I have to admit not having read much by or about Margaret Mead, with the exception of the Bali work she did with Bateson, but Bookslut has a nice review of To Cherish the Life of the World: Selected Letters of Margaret Mead:
To Cherish skates on the surface of academic anthropology but goes to the heart of human intimacy. Because readers can learn about other aspects of Mead’s life through Blackberry Winter, her autobiography, or through an earlier collection of correspondence, Letters from the Field: 1925-1975, editors Margaret Caffrey and Patricia Francis sensibly decided to focus this volume on Mead’s relationships. Combing through the Margaret Mead collection at the US library of Congress — the single largest collection that the Congress holds — they made fine choices. As anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson (Mead’s daughter) writes in the preface,“The discipline of reading these letters is to avoid worrying too much about the references to events and about the order in which they unfolded, and rather to attend to the way Margaret frames her words to communicate with a particular person.”
I was quite surprised at the little factoid she slips in there: “the single largest collection that the Congress holds.” Not sure if that is 100% accurate, but it doesn’t seem far off the mark. Here is what the library says:
Totaling more than 500,000 items, the Margaret Mead Papers and South Pacific Ethnographic Archives is one of the largest collections for a single individual in the Library.
In 2001, for the the 100th anniversary of Margaret Mead’s birth the library put a some of this material up on the web.
One thing I’ve always liked about Mead is that she was very much a “public intellectual.” As Bookslut says:
Deeply committed to furthering anthropology’s method and theory, she was committed to activism in a troubled world. Mead brought her skills and insight to bear in various war efforts during the ’40s, when she testified before Congress and other governmental bodies on social issues, in helping Democrat presidential candidates (Humphrey, Carter) campaign effectively on television, and in inviting the average reader into social science through a column in Redbook magazine.
Maybe its time to go back and take a closer look at Mead’s legacy?
Absolutely time to review her legacy. But it’s interesting that Mead’s legacy is relevant to another discussion on this site, that of anthropologists as official or unofficial (productive or reproductive?) government agents.
Mead worked for the US government during World War II. Whatever one thinks about her involvement in that supposedly ‘good war,’ her attempts to suppress the accusations leveled against anthropologists secretly working with the CIA in Project Camelot is less easily dismissed. See an article in the Nation on this issue. Here’s a nice quote:
The Nation article cites Eric Wakin’s excellent and little-read Anthropology Goes To War, in which, if I remember correctly, Margaret Mead is described as spitting on one of her opponents in a meeting on the Project Camelot controversy. So much for cherishing life.
My opinion of Mead is incredibly low and would be lower still if I didn’t worry that people would get me confused with Derek Freeman (who I have an even lower opinion of — with the exception of his very early work on kinship which I quite like). Michaela di Leonardo’s book _Exotics at Home_ absolutely roasts Mead and her pretension to populist politics. And while everyone has been _very_ careful not say anything that might associate them in the very least bit with Freeman, I think everyone agrees Mead’s work in PNG was lousy — especially by comparison with her husbands Bateson and Fortune.
Hmmm…. perhaps more on this could be found here:
http://www.barnard.columbia.edu/sfonline/mead/
Mead received Dept of Defense funding throughout her career, not just in WWII (though it bears noting that nearly *everyone* received funding somehow traceable to DoD or CIA sources from WWII to the mid-’70s). THe incident at the AAAs was tangentially related to Project Camelot, but was more directly caused by the publication of documents showing several anthropologists working with the US govt on counter-insurgency issues in Thailand. Eric Wolf was the chair or the AAAs ethics committee, the role of which he attempted to expand from an advisory role to a disciplinary one. In the fracas that ensued, Mead was appointed Chair of an ad hoc committee that eventually chastised Wolf for overstepping his committee’s charter and swept the counter-insurgency accusations under the rug, more or less. This incident set the stage for a drastic weakening of the AAAs ethics statement, especially with regard to secret research. As a colleague of mine puts it, the current Statement of Ethics forbids anthropologists from engaging in secret research unless, that is, the anthropologist is disposed to do so.