Margaret Mead: Anthropology, Coming of Age in Samoa & Fieldwork

[00:00:03][Music] [Applause] [Music] he [Music] f far overseas and island is whereon when day is done a Grove of tossing Palms are printed on the sun and all about the reefy shore blue Breakers Flash and fall there shall I go me thinks when I am done with all that poem was written by Robert Lou Stevenson about a South Pacific island just like this it's one of a group of islands known as Samoa which has Charmed and fascinated explorers and missionaries since contact was first made made in the western mind south sea Islands regularly conjure up images of paradise places where an idilic climate is matched by a relaxed and harmonious pattern of life and it's a pattern that has usually been seen as better than life back home for most of us these are idle Reflections holiday thoughts before returning to the stresses and strains of everyday life but for a young American Anthropologist called Margaret me the suggestion that life out here had less of that stress and strain was an important one in 1925 she came here to T Island to make in her own words a psychological study of primitive youth for Western Civilization she wanted to know if adolescence was always a time of turmoil her findings were the start of her Fame as the most widely read and the best known Anthropologist of all time [Music] [Music] when I was a small child my mother was studying Italian immigrants in the United States so I grew up with a general interest [Applause] this is Barnard College in New York City in 1923 Margaret me graduated here in a ceremony that's changed very little from the one you see going on today throughout her life she had a kind of curiosity that enabled her to ask a whole set of questions that normally just don't occur to most of us they were questions that were important for anthropology and interesting to the general public this scene causes few surprises for for anyone who lives in the west but of course there are many interesting questions that can be asked first of all why have a ceremony why don't the girls just go home at the end of their last academic term and receive their diplomas by post why give certificates at all why are they all wearing the same clothes and why are they so different from the ones that they normally wear every day of the week important questions and they're difficult ones to answer social events like these don't seem strange to us when they're part of our own culture it's only other people's rights and ceremonies that seem odd and bizarre so much so that we often forget that we ourselves have elaborate and formal and equally strange rights of Our Own Me had originally come to Barnard to study psychology but her curiosity was aroused by the popular lectures of the Great American Anthropologist France Boaz he had broken new ground by actually working in the field with the cultures he studied and he encouraged his students to do the same I think she was a very remarkable young person who had decided that she was going to show that a woman as well as a man could do field work in anthropology she wanted her own people and that meant that she was not going to work with American Indians where Boaz wanted to start to work he wanted she wanted to go to a very remote place of course that made it more dramatic well Boaz suggested that she go to American Samoa where a boat came in every 3 weeks and there could be communication well she uh bucked against that a little bit but she finally accepted it because she knew perfectly well she wouldn't go any place that Boaz wouldn't let her go throughout her career me was intrigued by the key stages that all humans pass through as they're born into and grow up in their own cultures Boaz was at the center of the nature nurture debate the question of whether your race or your culture makes you into what you are he wanted me to study one particular period of life when these biological and social aspects caused most conflict [Music] adolescence I wanted to study change I wanted to find out in a society that was changing uh whether people felt more strongly about new things or old things my professor wanted me to study adolescence I wanted to come to Polynesia somewhere he wanted me to stay in the United States so we made an exchange he said I could come to Polynesia if I studied the Adolescent girl most of the Gloom about adolescence had come from Germany they had these terrible words like belmares World Fame so that everywhere in the world you were supposed to have an awful time growing up nobody knew anything about Adolescence in Som or Hawaii or the marzes or Tahiti we didn't know anything Margaret me came out here to investigate Adolescence in a society completely different from her own her findings were startling adolescence was known in America and Europe as a period of emotional stress and personal conflict now if these problems were caused by biological changes and many at the time believed that they were then they should be found in human societies all over the world but here in Samoa me found that adolescence was in many ways the most enjoyable and happy time of life there were many reasons for this for a start she found that the culture itself was pretty relaxed and casual then there was the whole system of child rearing with its lack of harsh punishment and the large number of adults a child could turn to the other important reason was the General acceptance of sexual relations between adolescents sex was seen as something to be enjoyed in quantity as well as quality before you chose a partner for life do girls here have sex with their boyfriends at your age no no none of the girls no well we don't know but us some is it do you consider it wrong because the church says so yeah consider it the girl but it's really up to the girl you can hardly find girls like that it don't but Margaret me said that girls did it when they wanted to before they got married and with who they wanted to yeah it depends maybe that was long ago but nowadays it's Chang there's a big change in some me was one of the first women to go into the field as an anthropologist in later life she remembered what a daunting task this was for a young woman of 23 I think my first field trip was in a sense the most difficult because I did a kind of work nobody had done then so there weren't any models at all I was just told not to waste my time doing conventional things and that I was to learn the language and get acquainted with the adolescent girls and find