Mcdowell Revised

Portraits TOC MUNDUGUMOR: SEX AND TEMPERAMENT REVISITED Nancy A. McDowell n 1932 anthropologists Margaret Mead and Reo Fortune left the United States and traveled to the island of New Guinea in the Iremote southwest Pacific. Although Fortune’s goal was a gener- al one, Mead’s explicit intention was to investigate a particular problem: to what extent was human temperament based on biological sex? That is, are men temperamentally different from women because of biology, or are the differences Mead thought she observed in Western nations in the 1930s the product of culture and society? Her intention was to explore a range of societies rela- tively unaffected by European colonization. At the time very little was known about the many societies on the large island of New Guinea (there are over one thousand separate language groups in New Guinea and the surrounding islands of Melanesia1); coastal groups were familiar to Westerners but inland and highland groups were fairly unknown to outsiders. Mead hoped to use what she considered a “natural laboratory” to study the relationship between biological sex and human temperament. If she could find one society in which temperament was not biologically deter- mined, didn’t that mean that sex and temperament were not neces- sarily related throughout the species Homo sapiens? The results of Mead’s study were published in a classic book, still read and studied today, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies.2 The argument Mead made was no less astonishing when it was first published in 1935 than it is today: Each individual is born with a biologically given temperament that society can mold to a desired shape through socialization. This temperament is not indefinitely malleable; it can only be shaped and molded to a cer- tain degree. This biologically-based temperament was not, according to Mead, associated with the biological differences between male and female but was exclusively an individual constellation of traits. What evidence did she have for this assertion? She studied individual variation in three societies in the Sepik River region of New Guinea and looked at differences between the genders and among individuals. She first spent time with the Mountain Arapesh in the foothills of the Sepik region.3 Although the environ- ment was harsh and making a living was difficult, the men and women were both, according to Mead, gentle and nurturing just as the focus of the culture as a whole was on growing things. Of course there were deviants, individuals who were violent or aggressive, but they were exceptions, not the norm. What was most striking to Mead was that, although there was a clear division of labor by sex, the Arapesh expected both men and women to exhibit 3 4PORTRAITS OF CULTURE the same temperament and most did so. Deviations were individual matters and not related to biological sex. Among the Mundugumor, the next group Mead studied, the same situation existed: Both women and men were expected (and to a great extent did) conform to the same ideal temperament.4 But in the case of these river-dwelling villagers, that norm was not gentle and unassertive, but rather (to Mead’s Euro-American eye) violent and aggressive. Here, both men and women were histrionic, volatile, and quick to assert themselves. Again, there were deviants—individuals who were gentle and unassuming—but these were idiosyncratic exceptions and not patterned by sex or gender. Many have read Mead’s description and decided that Arapesh temperament was essentially the same as the Western stereotype of the “feminine” while that of the Mundugumor was “masculine.” Indeed, Mead herself lends credence to this interpretation in the way she contrasts the two groups: …whereas the Arapesh have standardized the personality of both men and women in a mould that, out of our traditional bias, we should describe as maternal, womanly, unmasculine, the Mundugumor have gone to the opposite extreme and, again ignoring sex as a basis for the establishment of personality differences, have standardized the behaviour of both men and women as actively masculine, virile, and without any of the softening and mellowing characteristics that we are accustomed to believe are inalienably womanly….5 Despite the contrast between the groups, what impressed Mead was that neither group differentiated temperament or personality along gender lines, and in this way both groups were very much unlike what she perceived Americans to be in the 1930s. When Mead arrived at her third study site, she was surprised to discover a society similar to her own but in some senses, according to her, the reverse. Among the Tchambuli (now known as the Chambri6), Mead saw active, no-nonsense, initiating women who were concerned with the economy, and sensitive men who focused on artistic and religious activities. There was a contrast between women and men here, as in the United States, but the characteristics were almost reversed: Men were gentle, passive, and “femi- MUNDUGUMOR 5 nine” while women were assertive, active, and “masculine.” As elsewhere, there were exceptions, but these were complicated by gender expectations. Among the Arapesh, aggressive men and women were deviant, and among the Mundugumor passive and nurturing women and men were deviant. For the Tchambuli (Chambri), unassertive women and aggressive men were noncon- forming to their gender character as well as outside the norm for Tchambuli (Chambri) people. Whatever factors affected ethos and temperament, it was clear to Mead that biological sex could not be determinative. There have been a variety of critiques of this work: Is this pat- tern “too perfect”? Did Mead see what she went (and wanted) to see? Did she exaggerate some things in order to bolster the contrasts? Why did she portray the Mundugumor as such assertive and violent people? What data did she have to substantiate such a depiction? Would someone else have seen the same thing? If one were to look at these data from the vantage point of the 1990s, would the analysis change? Would men and women look any different? There is now a large and growing literature in anthropology that evaluates both Mead and the anthropology of her time,7 so I shall not linger here with an extensive critique. It is important, however, to note that Mead’s approach was colored by two related things: the nature of anthropology when she did her fieldwork and wrote her analysis, and the kind of theory in terms of which she framed her investigations. The nature of the theoretical para- digm an anthropologist has cannot help but affect the way in which he or she perceives, records, and understands data. Although we can look back and easily find errors and naiveté in her analysis (e.g., likening the Arapesh to Western women, the Mundugumor to Western men), we need to appreciate what she wrote in the context of when she wrote it and the materials available to her. It is also necessary to understand the strengths and weaknesses of how anthropologists go about gathering the data they collect. If by science we mean an exploratory endeavor that produces replica- ble results in a systematic way, then there are people who would argue that fieldwork anthropology cannot be scientific. Whether it is or is not, of course, depends on how science is defined; what is important is an appreciation of the strengths and weaknesses of anthropological methodology. How might one best learn about other cultures and societies? There are a variety of means (includ- 6PORTRAITS OF CULTURE ing the study of, for example, the history and literature of the place), but anthropologists rely on participant observation, that is, actually living in the society while observing how it works and to different extents participating in the activities of the people studied.8 The advantages of this method are numerous: One can obtain an intimacy with the culture and its people not otherwise available; one can learn about cultures for whom writing is a recent acquisi- tion; one can understand that there is often a difference between what people say they do and what they actually do; one can relate as a human being to other human beings and thus enrich the data- base in ways that no survey would ever do, and so on. The disad- vantages are numerous as well. Foremost among these is the fact that it is an individual with her or his own personality and culture that selects and filters all of the data before it ever enters a note- book. To what extent does the fieldworker’s own world view affect what he or she sees? Would another fieldworker have described the Mundugumor as aggressive or assertive? Does such a simple word change significantly alter the reader’s understanding of what this culture is like? Beginning in 1972 I have done fieldwork off and on in the vil- lage (Bun) upriver from Mead’s “Mundugumor” (who now pre- fer to be known as the “Biwat” people after the river that runs through their land). The two peoples are culturally and linguisti- cally very similar but consider themselves to be different groups and indeed are described as speaking two separate languages.9 I was never a student of Mead’s and had no formal ties with her, but she knew of my work on these neighboring people. When it became apparent to her that she would not be able to realize her ambition of writing up all of the materials she had gathered on the Mundugumor before she died (apart from Sex and Temperament, she wrote little else on the Mundugumor ), she asked me if I would do so after her death.

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