Mead’s theoretical ideas evolved directly from her field investigations. Between 1925 and 1939 Mead participated in five field
trips and studied eight different societies. Oddly, her own dissertation was not based on fieldwork but on library research
about the material culture of Polynesia—a topic Boas assigned—
and is described as detailed and competent by some (Thomas
1980) and lackluster by others (McDowell 1980:278). Mead’s first
field research was in Samoa where she spent eight months in the
field in 1925. Her book, Coming of Age in Samoa, was the extremely popular outcome, and her results remain controversial
(see discussion below, p. 110). After she returned from Samoa,
Mead and Fortune worked on two field projects: a brief investigation of the Omaha during the summer of 1930 (her only work
on a Native American group) and a much longer research project in New Guinea (1931–1933), a cross-cultural comparison described in her Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies
(1963). Later she conducted field research with Gregory Bateson
in Bali in 1936–1938 and again in 1939 and among the Iatmul of
New Guinea in 1938. The Balinese research is notable for its use
of photography as a research tool, and it resulted in Balinese
Character (Bateson and Mead 1942; for an excellent study, see
Sullivan 1999).
These three phases of fieldwork capture the ethnographic basis of Mead’s central contribution: that specific child-rearing
practices shape personalities that in turn give specific societies
their essential natures. In the introduction to Coming of Age in
Samoa, Mead wrote,
This tale of another way of life is mainly concerned with education, with the process by which the baby, arrived cultureless
upon the human scene, becomes a full-fledged adult member
of his or her society. The strongest light will fall upon the ways
in which Samoan education, in its broadest sense, differs from
our own. And from this contrast we may be able to turn, made
newly and vividly self-conscious and self-critical, to judge
anew and perhaps fashion differently the education we give
our children. (1928:13)
Mead’s profile of Samoan upbringing was based on a detailed study of sixty-eight girls between the ages of eight and
twenty in three near-contiguous villages on the island of Ta’u,
the largest of the three islands in the Manu’a group of easternmost islands in American Samoa. A sample record sheet (Mead
1928:284) indicates that Mead collected a variety of personal and
family data on the ways Samoans evaluated each other (the most
beautiful girl, the wisest man, the worst boy) and administered
a set of basic psychological tests such as rote memory for numbers. “But,” Mead admitted,
this quantitative data represents the barest skeleton of the material which was gathered through months of observation of
the individuals and of groups, alone, in their households, and
at play. From these observations, the bulk of the conclusions
are drawn concerning the attitudes of the children towards
their families and towards each other, their religious interests
or the lack of them, and the details of their sex lives. This information cannot be reduced to tables or statistical statements.
(1928:264)
The basic conclusion was that adolescence in Samoa was not
a stressful period for girls, because in general Samoan society
lacked stresses:
The Samoan background which makes growing up so easy, so
simple a matter, is the general casualness of the whole society.
For Samoa is a place where no one plays for very high stakes,
no one pays very heavy prices, no one suffers for his convictions or fights to the death for special ends. Disagreements between parent and child are settled by the child’s moving across
the street, between a man and his village by the man’s removal
to the next village, between a husband and wife’s seducer by a
few fine mats. . . . And in personal relations, caring is slight.
Love and hate, jealousy and revenge, sorrow and bereavement,
are all matters of weeks. From the first months of its life, when
a child is handed carelessly from one woman’s hands to another’s, the lesson is learned of not caring for one person
greatly, not setting high hopes on any one relationship. (Mead
1928:199)
Mead cited a number of observations to support her conclusion. Samoan babies are nursed on demand until two or three,
but other foods like mashed papaya and coconut milk are given
to the infant during the first week. After weaning, toddlers are
turned over to a girl who is six or seven years old; these older
children watch over and are held responsible for their charges’
misbehavior. The Samoan household is bilateral and often extended; household composition varies from nuclear families to
households of fifteen to twenty people who may be related by
marriage, blood, adoption, or friendship. This flexibility of residence allows a Samoan child to take up residence with another
set of relatives when there are conflicts at home.
Mead described sexual relations as frequent and usually
without consequence. Of the thirty postpubescent girls Mead
studied, seventeen had heterosexual relations and twenty-two
homosexual relations; most of the female virgins lived in the
house of the Christian pastor. Liaisons occurred on the beach or
when an intrepid lover crawled into the house; rape was infrequent in contrast to the “moetotolo, in which a man stealthily
appropriates the favours which are meant for another” (Mead
1928:93; compare Freeman 1983). Abortions may end pregnancies, although there is no great fuss made over “illegitimate”
children who are incorporated into the household.
