During my exploration of del.icio.us bookmarks tagged “anthropology,” I came upon a site with the correspondence between student Margaret Mead and teacher Franz Boas during Mead’s research in Samoa (1925-6). This site, which was created to showcase more exchanges between the two anthropologists and complements the letters already published in the appendix of Derek Freeman’s book The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead.
Because I am unfamiliar with the details of the Mead-Freeman controversy (started by Freeman’s Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth), I was unable to truly appreciate the letters in terms of proving or disproving the validity of Mead’s findings. (For more on the Mead-Freeman controversy, see here and here, among others.)
Instead I read these letters as an exchange between a student and an advisor. In some of her missives Mead is quite honest in expressing her doubts about her fieldwork situation. The way she asks Boas for advice, I thought, was revealing of their close bond. In reading this exchange between a student and her teacher, I sensed some transference between the two, which might be a familiar feeling for those who has undergone the rigors of ethnographic fieldwork as a graduate student.
When I read this following passage in a letter Mead wrote to Boas (January 16, 1926), I thought to myself, “Hey, I’ve been there too!”:
But through it all, I have no idea whether I’m doing the right thing or not, or how valuable my results will be. It all weighs rather heavily on my mind. Is it worth the expenditure of so much money? Will you be directly disappointed in me?
this past fall I read a collection of M Mead’s letters from the field and — while I think Freeman’s scurrilous restudy was motivated by the basest of scholarly intentions — holy moly did she do fieldwork in high style. She wasn’t the only anthropologist of her era to do so, but that generation seems to have viewed native boys between the ages of 8 and 16 seemed principally as hunters, porters, cooks, bottle-washers, and servers at table. Mead has various reflections in her letters about what amusingly awkward help they make (!). Odd to reconcile with the earthy grande dame of anthropology, complete with wizard staff, image that she radiated in later years.
Ozma, from the letters I read I didn’t get this fuller picture of Mead with native boys as servants!
Now if that’s the case, and if I may be allowed to use her own tools of psychoanalysis on her, maybe all the feeling of inadequacy that she expresses to Boas the father figure was to disguise the overtly reversal gender role she was playing as the dominant female ruling over these boys. If she was paying her helpers, then I would also guess that her inability to make them do what she wished (“amusingly awkward help”) might have been a reflection of her own sense of inadequacy as expressed by a feeling of guilt for receiving the grant money (“Is it worth the expenditure of so much money?”)
Anyway I should stop playing the therapist before I get carried away!
the legions of porters came after the Samoa work, and seemed to have reached their high water mark during her time with Reo Fortune (might, in fact, been at least as much about what he considered a proper standard of field living as what she did). So although I am sure there is a Papa Franz dynamic in there somewhere, I’m not sure the local boys enter into it in quite that way in the Samoa period…
Ozma wrote:
This picture of Evans-Pritchard and a group of Zande boys is a good example of this (from an upcoming conference at Oxford).
Sorry, link problems: picture here