NATURE VOL.302 28 APRIL 1983 759 SPRING BOOKS deeply at variance with the facts of Samoan subject of virginity. He cited intense feeling Iences and contradictions characterize ethnography and history [p.l09]. about virginity on the part of mothers of girls, every society. Conflicting findings are However, the data sources and evidence and extreme preoccupation with the theft of sometimes taken as evidence that anthro­ presented by Mead and Freeman are quite girls in other villages on the part of young men in pological research is both subjective and different. Mead, then 23, worked with western Samoa. In thinking this over, I realized for the first time that the whole of the rivalry bet­ unreliable. And while Freeman presents adolescent and pre-adolescent girls in three ween the young men or the chiefs of different much evidence to contradict Mead's state­ villages in Manu'a. In an appendix she villages, could be expressed in the hope of one ments, he cannot claim to have reproduced presented data sheets for the analysis of group that they could do irreparable, asym­ her conditions of field work with adoles­ girls' age, family and social position, and metrical damage to the other group .... cent girls in Manu'a in 1925. His conten­ behaviour. She described adolescence as Translated into terms of behavior, it accounts tion that she was innocently duped and the best period of a woman's life, without for the continuous wariness and touchiness misled by village girls is unwarranted. stress or conflict, preoccupied with sex and which Samoans display in several contexts ever Why, one wonders, has not Freeman lovemaking. Mead contrasted the gentle alert lest something one would enjoy doing to written a new book on Samoa which incor­ others be done to oneself . .. . and carefree adolescence of Samoans with We need much more detailed material on ear­ porates the results of his researches, rather the educational and social pressures upon ly childhood, material which hopefully Derek than a series of chapters devoted to Mead's American youth, urging America to be less Freeman's current fieldwork will provide "errors"? He amply demonstrates his demanding of its young. [p.227]. ability to describe the social, political and Freeman goes to great lengths to dis­ rank system of Samoa in a way that sum­ prove Mead's characterization of Samoan The very nature of ethnographic field marizes his research and that of many other adolescence. To establish that Samoan work, as a local study by a lone an­ scholars into a clear and consistent state­ youths have a similar pattern of violence to thropologist, raises questions about ment. One can only surmise that his was that in other countries, he cites court reliability and generalization. The field personal preference for criticism over con­ records of Western Samoa, for 1967, which worker pursues particular subjects and struction. By this choice, he has prevented show that males in the age-group 14-20 problems, chooses a community, works anthropologists from evaluating the poten­ constitute a high proportion of first closely with only some members of that tial of his biological explanation of offenders. It is as though observations of community, and publishes observations Samoan behaviour. Mead's work will con­ teenagers in a village such as Lower and conclusions based upon the fieldwork tinue to reflect its time and place, but Slaughter in 1925 are disproved by Birm­ and the information available from other Freeman has yet to demonstrate the ingham police records for 1967. Freeman sources. Subsequent research among the correctness of his position. 0 says, same people - in this case an island group Mead, then, was at error in her depiction of the with a population of over 150,000-is like­ Paula Brown Glick is Professor of Anthro­ nature of adolescence in Samoa, just as she was ly to find differences attributable to local pology at the State University of New York, .. . in her portrayal of other crucial aspects of Stony Brook. She is author ofHighland Peoples conditions, historical changes, and inter­ of New Guinea (Cambridge University Press, Samoan life. This being so, her assertion in pretation or emphasis. Certainly ambiva- 1978). Coming of Age in Samoa of the absolute sovereignty of culture over biology, on the basis of these erroneous depictions, is clearly invalid, and her much-bruited "negative instance"* is science of anthropology, specially focused seen to have been no negative instance at all. In Little room for the on the relationship between the invidual other words, Mead's presentation of Samoa as and culture and on methods of assessing proving the insignificance of biology in the anthropologist that relationship. Cassidy's account of etiology of adolescent behavior is revealed as a how Boas set the theoretical problems of false case [p.268]. Mary Douglas her fieldwork project does not quite ring true. That towering scholar, geologist, Freeman's critique includes the com­ Margaret Mead: A Voice for the physicist, organizer of great Arctic and plaint that Mead never returned to Samoa, Century. north American expeditions, apparently nor revised her books on the basis of later By Robert Cassidy. first drew her attention to the cultural studies. In response to this, Mead speaks Universe Books: 1982. Pp.l76. $12.50. for herself in the preface to the 1973 edition variation in sexual mores. He is said to have of Coming of Age in Samoa: asked her whether adolescent troubles were MARGARET Mead, born into an academic peculiar to Western culture - how did Some young critics have even asked me when I family in Philadelphia in 1901, died inter­ young girls react to the constraints of am going to revise this book, and look unbeliev­ nationally famous and loaded with custom, was it true