This ease of transitions, the fluidity of status changes, Mead
argued, characterized childhood and society in Samoa. It was
not simply a matter of childhood shaping society or vice versa,
but both. The implications of this research, and the discovery
that adolescent turmoil was not an innate characteristic of the
human condition, gave Mead’s work great significance.
It is also a source of controversy fifty-five years later. In 1983
Derek Freeman published Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making
and Unmasking of an Anthropological Myth in which he argued
that Mead systematically distorted Samoan society. Freeman,
also a specialist on Samoa, contended that Mead “greatly underestimated the complexity of the culture, society, history, and psychology” of Samoans, assuming them to be “very simple”
(1983:285). That simplicity, Freeman held, merely reflected
Mead’s lack of command of Samoan language, her ignorance of
the complexities of Samoan status and political systems, and a
naive euphoria over Samoa as a tropical Eden. But most damning, in Freeman’s critique, was that Mead went to Samoa with
the preconceived intention of showing that culture, not biology,
determined human responses to life’s transitions, like adolescence. This assumption, Freeman later asserted, predisposed
Mead to uncritically accept Samoan girls’ statements about sexual liaisons that were false hoaxes, “an example of the way in
which a highly intelligent observer can be blinded to empirical
reality by an uncritical commitment to a scientifically unsound
assumption” (1999:212). Freeman writes,
It is thus evident that her writings from this period, about
Samoa as about other South Seas cultures, had the explicit aim
of confuting biological explanations of human behavior and
vindicating the doctrines of the Boasian school. . . . [T]here can
be no doubt that Mead’s fervent desire to demonstrate the validity of the doctrines she held in common with Benedict and
Boas led her, in Samoa, to overlook evidence running counter
to her beliefs. (1983:282)
Freeman’s accusations touched off a howl of controversy,
quite separate from the evaluation of the evidence, since he had
had evidence contradicting Mead since the 1960s but only published it after her death. The debate, which was featured in the
media, grew particularly vitriolic, because it touched a real
nerve: the debasement of the best-known work of the bestknown American anthropologist (see Holmes 1987; Leacock
1993; Orans 1996).
But long before the controversy, Mead’s work in Samoa set
the pattern for a series of detailed ethnographic studies conducted elsewhere in Oceania and Melanesia. Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies presents the results of Mead’s
1931–1933 work among three New Guinea societies. Her research examined a basic question about “the conditioning of the
social personalities of the two sexes” (1963:xiv). Mead described
her study as
an account of how three primitive societies have grouped their
social attitudes towards temperament about the very obvious
facts of sex-difference. I studied this problem in simple societies because here we have the drama of civilization writ small,
a social microcosm alike in kind, but different in size and magnitude, from the complex social structures. . . . Among the gentle mountain-dwelling Arapesh, the fierce cannibalistic
Mundugumor, and the graceful headhunters of Tchambuli, I
studied this question. Each of these tribes had, as has every human society, the point of sex-difference to use as one theme in
the plot of social life, and each of these peoples has developed
that theme differently. (1963:viii–ix)
These three groups lived within a one-hundred-mile radius
of each other on the northern shore of Papua New Guinea, and
yet their personalities were completely distinct. Of the Arapesh,
Mead wrote,
They regard both men and women as inherently gentle, responsive, and cooperative, able and willing to subordinate the
self to the needs of those who are younger or weaker and to derive a major satisfaction from doing so. They have surrounded
with delight that part of parenthood which we consider to be
specially maternal, the minute, loving care for the little child
and the selfless delight in that child’s progress towards maturity. (1963:134)
Arapesh child-rearing responsibilities were so evenly divided between mother and father that “if one comments upon a
middle-aged man as good-looking, the people answer, ‘Goodlooking? Y-e-s? But you should have seen him before he bore all
those children’” (Mead 1963:39).
