In the mid-1960's, when I was doing graduate work in anthropology, a favorite topic of debate in the student commons used to be whether Margaret Mead was “any good” as an anthropologist. Being somewhat older than most of my fellow students, and having been drawn into the field partly by Coming of Age in Samoa, I used to defend Mead vigorously: just because she could write well and had become something of a public figure—given to spouting off about anything from Nazism to premarital sex—was no reason to denigrate her professionally. Now I have finished reading her autobiography, Blackberry Winter,¹ and while I don't exactly want to reverse my earlier position, I wonder whether it isn't time to revive some of the arguments on both sides.

Margaret Mead was the firstborn child in an academically-minded family (both her mother and father had Ph.D.'s) and was raised without any conscious sense of conflict between her identity as a woman and her desire to use her mind. (I stress the word “conscious” because there is a good deal of indirect evidence in her autobiography that points in quite a different direction.) Although she married young, immediately upon her graduation from Barnard, this too did not affect her plans. She and Luther Cressman, her young husband who planned to become a minister but was then studying sociology, practiced birth control and went to graduate school together. And when Margaret confessed to a burning desire to “go to the field” to study a primitive tribe, Luther obligingly obtained a scholarship to Europe for himself for the nine months that they would be separated.

Out of this first field trip, undertaken when Mead was only twenty-four, came her most engaging and important book, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), but it also cost her her first husband. For on the boat coming from Samoa to Europe, where she planned to join Luther, she met Reo Fortune, a young New Zealander on his way to Cambridge to study psychology. Mead is fairly frank about the attraction that she and Fortune felt for each other on that long ocean voyage, but about the reunion with her husband in Marseille, she writes only: “That is one of the moments I would take back and live differently, if I could.”

Mead's next field trip, this time as Reo Fortune's wife, was a six-month stay among the Manus people of New Guinea, out of which came her Growing Up in New Guinea (1930) and Fortune's Manus Religion (1935). While back in the United States writing these books, the couple also managed to squeeze in a three-month research project among the Omaha Indians in Nebraska, which led to Mead's Changing Culture of an Indian Tribe (1932) and Fortune's Omaha Secret Societies (1932). And, by late 1931, they were back in the South Seas again.

This next field trip proved to be difficult for Mead both personally and professionally. She and Fortune began by spending seven months among the Mountain Arapesh, a New Guinea tribe living close to the subsistence level and therefore almost exclusively preoccupied with the daily struggle to obtain food. In her autobiography Mead writes that she found this culture, “in which there were so few ceremonies and little elaboration, very thin, and it taxed all my by now well-developed field skills to make anything of it”—a surprising statement in view of the fact that she later went on to write a five-part, 675-page monograph on the Arapesh.

Next, she and Fortune spent three-and-a-half months among the Mundugumor, also a New Guinea tribe, whom Mead disliked intensely (they were an aggressive, hostile people who still practiced infanticide) but by whom Fortune—at least according to Mead—“was both repelled and fascinated.” Finally, toward the end of the year, they moved to the Sepik River area (still in New Guinea), hoping to find a third, somewhat more congenial, culture to study.

They found their culture—the Tchambuli—and also Mead's future (third) husband. Gregory Bateson, a young English anthropologist, was studying the Iatmul, a tribe situated near the Tchambuli; and after helping Mead and Fortune get settled in their village, he became a frequent visitor. Mead at that point was interested in the problem of individual temperament and its relationship to sexual and cultural differences. She ultimately concluded—in Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935) and Male and Female (1949)—that there was such a thing as inborn temperamental propensities but that these were modified by the cultural styles prescribed for males and females. Eventually, in the course of their theoretical discussions out in the bush, Mead, Fortune, and Bateson took to analyzing each other as well as the tribes they had been studying. “It became clear that Gregory and I were close together in temperament—represented, in fact, a male and a female version of a temperamental type that was in strong contrast with the one represented by Reo”; and “we also discussed the implications for personal relationships. For example, what were the implications for a marriage in which the partners had essentially the same temperament?” In this highly intellectual game, Fortune clearly became odd-man-out, and upon their return to civilization Mead separated from him and, two years later, married Bateson.