that primitive girls were ing and angry when I say that to revise it would be impossible. It must remain, as all anthro­ honours in 1978. Her remarkable life excessively bashful, did they develop pological works must remain, exactly as it deserves to be recorded and reflected upon. crushes and other forms of romantic love? was written, true to what l saw in Samoa, and of She was an anthropologist, a teacher, a It sounds more like what his student told what I was able to convey of what I saw. True to humanitarian, a popular writer, a media him she intended to study and clearly, even the state of our knowledge of human behavior as star and a lay preacher. Her record defies at that youthful age, she was not one to be it was in the mid-1920s, true to our hopes and classification but it invites a more reflective easily diverted from her purposes. fears for the future of the world (p.x]. treatment than is here provided by Robert In 1925 she went to Samoa, chosen by Further, Mead clearly acknowledged the Cassidy. His book suffers the usual limita­ her supervisors as a place where she could importance of the work of others, in­ tions of hagiography, strong in praise of be safe under the watchful eye of the cluding Freeman, in her conclusion to the the deceased and weak in dealing with the United States Department of the Navy. reissued Social Organization of Manu 'a in enigmas and problems of a person living in Mary Slessor and Mary Kingsley, much 1969: a particular place and time. We are left with earlier travellers in West Africa, and Edith hints - apparently fellow ethnologists Durham, travelling in the feuding Balkans, Then, in 1%5,1 met Derek Freeman for the first accorded her only "grudging admiration" would not have made much of the dangers time, and he challenged my material on the very and her success was definitely in the larger she faced in the South Pacific. On her mild Manu'an reactions I had reported on the community, "grandmother to America", return she wrote Coming of Age in Samoa •The "negative instance" is defined by Freeman "citizen of the world" or "voice for the published in 1928, which overnight became as Boas's view of scientific method in which a century". a bestseller. Perhaps the grudgingness of single negative case invalidates a hypothesis. In Her graduate work was in the University colleagues' admiration stemmed from this fact, Freeman dedicates his book to Karl Popper of Columbia, with Franz Boas and Ruth instant popular success, or perhaps it because of Popper's work on scientific method. Benedict. Boas was building up a new confirmed a wilful independence and sense

© 1983 Nature Publishing Group -'~------SPRINGBOOKS------N_Aru__ ~ __ vo_L_.m __ ~_~ __ ~L___ 1~3 ADVERTISEMENT of power in the young scholar_ She was Cassidy not be sensitive to the import of his offered a post of Assistant Curator in the own remark: "After seven months she and American Museum of Natural History in Fortune had had their fill of the Arapesh". 1926 and declared that once she saw She felt she worked so much faster than through the windows of her attic room in anyone else; like a scientist, she chose a that august establishment she would never limited problem and could quickly tell move out. whether she had collected enough evidence Was it really this resolution that to settle the answer. Margaret Mead often prevented her from accepting any other complained that the British anthro­ academic appointment, as Cassidy im­ pologists were unappreciative of her plies? In 1954 she was made Adjunct Pro­ achievements. This hurry-hurry, single­ fessor in the Anthropology Department at issue style of field work explains a signifi­ Columbia but never improved upon that cant difference between herself and her part-time peripheral post until1968, when Fordham University asked the now ageing superstar to develop their department of Blue butterflies of the anthropology. There are others who have Lycaenopsis-group done great research from museums, and By J.N. Eliot & A. Kawazoe A detailed taxonomic study and revision. others who have been delayed from Unique specimens and the rarer species holding responsible office by the slow pro­ illustrated in colour. Line drawings, keys motion in the museum world (as to and descriptions for identification to subspecific level. 1983. 296pp. 6 plates academic tenure, Margaret Mead's rise was colour, 12b/w. 560 line figures. not meteoric; Associate Curator in 1942, 0 565 00860 9 Hardback. Curator only in 1964). Others, again, Until june I. £25.00 prefer museum appointments for the Afterwards £28.00 freedom they give. A directory of natural history The interesting questions which Cassidy and related societies in never attempts to broach are counter­ Britain and Ireland factual conditionals about the interplay of Compiled and edited by Audrey Meenan sex, personality and culture, the very theme Addresses, aims, amenities, meetings etc of of Mead's life work. How much did she local, national, school and college societies listed from A-Z, geographically and by choose to be an outsider, how much was subject. "Natural History" being here the choice a response to the opportunity interpreted in its widest sense. structure she found herself facing - it is 1983. 407pp. 0 565 00859 5 Hardback £15.00 impossible to say. Yet, a man who showed such an early brilliance and energy would A checklist of the helminth have been sought by major institutions parasites of marsupials and which would have forced the conflict of monotremes ambition and independence to be played By E. A. Harris within supporting structures eminently Brings together the published literature on the nematodes, trematodes, cestodes and able to bestow rich rewards on their acanthocephalans recorded from marsupials favourites. Margaret Mead remained an and monotremes. Microfiche, 2 fiche in individualist, she resisted capture by any introductory folder. 