out what they were up to I'd never eaten any food except American food and I had to learn to eat Salon food and also there weren't any styles of work then in S I learned to dance and learned to talk a very elegant language and in return for the help they gave me I conformed to many of the styles of their society [Applause] [Music] against the developing Trend in anthropological fieldwork methods me chose not to immerse herself entirely in Simone culture but she did spend most of her day with the adolescent girls that she was to make famous because there was a well established mission on the island some of the girls spoke English and several of them became close friends which helped her build up a detailed portrait of Simone adolescence those girls that me studied are now the Elders of T Island it was their answers to her questions about life and love and Fidelity that were to have such an impact on the people back home some of her subjects still remember those questions foree me's findings were published in her first book coming of age in Samoa but there are some problems with her account of life in Samoa in the 1920s critics have claimed that she missed certain important aspects of siman life she spent only 6 months on TAA Island most of that time living with an American Family rather than amongst the Simone people this has made people wonder whether she could have really grasped the full complexity of Simone culture and whether for that matter she could have fully mastered the unusually difficult Simone tongue asking people about personal and intimate areas of their lives is not easy even in your own language what can be said is that me was certainly struck by the differences between Adolescence in Samoa and America whether she knew enough about Samoan life to be sure that those stresses and strains were really absent is a question that anthropologists are still arguing about today me did not report her findings in the usual academic fashion her book was written for the general reader in those days anthropologists used to Pepper their pages with language and nobody spoke if I had used words like exogamy and and dogamy and things like that they couldn't have read the book so I wrote it in English for the people I thought would use it and if you write a book for people are going to use something you write it for the whole world maybe she might have been a little bit uh euphoric about situation there but I'm quite sure that she made every effort to get as objective picture as she could could and um I think that uh modifications that might have been made later were probably made under the pressure of publicity that the media picked up and things of that sort she just provided the impulse for this interest in Social and sexual behavior to develop it was just ready to be born so to speak and I think she was Midwife me returned to take on her first job as a assistant curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York many students and friends were to make the long climb to the room she made famous at the top of the museum Tower she had also taken on a new husband the Anthropologist Rayo fortune together they looked for another culture to work in and chose Perry Village on the island of Manus off the northern coast of New [Music] Guinea [Music] in 1928 the people of Perry lived as they had lived for hundreds of years a fishing and trading people they lived literally in the [Music] sea there was no land except a few tiny Islands the mainland was a quarter of a mile away the setting was beautiful but life in the village was far from idilic armed with Spears and wearing phallic shells the men would dance behind the display of dogs teeth and shell money this time me lived right in the middle of the people she was studying in a house that she and Fortune had specially built on stilts over the Lagoon with no mission in the village there had been little contact with Colonials but several of the young men had seen service on plantations away from the island this was a time when men had to go to the larger cities of rabul and port morby and learn to speak pigeon English in order to earn white man's money and the people of this particular Mana Society were very interested in the accumulation of wealth in spite of the rigors and the isolation this field work was one of the happier periods in her marriage to Fortune me worked in many different cultures during her long and productive Life as a professional Anthropologist but it's probably fair to say that it was her studies of this particular community at Perry Village that stands out from the rest of her work whilst her husband was investigating the religious beliefs of the people of this island she was tackling a totally different question it was all to do with the way that Western intellectuals in the 1920s thought about what they called primitive peoples the general feeling was that adults in a community like this had a childlike mentality that they reasoned and thought rather like the average Western child if this was so me asked what on Earth was the thought of these children like it was another of her characteristically penetrating questions and it naturally LED on to the whole topic of how children anywhere in the world learn about their own culture and gradually absorb its ideals and [Music] values there was a marked contrast in Manus between the Carefree days of childhood and the strains of adult life surrounded as it was with its taboos regulations and [Applause] obligations while the anthropologists were engrossed in their work the daily running of their household was in the hands of a group of boys one of them John kipac is now the most senior man in the village number one house now been walk writing book fore me had chosen to study children partly because of the Vogue for Progressive education back home she wanted to see if children really could be brought up to be fundamentally different people from their parents as some educationalists believed I can take out your crayon now and start bring any picture you like not pencil you use your crayon during that 6 months in Manus me recalled that she watched the Manus baby the Manus child the Manus adolescent in an attempt to understand the way in which each of these was becoming a Manus adult one of the ways she probed their minds was to watch them drawing she' brought reams of paper with her and she set the children to work in all she collected over 35,000 drawings she noticed that in spite of an adult world full of spirits and