Learning to Live in One World: Margaret Mead and the Rise and Fall of Cultural Relativism

At a moment when discussions about the United States’ role in the world coming out of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and into the Arab Spring are particularly pressing, Peter Mandler’s Return from the Natives: How Margaret Mead Won the Second World War and Lost the Cold War reminds us of the important work and incredible challenges social scientists encountered and continue to face in times of national and international crisis. Through a close reading of anthropologist Margaret Mead’s intellectual work and personal biography during a lesser known portion of her career (1939–53), which was spent largely in the United States putting anthropology to use stateside, Return from the Natives raises significant questions and offers compelling clues about both the changing U.S. role in the world during the transition from World War Two–inspired internationalism to Cold War–fueled globalization and what anthropologists contributed to these debates. How have intellectuals squared their disciplinary responsibilities with their personal and national interests? What roles have anthropologists played in charting the waters through past international conflicts? Using Mead as a model, what role ought they play?

Named one of the eight “outstanding women of the modern world” by the Washington Post in 1943, Margaret Mead is best known for her important field work in Samoa and New Guinea, her close relationship with Ruth Benedict, and her cultural commentary during the l960s (p. xii). Less known and largely misunderstood, according to Mandler, is how Mead brought her anthropological skills to bear on the United States in the years leading up to World War Two and through the Cold War’s inception. Since her death, however, scholars have come to critically identify her as a cold warrior who sacrificed her anthropological commitments to research subjects in order to serve the expanding Cold War state—effectively putting the nation on the road to the Vietnam War. Mandler asserts that many of these misinterpretations are the product of approaching Mead from a post-Vietnam vantage point rather than locating her work in its appropriate historical context: a moment when the question of American engagement in the world remained open for debate and the course of the Cold War had yet to be determined. Mandler does not find Mead innocent of all charges. He is aware of the consequences, intended and unintended, of her anthropological work. Still, rather than her role as a cold warrior, Mandler highlights Mead’s steadfast advocacy of cultural diversity as an international value the United States and the world should embrace.

Far more than an intellectual biography of Margaret Mead, Return from the Natives is also a chronicle of Mead’s intellectual intimates. The anthropological work of her colleague and third husband, Gregory Bateson, is extensively explored, as are her lovers and intellectual sparring partners, Ruth Benedict and Geoffrey Gorer. Examining the occupational and ideological diversity of Mead’s circle is also of considerable importance to Mandler, who is intent on distinguishing the World War Two/Cold War anthropological tradition from other social sciences. Arguing against accusations that social scientists were simply handmaidens to the state and complicit in, if not actively solicitous of, the militarization and weaponization of the nation in the 1940s and 1950s, Mandler describes the various trajectories available to Mead and her peers. He likewise captures the challenges they faced navigating their disciplinary commitments and patriotic compulsions.

Which brings us to the very heart of the text: Mandler’s exploration of the rise of the cultural relativist tradition in anthropology, its 1940s heyday under Mead, and its Cold War eclipse as the proponents of “universal democracy” concluded that the world’s people were “just like us.” Displacing Mead’s assertion that national differences could be traced back to a cultural diversity requiring recognition and respect was the idea, popularized by modernization theorists, that difference was more...