0 565 00874 9£6.00 institution and she exerted influence from List of British vascular plants outside the Establishment. Prepared by j. E. Dandy From her attic in New York Mead made for the British Museum (Natural History) a field trip of six months with her second and the Botanical Society of the British Isles. • 1corporating the London catalogue of husband, Reo Fortune, . and published British plants. First printed 1958 this Growing Up in New Guinea in 1930. The important work has been out of print for path of research for the next ten years had Margaret Mead in the late 1920s, after her return some years. it has now been reprinted to from Samoa. meet continuing demand. v + 176pp. been set. It was to show the malleability of 0 565 00449 2 Hardback £5.00 human personality, the strength of cultural British contemporaries-compare Audrey Flora Zambesiaca. pressures to mould what are assumed in Richards, who wrote large monographs any one civilization to be personality traits Vol. VII part I. with impressive documentation and Families Crassulaceae, Valerianaceae, indefeasibly linked to physical sex. The analysis on one tribe alone, and trained her Dipsacaceae; then Campanulaceae­ comparison of adolescence in Samoa and students to keep going back and amplifying Loganicaeae. Manu'a was followed by comparison of Edited by E. Launert. the results. The latest published in this ongoing series by three societies in New Guinea: the After her third marriage she went to two the Manal!"ing Committee of Flora Arapesh, whose culture shows practically new field areas, latmul and Bali between Zambesiaca. 1983 394pp.89Jine drawings, no differences in temperament between colour frontispiece. 095076 82 00. Paperback 1936 and 1939. At this stage she had £23.50. men and women, both being equally gentle become interested in the techniques of and unaggressive; the Mundugumor, both ethnography, and the use of photography Guernsey's earliest flora sexes equally violent and ruthless; and the and film. In the 1930s she was one of the By D. McClintock Tchambuli, a society where the men were founders of the culture-personality move­ An account of the plants of the Guernsey countryside circa 1790. Based on the work of artists and ran the ceremonies while the ment in anthropology and was becoming joshua Gosselin (1739-1812). 210pp, women were the real producers and en­ very interested in national culture, but Kar­ frontispiece, 7 figures. A Ray Society trepreneurial managers, the perfect com­ publication No.1 55.0 903874 17 2 diner and Dubois did the more important Hardback £14.00 plementary case to modern America. work in the first and Benedict in the One can pause to ask why she spent so second. She was there at the beginning of Publications Sales, British Museum (Natural little time in each of these societies. After many intellectual movements but did not History), Cromwell Road, London SW7 5BD. all, this was the post-Malinowski era of stay with them. One suspects that the long, intensive fieldwork. How, then, could demands of the mass media were beginning Circle No. 19 on Reader Service Card. © 1983 Nature Publishing Group N_A_~ ___ m_L_.m __ ~-~-~_L __ I~_J ______SPRINGBOOKS------761 to pose an effective counter-attraction to encapsulated in the following phrase: "It is obscure scientific study. Advancing by stealth the history of an occupational group whose By the outbreak of the war Mead was status had risen and fallen over time as the a very famous anthropologist. New June Goodfield women's role responded to external events challenges were put to her. As executive and pressures". What Margaret Rossiter secretary for the National Research Coun­ Women Scientists in America: Struggles does so well is to explicate her story in those cil she edited the Report of the Committee and Strategies to 1940. terms, backed by an abundance of em­ on Food Habits (1941-1943), full of in­ By Margaret W. Rossiter. pirical material, in quantity that would teresting ideas about methods of compar­ Johns Hopkins University Press: /983. satisfy the most Baconian of scientists. ing food habits and ideas about the relation Pp.438. $27.50, £22. Beginning in the nineteenth century with between nutrition, social class and ethnic the "entering wedge" provided by the traditions. She advised the United Nations THERE are certain intriguing resemblances women's colleges, we see the quiet army on its relations with foreign cultures; between the practice of science and the infiltration of women into science, a move­ she became an authority on technology and study of history: the more we observe, the ment that turned out to be unexpected, economic development and made it her more we recognize how much still remains unintended and at certain times prime mission to bring emerging Third to be discovered. Moreover what we ac­ unwelcome. It is fascinating to notice that, World countries into the twentieth cen­ tually see is strongly influenced by the ques­ at a time when science had a lowly status in tury. A peculiarly personal mantle of inter­ tions we bring to our observations. Thus we Britain's institutes of learning, the national counsellor and interpreter of the can by-pass a great deal that may actually Women's Colleges of America took pains world fell upon her shoulders. No one be very significant. to emphasize the extent of science in their wearing it with such authority and con­ As directions in research become first curricula offerings, showing a slant fidence should complain of lack of fashionable, then hallowed, other aspects undreamt of by C.P. Snow. For the academic recognition. Yet I would pay her of a discipline may dwindle to near invisi­ emphasis placed on