ghosts the children produced only the most careful representations of real things me was interested in how children took on the ideals and values of the Adult World they were destined to grow into in her day as there were no schools this formal socialization of children couldn't rely on the classroom in 1930 she published her findings in a book entitled growing up in New Guinea again it was read by people outside academic anthropology in it she said that human nature is flexible but it's also elastic it will return to the form that was impressed upon it in earliest years me owed a lot to the people of Perry like all anthropologists she capitalized on the information she collected in the field but they feel that they owe a lot to her and respond vigorously when critics attack her [Music] the whole question of how much anthropologists contribute to the societies they report was something me was aware of Barbara haniman R who still regularly visits Manus was one of me's research colleagues certainly by the time I knew her she was aware that not only do we influence the culture do we take advantage of it but that they influence us and change our lives and that it's a reciprocal Arrangement where it may be damaging to both sides it may be useful she felt I think early on that she and other anthropologists were in a very poor position to give meaningful things to the people that they were studying I have no idea whether her methods were very different from other people's but she knew right from the very beginning that her notes and Diaries and letters and everything that she put pen or typewriter to would in the end be a public [Music] archive me's archive was to receive more information on the people of Perry Village and it wasn't just about how children develop into the type of adults that their culture determines little did me know on her way back to New York that of all the cultures she visited Perry was to be the venue for more anthropology in fact the people of this Village can claim to be the most anthropolog ised in the world [Applause] [Music] Margaret me had looked at the way in which children in any society learn to think feel and act now she wanted to know more about how men and women were expected to behave in society her experience in the field had indicated that the roles that males and females play in different cultures weren't Universal in 1931 me started the first of a series of short field trips to different cultures on Mainland New Guinea with Ray Fortune she studied the arapesh the munduga Moore and then went up the seic river to study the chambry people it was here that they got to know the young British Anthropologist Gregory Bateson who was also doing field work he was a stimulus to all their thoughts on personality and culture and all three relished each other's company they'd all been in the field for quite a while uh they' faced difficulties and fatigue and malaria and loneliness and lack of people to talk to about their work uh and they spent hours and hours and hours uh sitting inside a little room that was uh enclosed with with mosquito netting uh because the sepic is a prime mosquito area uh talking I this talking in a very intense way I think they all were very excited by it me was interested in the impact that the anthropologist's own culture had on the society being studied not just the ideas and behavior but also the objects they brought into the field she was a meticulous Observer as well as this film of chambry children reacting to a koala bear for example she made detailed notes typed up in the evening so that she could later retrieve all kinds of information from a single event up the seic river I think that our main contribution to the Village was really that we were a continuous circus me we were somewhere to go every afternoon when they were bored about 80 women who had been working all day would then get all smartened up and wash their babies and bring them all along and stand around and just see what we were doing now I wear specially designed clothes but they're not grass skirts I wear clothes Amalgamated her experience in three very different new gu cultures to produce her third bestseller in 1935 sex and temperament this book showed that behavior of people of different Sexes was conditioned by the culture into which they were born me and bateson's interests brought them closer together she later called it the perfect intellectual and emotional partnership in 1936 following her divorce from Fortune they were married on their way to do more field work this time in [Music] barley in barley she again looked at the way in which culture influences the personality of a child over a period of two years mostly spent in a remote Village me and Bateson went about their work in an experimental way rather than produce their results as a written work punctuated with a few pictures they attempted a photographic essay linked by words it was an Innovative look at Ban's character within a few weeks they discovered they were taking far far more photographs than they had ever imagined and they sent for additional film and produced the most intensively documented uh photographic fieldwork really that has ever been done there has been work since where more movies have been taken but that kind of intensive still photography where Gregory held the camera and Margaret took detailed notes of the context of every photograph still stands as unique the dance in slow motion they also took some remarkable film footage among which trance and dance in barley has become a classic and here in slow motion you see the women the fumes of the incense that is being carried among them to calm them blends with their loosened hair this old woman had said that she would not go into TR but when the others began to turn their ques against themselves she joined [Music] [Music] them if anyone becomes too violent they are disarmed in slow motion again you see the look of contorted seeming Agony on the face of this transer another area they closely documented was the behavior of mothers to their babies and the responses that were elicited these they attempted to compare across several cultures now me had a personal as well as a professional interest in child rearing when they returned to the states she was pregnant with her first and only child Mary Katherine baaton I was born in 39 uh at that point sophisticated people Highly Educated people who wanted to be scientific and modern were inclined to feed babies with bottles on schedules in rather