Mead's next field trip, in the company of Bateson, lasted two-and-a-half years, much of it spent in Bali, but also including a return visit to the Iatmul at the Sepik River. Bateson was interested in photography, and he and Mead took some 28,000 stills, in addition to movie footage, illustrating various aspects of Balinese and Iatmul culture. In keeping with the old research adage that one's methods often dictate the results, the two chief publications growing out of this Bali field trip were essentially picture-books: Bateson and Mead's Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis (1942) and Mead and Macgregor, Growth and Culture: A Photographic Study of Balinese Childhood (1951).

Mead and Bateson returned to the United States on the eve of World War II, and both of them soon became involved in war-related social-science research. Mead also discovered that much to her surprise, for she had been told when she was twenty-five that she could not have children, she was pregnant. In December of 1939, at the age of nearly thirty-eight, she gave birth to a daughter. The last fifth of Mead's autobiography is given over almost exclusively to a lyrical account of her daughter's earliest years—how she reacted to the then-new Spockian principles of child-raising—and the more recent birth of her daughter's first child. Mead glosses over her work during these intervening years, saying only that “since the 1940's I have moved in new directions.” And, despite her paeans to family life, she refers only obliquely to the fact that in 1945 her marriage to Bateson also came to an end.

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To find out what became of Margaret Mead professionally between 1940 and 1972, one can begin by consulting the inside flap and back of the dust-jacket of her autobiography, which read like a Who's Who entry of honorary titles and awards, of conferences attended, speeches given, and task-forces organized. It is, in fact, these last thirty years of activities that have given her a world-wide reputation as everybody's grandmother and that have caused many anthropologists to dismiss her as a serious scholar. But if one looks carefully at her early work—and Mead says without a trace of false modesty that by the age of thirty-four, “I had what amounted to a lifetime of completed work behind me”—it becomes obvious that there was never a sharp break between her scientific research and her punditry. Even her earliest book, Coming of Age in Samoa, contains two rather preachy concluding chapters about the implications of Samoan education for our own society. Her later columns in Redbook, lectures on the generation gap, and raps on race are no more than an extension of this early propensity to moralize. In fact, one would have to say that only a minuscule proportion of Mead's output is truly scientific. Her monographs about the Arapesh, the Omaha, and the Manus kinship system are competent—if not very original—works of social science. Coming of Age in Samoa is aimed at a popular audience and written in an anecdotal style, but still deals with an interesting and important theoretical question. Significantly, it was a question not chosen by Mead herself but set for her by her teacher, Franz Boas. Boas had become interested in adolescence, and he wanted Mead to test out “on the one hand, the extent to which the troubles of adolescence, called in German Sturm und Drang and Weltschmerz, depended upon the attitudes of a particular culture and, on the other hand, the extent to which they were inherent in the adolescent stage of psychobiological development with all its discrepancies, uneven growth, and new impulses.” In Samoa, Mead found a society in which children moved without any inner turmoil from childhood into a period of sexual experimentation and, eventually, marriage. Her book is therefore a case study of a negative instance, arguing that because Samoan adolescence does not involve great emotional upheavals, cultures, rather than universally present biological factors, condition human behavior.

Today scientists laugh at such a categorical, one-sided resolution of the nature-nurture problem; but in 1928 Mead's demonstration of the cultural impact on adolescent behavior was as important as Malinowski's demonstration that the Oedipus complex did not exist in a matrilineal society. Mead subsequently modified her views about the impact of inborn traits—particularly with reference to male and female roles and temperament—but her work on this subject remained anecdotal and illustrative at a time when other social and biological scientists were turning to experimental or carefully controlled research. As a result, her books Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies and Male and Female have been misunderstood and attacked from all sides. Male and Female, for example, has been criticized by Diana Trilling for ignoring Freud's insights into the psychological impact of being male or female; at the same time it was roasted by Betty Friedan for being a sexist tract urging women to have babies and be “feminine.” The problem, I think, is that Mead's discursive approach often permits her to stand on all sides of all issues and leaves her open to such attacks.

