diversities” (p. 63). Serving in wartime Washington and later writing manuals for the United Nations Educational, Social, and Cultural Organization on the promotion of technical aid in foreign cultures, Mead’s “greatest ambition” was to “embed the ‘culture and personality’ idea at the heart of intercultural relations” (p. 85).

By the early 1950s, however, as Mandler insightfully argues, Mead’s aspirations ran aground. First, the psychological methods undergirding national character studies came under withering fire. Was it really possible, critics asked, to generalize from a claim about the psychic impact of distinctive methods of childcare...