For me, climate change is a crisis so big it is hard to think about at all. Can anthropology help us think through a problem that leaves us feeling overwhelmed? I would argue that yes, anthropological thinking can tackle these thorny problems, and in fact, it’s one of the few approaches that can. The recent AAA Global Climate Change Task Force Report makes this clear, by pointing out anthropology’s unique view on historical and current adaptation. Here, I also want to look back and find some inspiration in the public anthropology of Margaret Mead, who did not hesitate to comment on thorny problems of her day.

Anthropology can be thought of as a form of mediation in many senses, as Dominic Boyer has argued. In the last post of this blog series, I suggest that Mead took on the role of a mediator in four ways, an approach that can serve us now when dealing with a problem as large and unwieldy as climate change.

First of all, Mead was a mediator between different groups. Of course, she mediated between the people she studied and the American public through her writing. While I am not sure whether she acted directly as an advocate for the interests of indigenous people, she certainly advocated for their humanity. Anthropologists have an important role in documenting and publicizing the effects of climate change, especially in marginal communities, and as climate change affects places where we work, we will be increasingly called upon to advocate. Many anthropologists—such as Kathleen Galvin, Ben Orlove, Shirley Fiske, other members of the AAA climate change task force, and myriad others including an increasing number of graduate students (see the Savage Minds series on climate change for a useful overview)—are doing this work already.

Mead was also a mediator between groups, including academics, policy makers, and the public. She participated in policy research groups and wrote columns in popular magazines. It must be remembered that Mead was primarily a curator at the American Museum of Natural History and was thus expected to talk to the public. However, it is risky for an academic anthropologist to delve into policy and popular media. Policy makers are not exactly asking for our opinions, but anthropologists could work as advisors, especially in terms of mitigating effects on poor and marginalized people. We are also good at understanding behavior through culture and perhaps persuading people to shift patterns. Further, development organizations and businesses are already using anthropological thinking. Many anthropologists have shown the international development system to be broken—at least in terms of making life better for people—and business goals most often exacerbate climate change. Yet there are many public-private initiatives that seek to address vulnerable populations and climate change. I do not suggest we stop critiquing these efforts, but what do we lose if we shut ourselves out of these conversations?

Second, Mead was a mediator between extreme views. In terms of her views on women’s changing roles in America, she was both liberal and conservative. A forthcoming article by Paul Shankman entitled “Margaret Mead and Public Anthropology: Redbook, Women’s Issues, and the 1960s” shows that she was an early advocate for abortion rights, no-fault divorce, and reducing family size. Yet Mead also felt that a woman’s role as a mother was more fundamental than her work outside the home. Importantly, though, her views changed over time. Early on in the 1960s she argued that women wanted to be married and raise children, while later in the decade she argued that women and men should have more similar roles in the household and working world, which would effectively value care work more. Here, she shows an ability to gauge her public and to change her mind as the times change, while finding common ground. As good listeners, anthropologists might be able to do the same for extreme debates about climate change.

Third, she mediated between the intimate and the enormous. From details of family life or gender roles in other places, she commented on the family or motherhood writ large in her books and columns. Larger still, she answered readers’ questions on a wide range of issues. Were she alive today, I believe she would try to understand globalization and climate change through the intimate details and context of cultural life. As Karen Ho argues, anthropology has the ability to discover a “vertical slice” of institutions, sites, or cultural forms, which allows a view in between the individual and the global. We can try to link the intimate and the macro in dealing with a problem of such enormous scale.

Finally, Mead was an important mediator between despair and optimism. In anthropology, I feel it is common to feel overwhelmed by the state of the world and the enormity of human suffering. As Sherry Ortner observes, the field has focused on “dark anthropology” of late and the parallel search for happiness or a good life. Mead found hope in the darkness. Today, the South Pacific islands where she worked are at great risk for disappearing altogether. How could she find optimism in that? Yet she strikes me as a practical soul. When asked what time in history she would most like to have lived, she replied:

“I am glad to be living today. In this period…every living person is given opportunities for significant action. We are faced with the need not only to preserve ourselves, our children, our country, and our values, but also to preserve the whole world from the threat of possible destruction.” (Mead 1979: 252)

There is work to be done. Anthropologists are curious and knowledgeable about humanity’s tendencies in crisis. Humanity does not have a good record. Margaret Atwood, who also understands this, writes here about how she believes climate change will play out. Perhaps we are insignificant in the face of such odds. Other global capitalist entities hold the power cards. However, if we wish to make this impending crisis less severe, I doubt we can do it alone. In response to the opening question, no, I do not think anthropology can solve big problems like climate change. However, mediating may be what anthropology has to offer.

Mead, Margaret. 1979. Margaret Mead: Some Personal Views. Rhoda Metraux, ed. New York: Walker and Company.

But beyond scaremongering, what does screen time and immersion in digital worlds actually mean in terms of child rearing? I ask this question not just because it is anthropologically interesting, but as the parent of two small children who are growing up in a digitally transforming world. In keeping with my last two posts in this series, I turn to the work of Margaret Mead for ways to think about technology and child rearing. Perhaps Mead’s most interesting insights are about the decline of respect for elders’ knowledge—and thus, a loss of knowledge about traditions and life wisdom—in situations of rapid cultural and generational change. She felt that American children had markedly different lives from their (often immigrant) parents, with access to more resources and technologies, and the potential for upward mobility. This, she argued, meant that:

“In a country where the most favoured are the ones to take up the newest invention, and old things are in such disrepute…the world belongs to the new generation…. In the past there have been societies in which the elders have been craftsmen in life, wise in its requirements, loving in their use of precious materials…. But in…America, life is not viewed as an art which is learned, but in terms of things which can be acquired” (Mead 1930: 214-16).

