Confronting the Margaret Mead Legacy Confrontingthe Margaret Mead Legacy Scholarship, Empire, and the South Pacific Edited by Lenora Foerstel and Angela Gilliam ill Temple University Press • Philadelphia Temple University Press, Philadelphia 19122 Copyright © 1992by Temple University. All rights reserved Published 1992 Printed in the United States of America @)The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Confronting the Margaret Mead legacy: scholarship, empire, and the South Pacific / edited by Lenora Foerstel and Angela Gilliam. p. ern. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-87722-886-8(alk. paper) 1. Ethnology-Oceania. 2. Mead, Margaret, 1901-1978. 2. Anthropology-Government policy-Oceania. I. Foerstel, Lenora, 1929- . II. Gilliam, Angela, 1936- GN662.C64 1992 306' .0995-dc20 91-16194 This book is dedicated in loving memory to Eleanor Leacock (~ONTENTS Foreword Peter Worsley ix Preface Angela Gilliam and Lenora Foerstel xix Acknowledgments xxxiii PARTl The Margaret Mead Legacy 1 Anthropologists in Search of a Culture: 3 Margaret Mead, Derek Freeman, and All the Rest of Us Eleanor Leacock 2 Leaving a Recordfor Others: An Interview 31 with Nahau Rooney Angela Gilliam 3 Margaret Meadfrom a Cultural-Historical 55 Perspective Lenora Foerstel 4 The Stigma of New Guinea: Reflections on 75 .Anthropology and Anthropologists Warilea Iamo 5 Margaret Mead's Contradictory Legacy 101 Angela Gilliam and Lenora Foerstel viii CONTENTS PART II Empire and Independence 6 For an Independent Kanaky 159 Susanna Ounei 7 The United States Anthropologist in 173 Micronesia: Toward a Counter-Hegemonic Study of Sapiens Glenn Alcalay 8 Anthropology and Authoritarianism in the 205 Pacific Islands Simione Durutalo 9 Tugata: Culture, Identity, and 233 Commitment John D. Waiko 10 Papua New Guinea and the Geopolitics of 267 Knowledge Production Angela Gilliam FOREWORD Peter Worsley Critical evaluation of Margaret Mead's work is long overdue, particularly in the United States, where I have frequently found it difficult to engage in discussion about Mead, since the slightest breath of criticism commonly evokes a passionate-s-and to my mind quite uncritical­ defense of the entire corpus of her very uneven writings and of her life-career. I am, therefore, glad that the contrib­ utors to this book have undertaken an examination of the Mead legacy in a Pacific-wide context. I myself cannot contribute on Melanesia, as I would have liked to have done, because my efforts to carry out fieldwork there were aborted, the day before I was due to leave for the New Guinea Highlands, by the refusal of the Australian colonial authorities to give me an entry permit to the country (Worsley, 1990). I was forced, therefore, to switch rapidly to fieldwork among Australian Aborigines. But the intelligence services who had earlier banned me from Africa-on the region on which I had been specializ­ ing, following several years of army service and employ­ ment on the Tanganyika Groundnut Scheme-finally achieved th.eir objective: forcing me out of anthropology. When I was told I would never get an anthropological post, I decided 1 would have to turn to sociology. McCarthyism was thus not confined to the United States, even if it was manufactured and exported from there, and for many years x PETER WORSLEY after McCarthy's fall from power, I still had to get a special "waiver of Congress" every time I wanted to visit the country. Any hope of fieldwork in Melanesia having been aban­ doned, I nevertheless decided to make use of the cultural capital accumulated while in Australia to write a study of "cargo" cults (1957a) as a farewell to the region, of neces­ sity based entirely on library sources. As a result of publishing that book, I was asked to review Margaret Mead's (1956) study of the Paliau move­ ment. It seemed to me so inadequate a work (unlike the splendid 1962 study by her colleague Theodore Schwartz) that I suggested to the editors that, instead, I write some­ thing more general about her work. In the review article, "Margaret Mead: Science or Sci­ ence-Fiction?" (Worsley, 1957b), I paid full tribute to her major achievement in putting anthropology on the map and to her commitment to what in my mind is the classic anthropological "project": the demonstration that anthro­ pology is not a purely scholastic discipline, fixated upon the study of exotic cultures and customs "out there," and therefore, to most people, of no relevance to their own lives. Mead's vision, per contra, and her achievement, was to show that the findings of anthropologists about remote peoples were highly relevant to the concerns of Americans about their own society, and that the culture of the United States was only one among very many cultural forms, not necessarily the culmination of human evolution. Yet, at the same time, I took leave to raise criticisms about the impressionistic and often dubious nature of