a rigid way and it was her knowledge of the range of human child wearing styles that made her do a whole set of things like breastfeeding me for a long time like self-demand uh that were ideas that needed to be reintroduced into Western culture and if if she hadn't had that set of ideas if she hadn't wanted to do something somewhat experimental and documented and make that experience available for other people I probably would have had a very different kind of early childhood to indulge these whims me knew she needed a new type of pediatrician she chose Dr Benjamin Spock whose subsequent best-selling book on child rearing changed the way that millions of American Mothers brought up their children it was strongly influenced by me's own observations around the world Katherine Bateson had what has been described as the best documented childhood in the United States for Bateson the biologist with an abiding interest in anthropology and me the Anthropologist who so often ask questions of biology it was another chance to experience and observe the process of socialization this time on a personal level starting with the filming of her birth and continuing with note taking and a whole series of observations through her early years each stage of her life was recorded when the war broke out both of my parents uh were fully committed to the need to win that war it's not at all like the situation now where we tend to feel that war is not a viable way of pursuing National objectives uh the war had to be fought and it had to be won me was seen as a serious Scientist by her government who recruited her to assist in the war effort as one of her lifelong friends Roda Metro recalls she was sent to England at the request to the English and also with the war department of the United States because American boys were saying that that English girls were were totally immoral and English girls were saying that American boys were totally immoral and so she did a series of lectures around but she was also trying to do interviewing to find out what in the world this was all about well the the point was rather simple one which her knowledge of American culture and her growing knowledge of English culture was very valuable in the United States the boy always takes the initiative and the girl is there to let him know by various standard devices that's as far as I want you to go rization was the order of the day and it certainly looks as if everything was going according to plan in England the respons ability rests entirely with a boy so a boy had to restrain himself until he was ready to make a commitment or not well when that was explained and it was explained to the Troops it was explained to the people in charge of recreation and it was explained to families the whole thing cleared up Ms work on the relationship between British and American troops which she came to London to research like the rest of of her war workor is significant like her teacher France Boaz she was no longer content to Simply go off and study exotic societies she had thoughts and made statements about contemporary cultures like her own at the end of the war me's third and most successful marriage to Gregory Bateson ended in divorce she never married again she did however do more field work as in Europe the war in the Pacific had had a profound effect on its peoples and a colleague of mes reported interesting changes taking place on Manus when the actual fighting was over monus was used as staging area for the continuing American operations in the Pacific the force of men and materials built up on Manus was enormously greater than anything the people had ever experienced over a million American soldiers poured through the admiralty Islands fighting a war with the most highly developed equipment the world had ever seen and some for 1,000 Admiralty Island people were exposed to this tremendous spectacle the Americans knocked down mountains blasted chanels smooth islands for airst strips and tore up miles of bush with their marvelous engines watching the Americans in monis the monus grasped the idea that there existed a total civilized way of life about which civilized men knew and they did not they desired what they [Music] saw there's a star spangle Banner waving somewhere in a distant land so many miles away only Uncle Sam's great Heroes get to go there where since her early work in s she had never worked alone in the field and on her return to Manus she was Again part of a team me who had always been interested in social change now had an opportunity to study it firsthand just what had happened to the culture that had hosted over 2 million American troops what did the young people want what did the older people expect 25 years after her original field work Perry Village had changed it was now built on the mainland many of the people still remembered her and she came to respect the way that they had accommodated and yet also somehow resisted change for foree speee [Music] foree [Music] spee [Music] Margaret loved the field and lots of people say she was a very different person in the field she was completely absorbed in what was going on she had a standard size notebook and she had it with her at all times a little black and white marbled cover and she must have bought them by the gross she sounded many times as if she were talking to herself she'd suddenly say say I feel like hell today tonight I washed my hair little trivial things that wouldn't be what you'd expect to find in field notes at all and yet at a deeper level she certainly realized that she was making careful records of genealogies and the kinship reasons for behavior in the village and that they might in due time be important to people who are doing a different kind of research often her speculations in the field was more interesting than the analyses that appeared later in print I keep feeling that Margaret's Diaries and field notes are the great untapped resource August 27th 1967 I woke up this first day to the Early Morning Sounds of the village as familiar to me now as the early morning sounds outside the window of my apartment in New York the past and the present mingle they had kept their basic methods of making a living but they had stripped off all the elaborate exchanges which once drove the older men incessantly and Enslaved the young men to their economic [Music] backers neandra doing her washing to music by The Beatles does not surprise me in the least not just because she's attending the university in Fort