The Mundugumor could not be more different. Living in a
society “based upon a theory of a natural hostility that exists between all members of the same sex,” Mundugumor fathers and
sons, and mothers and daughters, were adversaries. “The
Mundugumor manchild is born into a hostile world,” Mead
wrote, “a world in which most of the members of his own sex
will be his enemies, in which his major equipment for success
must be a capacity for violence, for seeing and avenging insult”
(1963:189). This hostile temperament was shared by men and
women; the Mundugumor have
no theory that women differ temperamentally from men. They
are believed to be just as violent, just as aggressive, just as jealous. They simply are not quite as strong physically, although a
woman can put up a very good fight and a husband who
wishes to beat his wife takes care to arm himself with a crocodile jaw and to be sure that she is not armed. (Mead 1963:210)
Turning to the Tchambuli, Mead found another society
where the principal themes of temperament and gender were
differently defined:
As the Arapesh made growing food and children the greatest
adventure of their lives, and the Mundugumor found greatest
satisfaction in fighting and competitive acquisition of women,
the Tchambuli may be said to live principally for art. Every
man is an artist and most men are skilled not in some one art
alone, but in many: in dancing, carving, plaiting, painting and
so on. Each man is chiefly concerned with his role upon the
stage of his society, with the elaboration of his costume, the
beauty of the masks that he owns, the skill of his own fluteplaying, the finish and élan of his ceremonies, and upon other
people’s recognition and valuation of his performance. (Mead
1963:245)
And while Tchambuli men were preoccupied with art,
women had the real power, controlling fishing and the most important manufactures, looking on their menfolk with “kindly
tolerance and appreciation” (Mead 1963:255).
Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies was important
because at that time in the United States sex roles were viewed—
by men and women—as inevitable, natural characteristics of gender differences; Mead showed that these behavior patterns were
actually extremely malleable and reflected cultural differences.
Mead and Gregory Bateson also explored the cultural bases
of personality in their fieldwork in Bali in 1936 to 1938. Their
goal was to “translate aspects of culture never successfully
recorded by the scientist, although often caught by the artist,
into some form of communication sufficiently clear and sufficiently unequivocal to satisfy the requirements of scientific enquiry” (Bateson and Mead 1942:xi). In the absence of a complex
scientific vocabulary designed to express a culture’s ethos, Mead
had relied on ordinary English words—even though their meanings were specific to a cultural setting completely different from
Balinese experience (Bateson and Mead 1942:xi). The way out of
this dilemma was to combine traditional ethnography with a
photographic record so that the observations could be recorded
and communicated.
The result is a fascinating anthropological record. Based on
their work in the mountain community of Bajoeng Gede, Mead
and Bateson document a way of life that is based on orientation.
“Orientation,” Mead observes, “in time, space, and status are the
essentials of social existence” (Bateson and Mead 1942:11). Mead
writes that “each man’s place in the social scheme of his village is
known” (Bateson and Mead 1942:7). The status differences are reflected in space (the superior person should sleep on the eastern
or inland side of the inferior person), vertical elevation (higher
chairs for higher statuses), language (using polished language to
speak to someone of a higher caste or status), posture, and gesture. In Bajoeng Gede, “space and time and social status form an
orderly whole, with little stress or strain” and “within the fixed
and complicated sets of regulations, obligations, and privileges,
the people are relaxed and dreamy,” and this spatiosocial orientation “is felt as a protection rather than a straitjacket and its loss
provokes extreme anxiety” (Bateson and Mead 1942:10).
This cultural knowledge is literally transmitted at birth.
Mead writes,
When the Balinese baby is born, the midwife, even at the moment of lifting him in her arms, will put words in his mouth,
commenting, “I am just a poor little new-born baby, and I don’t
know how to talk properly, but I am very grateful to you, honorable people, who have entered this pig sty of a house to see
me born.” And from that moment, all through babyhood, the
child is fitted into a frame of behavior, of imputed speech and
imputed thought and complex gesture, far beyond his skill and
maturity. (Bateson and Mead 1942:13)
Gradually the child adopts these patterns of speech and behavior, a process that Mead describes in a fine metaphor, as
“slip[ping] into speech, as into an old garment, worn before, but
fitted on another hand” (Bateson and Mead 1942:13). “As with
speech, so with posture and gesture,” Mead writes, and it is in
Bateson’s photographs that we see mothers pose their children’s
hands in prayer, dance teachers extending children’s arms to instruct by muscular rote, and a mother teasing her son by holding
his younger sibling over his head and thus inverting proper relationships of age, status, and elevation.
In all Bateson shot some 22,000 feet of 16 mm film and 25,000
still photographs; combined with Mead’s intensive ethnographic
record, as Nancy McDowell observed, “they found themselves
with a body of data, particularly photographic material, that was
so detailed, extensive, and innovative that no other body of data
existed with which they could compare it” (1980:297). It remains
a masterpiece of documentation and analysis.