the evidence she used in these popular works. That she could do work of the most rigorous kind when addressing herself to her professional colleagues, there is no question, as FOREWORD xi "Kinship in the Admiralty Islands" (1934), to name no other work, shows. Nor was I suggesting, of course, that she should. have written in that way when writing for a popular audience: I simply regretted that the standards that informed her writing for professionals were absent in her popular writings. I soon found that Margaret Mead did not react kindly to criticism, for she responded with a letter in which she expressed "outrage." She was generous enough to praise The Trumpet Shall Sound, only to contrast it with my Science and Society review, which was, she wrote, a "sloppy piece of writing," a "lambast . which bristles with inaccuracies," and a "rehash of [my] professor's bricks" in which she could not find "anything specially of value." Taken aback by the virulence of this language, I soon discovered that it evidently was not unusual, for I received several communications from anthropologists in the United States who told me that they had been treated to similar 'withering counterattacks when they had dared, especially in public situations, to say anything critical of her work. These exchanges about a minor review 30 years ago scarcely matter now. But the evaluation of such influential work does remain important. It was not just the general Boasian message about the importance of culture that brought her a mass readership, but what she had to say about one particular aspect of culture: about the different ways in which the biological facts of sex are converted, in different cultures, into highly varied forms of institutional­ ized gender. To women in particular, this came as a power­ ful, liberating idea, because it contained the implication not only that the existing division of cultural labor between the sexes was not a fact of nature, but that it need not be as it xii PETER WORSLEY was in Western societies. I remember in particular how one of my very first students, who was not unaware of the variability of culture, having experienced firsthand the sin­ gularly traumatic experience of the transition from life in middle class Poland before World War II to the extremity of the culture of the Dachau concentration camp, telling me, years later, that the most exciting intellectual experi­ ence of her social science course had been reading Mar­ garet Mead's Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935). Uncritical adulation of Margaret Mead is something else. Unfortunately, it is far from dead in American anthro­ pology. Thus, I found it disturbing that most contributors to the 1983 symposium in the American Anthropologist on Freeman's Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth (1983), responded to his detailed and documented critique of her Samoan work not so much by refuting his charges but by denounc­ ing his own theoretical orientation. One does not have to share Freeman's views on the relationship between biology and culture to recognize the relevancy of his critical com­ ments about the inadequacy and inaccuracy of Mead's treatment of the topics of rank, cooperation and competi­ tion, aggressive warfare and behavior, pagan and Christian religion, punishment, childrearing, Samoan character, sex­ ual mores and behavior, adolescence, and the Samoan ethos, and of the limitations of the fieldwork. Tu quoque is a poor argument. In any case, the entire discussion (as Leacock argues in Chapter 1), whether focused upon the theoretical debate or the debate about the accuracy of Mead's empirical work, continues a tradition of which both Mead and Freeman are part: the abstraction of supposedly timeless Pacific cultures FOREWORD xiii from a real context of massive rapid social change. During the colonial epoch, the indigenous aristocrats intensified their efforts to extend their power at the expense of the autonomy of village communities. And, during the post­ colonial epoch, there has been an ever-increasing involve­ ment of the whole region in the global struggle between the superpowers, notably because of the enormous pressure exercised by the United States upon new and tiny statelets in its effort at "strategic denial" of the region to feared (but imaginary) communist penetration. These things rarely enter the work of those anthropolo­ gists, who concentrate predominantly upon lineage and clan (real enough phenomena, to be sure) and upon big men and intervillage rivalries. To this extent they have contrib­ uted to the construction of "primitivism by omission," to the consolidation of stereotypes that they would laugh at were they to find them in the pages of the National Geo­ graphic: the image of the Pacific as a sexual paradise under the palm trees, and the quite contrary image of a region inhabited 1bysavage cannibals engaged in constant warfare.