science "reassured the the compliment of greatly wishing that she bility. It takes a Braude!, with his sweeping parents of the high moral character and had stayed more patiently with the growth studies on the Mediterranean World, or a religious values taught. (Literature, of the ideas she brought to birth. Nothing Ladurie in Montaillou and Love, Death especially novels, were, by contrast, quite in economic anthropology had anticipated and Money in The Pays d'Oc, to recreate suspect.)". Given this difference in her study of economic structures in the Ad­ lost lives and reveal the sheer dimension educational history, surely no one would miralty Islands. She was right in believing and complexity of the tapestry of history. ever have predicted that Britain would at the end of her life that nothing signifi­ Such was the majesty of their scholarship, produce the first scientist ever to be a Prime cant had been built upon her important and such the vision of their disciplined im­ Minister and a woman at that! work on food habits. The outstanding pro­ agination, that the works of these pioneers The ends which were ultimately achieved blems about the relation of personality and forced those with minds not irrevocably were far from being those for which the culture are still unsolved and no method closed to look with fresh eyes on old fields new ventures were launched. What began has been determined for solving them. But of study. as a movement to educate women so that in academic life you either need to have in­ While it cannot be said that Margaret they would, in turn, produce more en­ stitutional support or to concern yourself Rossiter is a Braude! or a Ladurie, her new lightened sons, ended with a group of with the nurture of your own brain book nevertheless achieves similar ends highly motivated, qualified and often quite children. and is a seminal work of rich scholarly remarkable people having no place to go It is fair to wonder with whom Mead detail. It may not transform the history of except back to where they came from -the should be compared. Was she a latter-day science, but those who ignore its impli­ women's colleges. This, rather than any Marie Stopes? No, even their shared cations will be intellectually impoverished. inherent intellectual limitation, explains vilification as corruptors of morals does Not too long ago many people believed that why few of these women scientists did

not put them on a par; Mead was less one­ Marie Curie was the first - if not the only j' research - though there were notable track. What about contemporaries? Was - woman scientist. The sixteen-volume , exceptions. That this situation, and its she a great philanthropic writer? Dorothy Dictionary of Scientific Biography, edited I corollary, persisted for well over one Day is a giant name for an editor and com­ by Charles Gillispie, did something to hundred years is confirmed in Evelyn mitted social reformer, worthy for the improve the situation but nothing like Keller's forthcoming biography of Barbara comparison, but Mead's concerns were enough. Dr Marilyn Ogilvie's labour of McClintock. McClintock's work in more dispersed. What about helping the love - lasting over a decade - which has bacterial genetics was so brilliant that Third World? Margery Perham, born in culminated in a Dictionary and Biography Joshua Lederberg, in the 1950s, once 1895, achieved much on behalf of the con­ of Women Scientists from Antiquity to described her as either "mad or a genius", stitution framers of emerging independent 1910 will, when it finally sees the light of but she was forced to do her research on the Africa? Certainly, I doubt that any of them publication day, open our eyes still further. fringes of academia. For she refused to would have envied Mead the international Now with Women Scientists in America relinquish her calling, even though popular acclaim that she earned. Margaret Rossiter reveals that for well over appropriate positions in academic This biography pays scant attention to a century ''women have been an integral institutions were never forthcoming; nor her anthropological work. It is clearly part of the scientific community" yet "for would she abandon her lodestar and fall meant to be a friendly report. But it is not a variety of reasons" most of these women back into teaching science in a women's helpful to her academic reputation, now scientists bordered on the "invisible". college. under attack by Derek Freeman (see Once she had overcome the initial Rossiter clearly displays the causes and p.758), to present her as a fabulous media "stumbling block of locating material, star. Would Danny Kaye rather be remem­ through several years of detective work" Gentlemen of Science bered by his friends as a great comedian or the full wealth of the vein she was mining became apparent. The quantity of material Oxford University Press have recently issued a as a great philanthropist? Margaret Mead paperback edition of Jack Morrell and Arnold herself cherished her academic standing, discovered was enormous; once mastered, Thackray's Gentlemen of Science: Early Years but this volume does nothing for such rich and deep analyses could be and were, of the British Association for the Advancement concerns. D undertaken. Thus Rossiter's account is not of Science. In his review of the original edition one whose only conceptual threads are (Nature 294, 19; 1981) Robert Fox spoke of the those of feminist rhetoric. There is nothing book as bristling "with challenging interpreta­ Mary Douglas is Avalon Professor of the Humanities at Northwestern University, Il­ simplistic here: she has given us a sophisti­ tions". Price of the paperback is £7.95. linois. cated analysis of a complicated situation,

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