Margaret Mead by Paul Shankman (review)

Margaret Mead, by Paul Shankman, is the first volume in a series from Berghahn Books focusing on anthropology's ancestors (the second is on William Robertson Smith, and the third is on Françoise Héritier). The prospect of examining and evaluating Mead's work and influence is necessarily a daunting one, and Shankman is well aware of the challenges involved. Mead herself was a complex person and lived a very active professional life from the early 1930s, when she did fieldwork in Sāmoa, until her death, over forty-five years later, in 1978. Shankman does an admirable job addressing the complexities of Mead's work and the value it had and continues to have for anthropology. Although he clearly admires Mead and her accomplishments, he fairly evaluates her work and gives adequate voice to her critics. The book is a comprehensive introduction not only to Mead but also to the nature of American anthropological inquiry during the middle of the twentieth century.

Shankman divides the book into two sections that mirror Mead's own activities: the first covers the early years when her anthropological activities, both fieldwork and publications, were prominent; the second explores her work after World War II, when her field of interest reached beyond the boundaries of academic anthropology.

Although her PhD dissertation was not based on field research, Mead had an almost unquenchable thirst for firsthand fieldwork. Shankman describes the research she conducted in seven different cultural groups (Sāmoan, Omaha, Arapesh, Mundugumor, Tchambuli [Chambri], Balinese, and Iatmul), noting what a remarkable accomplishment that was. He highlights the importance of the new questions, methods, and topics for research that she introduced. It is only in historical context that the value of these contributions can be assessed. One of the strengths of Shankman's analysis is his scrupulousness throughout in carefully placing Mead's work in this context. Too many of Mead's critics err when judging her work because they do not do so.

In discussing the publications resulting from Mead's fieldwork, Shankman is careful to distinguish her work written for professional colleagues from that designed for the general public. It is unfair to judge her work on Sāmoa exclusively from The Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) without considering Bishop Museum Bulletin 76, which is essentially a monograph-length description of "The Social Organization of Manua" (1930). As Shankman observes, "The two books stood in stark contrast to one another" (40). Nor should one evaluate her work on Manus from Growing Up in New Guinea (1930) without Kinship in the Admiralty Islands (1934). Mead was cognizant of the importance of the data she collected and was committed to making it generally available. Ironically, she received considerable criticism from her anthropological colleagues for writing books for the general public and facilitating the public's access to her ideas and data; these works allowed her detractors to "label her a 'popularizer' and to pay less attention to the professional side of her work" (4).

World War II had a profound impact on Mead, as it "took precedence over Mead's personal life and professional trajectory" (86). It was during and after the war that she turned her attention to the colonizers as well as the colonized, and she initiated the idea that a culture could be studied "from a distance," a necessity during the war when it was impossible to conduct fieldwork in locations such as Japan. Anthropologists did assist the war effort in a variety of ways. Mead, Gregory Bateson, and Rhoda Métraux, for example, conducted top secret research for the agency that later became the US Central Intelligence Agency (94). Mead's wartime activities were focused primarily on the strategic interests of the United States and its allies; however, her focus changed after the war to...