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A different but related case is the current controversy over Mead's views about the generation gap. As the anthropologist Cora du Bois has pointed out, Mead has long been interested in sociocultural change viewed as generational interaction. That is to say, in several books and articles—most notably in New Lives for Old (1956), her re-study of the Manus people whom she first described in Growing Up in New Guinea—Mead has focused upon various generations as they are simultaneously exposed to rapid social change. Again, because she favors an anecdotal approach, one is treated primarily to descriptions of incidents in which a father and son disagree or a young middle-aged man states proudly to the visiting anthropologist, “We used to do things this way, but now we do them differently.” It is all very persuasive, but no evidence is provided to indicate the prevalence of the habits or traits she describes, and—more serious for an anthropologist purporting to deal with personality change in response to social change—she offers no psychological data, such as depth interviews or responses to psychological tests. In the case of her second field trip among the Manus, such tests were administered in great profusion, but—as Mead admits in the Appendix of New Lives for Old—they had not yet been analyzed when she wrote her book.

Her latest assertions about social change as a generational phenomenon are so broad as to defy the rules of scientific evidence altogether. First delivered in 1969 in the form of lectures and subsequently published as Culture and Commitment: A Study of the Generation Gap (1970), Mead's thesis is that children born post-1945 are living in a world in which they feel at home but which their elders can barely cope with, let alone comprehend. Prior to this supposed watershed, she argues, cultures were either “postfigurative”—given to very little social change so that parents and grandparents were of some use in socializing children—or “cofigurative”—experiencing social change but of an order that both adults and children could assimilate. Today, Mead argues, all cultures are “prefigurative” and adults are of no use at all: “there are no elders who know what those who have been reared within the last twenty years know about the world into which they were born,” and “the young, free to act on their own initiative, can lead their elders in the direction of the unknown.” Not surprisingly, these ideas, so similar to Charles Reich's formulation of Consciousness III, are enormously popular on college campuses.

One may well ask what sort of relevance Margaret Mead herself, at age seventy-one, can have for the trackless young; but she has explained that in addition to having been raised almost seven decades ahead of her time (which puts her back at the culturally innocent age of one) the generational crisis we are facing “is, in fact, perceived most accurately not by the young, but by their discerning and prophetic elders.” A somewhat less apocalyptic explanation, which has a long and honorable history in anthropology, is that there is always a generation gap of sorts between parents and their children, in response to which children often form alliances with the grandparental generation against the middle, power-holding group. According to this view, the young and old ends of the age-spectrum are hostile to the middle sector because they lack the status that an achievement-oriented society awards those who are productive. This view also assumes that the situation is natural and resolves itself: the young become middle-aged and find the world less easy to understand than they once thought; the old eventually die off.

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I raise these points about Mead's work not because I dislike popularized anthropology: it is, in fact, my favorite bedtime reading. But I am disturbed when a famous popularizer tries to pass himself, or herself, off as scientifically beyond reproach. And though it may be admirable for some individuals to attempt to act as bridges between the worlds of hard science and popular culture, there is a great temptation to use the cachet acquired in one area to enhance one's status in the other. Thus while Mead is not so highly regarded as an anthropologist by other anthropologists, she is often deferred to by them (particularly at large and public meetings) because of her non-academic reputation; and when she testifies or speaks out publicly on matters she knows little or nothing about (marijuana, arms control, space flight), she is listened to because of her supposed expertise as an anthropologist. I am reminded, in this connection, of a Berkeley cocktail party I once attended in honor of C. P. Snow. At one end of the room several literary critics and novelists were saying, sotto voce, “Well, he's really a terrible novelist, but I hear he's quite a good physicist,” while at the other end of the room a group of famous physicists were saying to each other, “Of course, he's no good as a physicist, but I hear he's written some nice novels.” It was the first time it had occurred to me that the outcome of attempting to bridge two worlds might be simply a pratfall between two stools.

¹ Morrow, 305 pp., $8.95.