morsy but because Perry Village itself is no longer cut off from the rest of the world as it once [Music] was I I think that you might like to hear what she had to say when she was writing her diary when she in a sense really summed up how she felt about being an anthropologist who returned probably more times than any predecessor had to the same Village what she wrote was I am most conscious of the enormous sense of continuity as I look at the old whom I knew as children and see The Grandfather's faces reflected in their Descendants the shared Memories the shared experiences bind them together in a web that is stronger than the ancestral curses then she went on the world has changed anthropology has changed the village has changed its people have multiplied and spread out to the Far Corners of New Guinea and Beyond and have helped the new institutions to flower in a way this kind of continuing fieldwork is a symbol of the way all finality has vanished from scientific work in some ways the village of Perry had become a life project she wanted the people to enjoy Independence but not from all their traditional ways she gave her farewell speech by the light of a hurricane lamp now it is very important that the new generation the younger people who have learned English and have gone away to school that when they come back they both bring new customs with them and remember the ways of their forefathers also if you forget entirely your grandfathers your great-grandfathers and where they lived and what they did then you will be people that have no ground under your feet who have no roots in the ground who belong only in the present and have no idea of the past now Meo Sav we can come back me come back we know come back me who's thaty Savvy that's all you f a Savvy right now you feel can ride him along me you can sell him talk along me he can savy what name something you get up long Place how was that place he straight all together Perry is now seen as more than a research project by the members of the team that me introduced to the Village after the war how many of you remember Margaret in 1975 you would have been very little and you remember when when she came here in 1975 you were pretty small and we wanted to do something that Margaret believed in very much so we thought a nice thing might be if one boy and one girl from Perry where Margaret visited for over 50 years she came here seven times and each time she wanted to know what the children were doing so this is in her memory and I know that you will go on to school and then on to University and you will be a big man and a big woman in your country PNG and Margaret would have been very very proud of you [Music] congratulations anthropologists have recently been taken to task for leaving the cultures they study without actually doing anything for the people themselves academics build their careers on work done among a remote people yet the favor seems very one-sided apart from those of me's team who still contribute to the welfare of the new Perry Village the older people do feel that their Anthropologist always had their interests at heart [Music] fore later in life me received public Acclaim and her share of honors she became a commentator on her own culture giving public lectures on a wide variety of subjects with Roda Metro she was also asked to write a regular column in one of the most influential of American woman's magazines when red book came along that seemed ideal because it was a it was a way of approaching younger Americans and Margaret as a teacher of course was always concerned with uh building an audience for anthropology because there was virtually no audience for anthropology we dealt with problems of of contemporary marriage we when the commune uh were getting quite important and people were worrying about them and wondering about them we did something on communes we did uh a series of articles on uh why Johnny can't write rather than why Johnny can't read on on problems of of Early Education for literacy and and understanding the world around them was using an anthropologist skill to talk about topics that people were asking questions about or were angry about or were very interested in she was very successful both as an anthropologist and uh outside of direct anthropology in in getting people's attention Margaret me died of cancer in America in 1978 it's interesting to see how her own culture evaluated her life and achievements these press clippings from just after she died call her a Pioneer and an innovator grandmother of us all America's apple pie Anthropologist Earth Mother grandmother to the world and a matron Saint me success as a popular Anthropologist was astonishing but her own profession often regarded her success with suspicion popularizers of academic disciplines seldom earn the respect of their colleagues I'm not sure what all reasons were there may have been political reasons Beyond this jealousy but she was never given advancements in the way of appointments as professorships and she didn't become a full curator of the museum until late in her life so that the fact of being a celebrity and the turns that her career took and didn't take influenced each other uh I don't think it really got in her way I'm not sure that uh she was as much interested in propounding a new Theory or new theories for anthropology as she was in doing excellent field work I think she had perhaps had a a sense that the future would take care of the Excellence of her work this time BR let me come me har now me cry straight away now me cry cry cry cry [Applause] me's activities is an anthropologist had broadcast a relatively unknown academic discipline to a worldwide order audience eager for news about other societies there are many anthropologists who feel that her claim to have a thorough understanding of all the culture she studied to be a bit far-fetched but if her analysis of social life wasn't all it could have been she certainly had the reputation as an assiduous field worker and that Knack of asking important and penetrating questions her intense desire to emphasize the vast variety of ways in which social life is organ ized and the enthusiastic and public way she relished cultural differences meant that by the end of her life it was anthropology itself that had come of age thank you very much ah thank you goodbye Stefan goodbye ah Kai Kai goodbye Carol thank you too goodbye [Music] John on y [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] to really just very nice