The Trashing of Margaret Mead: Anatomy of an Anthropological Controversy

Introduction

3 Introduction S     anthropologist of the twentieth century . At the time of her death in 1978, Margaret Mead was America’s first woman of science and among the three best-known women in the nation.1 For many people, she was the embodiment of anthropology itself. As a successful professional woman, Mead was also a heroine and role model for many younger women. Time magazine called her “Mother to the World.”2 As a public intellectual , she spoke about sex and the family, on behalf of civil rights, for the environment , and against war. Her opinions on almost any contemporary issue were sought so frequently that it became a cliché to ask, “What would Margaret Mead say?” Easily recognizable with her cape and walking staff, she was considered an icon and an oracle. During her fifty years in public life, Mead wrote a number of popular books on topics of great public interest, including Coming of Age in Samoa, the book that launched her career and remained her best-known work. Other popular books included Male and Female; Culture and Commitment, about young Americans and the “generation gap”; and A Rap on Race, with author James Baldwin, on race relations in the United States. She lectured tirelessly, networked broadly, served in many organizations and professional associations, and received many honors. Mead was the president of the American Anthropological Association and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She appeared on television and radio. And for seventeen years, from 1962 through 1978, she wrote a column for Redbook, a magazine read by millions of women each month. Mead’s most famous words are still cited today: Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world.® Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.3 Whether displayed publicly on an antiwar T-shirt worn in San Francisco on the eve of the Iraq War in 2003 or held privately as an “idea to live by,” these words resonated with large numbers of people.4 No wonder people wanted to know what Margaret Mead would say. If someone asked her opinion, she usually gave it, often acting as a social critic. When testifying in the 1960s before a congressional committee on marijuana use, Mead chastised adults for lecturing young people about the evils of marijuana while at the same time smoking cigarettes and consuming alcohol themselves.5 She could casually stroll down the dinosaur hall near her office at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and engagingly discuss the implications of dinosaur extinctions for the future of the planet.6 Mead consciously shaped much of her career around public issues, putting anthropology and herself on the map. She popularized the discipline in a way no one has before or since. Mead was so well known that, for many Americans and others as well, her name and face were instantly recognizable. While she was still alive she had her own character in the first stage version of the musical Hair. After her death she appeared on a U.S. postage stamp. In 2001, the Wall Street Journal used a large photographic portrait of Mead in a prominent quarter-page ad about its online news service; her name appeared in tiny print, just in case someone had forgotten who she was. Schools were named after her; so was a crater on the planet Venus. A recent book by Esther Newton humorously titled Margaret Mead Made Me Gay had little to do with Mead but nevertheless caught people’s attention with its association of Mead and sex. An article in the Nation by Micaela di Leonardo titled “Margaret Mead vs. Tony Soprano” also traded on her name recognition, just as author Nicholas von Hoffman and cartoonist Garry Trudeau had decades earlier in their satirical book on Samoa, Tales from the Margaret Mead Taproom. Mead touched many lives directly and indirectly. She even taught a future president of the United States. While she was a visiting professor at Yale in the 1960s, young George W. Bush enrolled in her popular undergraduate anthropology course and received one of the highest grades of his college career.7 Apparently , though, Mead and anthropology had little influence on Bush, receiving no mention in his autobiography. Of course, Mead was an anthropologist first, and anthropologists remember her because of her lasting contributions to the discipline. Within a span of fourteen years, between 1925 and 1939, Mead made five field trips to...