Here, Mead argues that in societies that value facility with new technology over life experience, children lack humility or appreciation for skills learned over a lifetime. This is a comment less on how virtual game play affects children, and more on how the privileged place of these digital creations in our society affects kinship structures.

However, I do not think that Mead would consider television or video games inherently bad for children. Mead studied childhood in many places—perhaps most famously among different groups in the South Pacific—and compared their practices to American child rearing. Later, she was considered one of the first “experts” on parenting, along with her friend and family pediatrician Benjamin Spock. As an early contributor to the “nature-nurture” debates, she believed that certain cultures create specific personalities and that this happens early with children. Mead’s work reminds us that parenting is infinitely varied, and thus one should keep an open mind to new variations.

I will come clean now, and admit that I am not a gamer. My parents never allowed video games, although I watched my male friends play some of the games of that era. I didn’t join in much partly because of perceived gender divides, and because I was terrible at these games, having no experience. I was intrigued by the world of the Legend of Zelda, although I always felt I had more in common with Link, the industrious (male) protagonist, than with Princess Zelda who must be rescued. As for Mortal Kombat, I remember asking, “What good is it to know how to knock out a monster with a double kick in this game if you can’t do it in real life?” (My friends would say, “That’s not the point.”) However, thinking about virtual worlds anthropologically—and the variation in these worlds now as compared to when I was a kid—I realize the moral judgment in a wholesale rejection of the play, exploration, and socializing possible in digital spaces.

I think Mead would understand virtual worlds as “real,” and make distinctions about different kinds of virtual experience. For example, in a typical video game, there is some room for flexibility and agency (and increasingly so, from what I understand), but the visuals and rules have been pre-programmed, thus lacking the chaos and surprise of the physical world. A computer program has yet to simulate the world, but there are digital spaces that allow more creativity. Tom Boellstorff argues convincingly that places and social relationships in Second Life are “real” and provide a space for people with certain interests or medical conditions to meet.

Minecraft, which appeals enormously to children, allows players to build structures with other players in a virtual space that does not include an overall goal with challenges to overcome. Some argue that Minecraft encourages children to think like computer programmers and engineers. Minecraft has provided a platform for children with autism to meet and socialize and, as Mimi Ito demonstrates, can be a creative route to education. Gaming communities lead to relationships between people, who may meet face-to-face or not, while Casey O’Donnell shows that game developers have their own cultures. And of course, Pokémon Go is the most audacious attempt yet at creating an “overlay” between real and virtual worlds.

Mead would probably argue that virtual worlds are part of the “real” world for our children in the same way they are real for adults. Let’s be honest: I spend the majority of my weekdays staring at screens. Yet the activities I do on screens vary—I email mainly for work, I use my phone for texting with friends and family or to scan social media, I use the Internet for research, I write on a computer, and increasingly I read articles and books online. At night I might watch a “brain candy” TV show. As I’ve said, I’m not a gamer, so I do not have immersive experience in this kind of virtual world, although I enjoy a good science fiction novel or TV show here and there. I can understand the appeal. However, I limit my two-year-old’s screen time to a weekly Friday family movie night, when we all watch a half hour of a cartoon movie. He asks for movie night during the week now. He also talks to his grandparents using Facetime on my phone, and sometimes I let him look at photos of himself and family on the phone. He already knows how to swipe the screen and sometimes cries when I take the phone away. It’s a slippery slope, but is it a bad one? This will become ever more complicated as my kids get older and want to play virtual games. I do think it is important to spend time in the physical world, in face-to-face social situations. I also realize this is a moral argument in many ways.

I think Mead would say it is important for children to explore their worlds including virtual spaces, but not at the expense of exploration of the rest of their worlds. She would probably be the first to argue that more ethnographic research is needed. What do these games mean for how children learn roles, rules, norms, socializing, and trusting themselves? How does this compare with learning from physical play that teaches them rules of the physical world—such as climbing and falling from a play structure—and face-to-face social interactions? Of course, as noted above, some anthropologists are doing this work already. Certainly, games can help children develop empathy; Mead herself, with Gregory Bateson, invented a card game that sought to teach how democratic leaders and dictators think differently. The nonprofit Games for Change specializes in video games with “social impact.” Further, learning depends on the virtual space. Can we make these spaces even more flexible and inclusive, especially in terms of gender or parameters of the game?

Finally, Mead would likely turn the lens back on American society. What does it say about us that we judge parents based on their screen time policies? This is a moral and gendered stance that judges parents and especially mothers. However, I think there is more to it than mommy shaming. In a world that feels increasingly uncertain, the debates over screen time seem to reflect broader cultural anxieties about preparing children—and adults, by extension—for an unknown and unknowable future. Giving our children varied experience in the world, including but not limited to virtual worlds, may be the best we can do.

Mead, Margaret. 1930. Growing Up in New Guinea: A Comparative Study of Primitive Education. New York: William Morrow and Company.

But how much deviance from gender norms is really possible? Deviance is a word not used in contemporary anthropology very much anymore. It suggests a rigid norm that can be identified and described with a certainty few anthropologists would agree with now. It is also a term loaded with stigma. Who are the deviants? The word brings to my mind figures from my adolescence, a group I counted myself among for a time, associated with a defiant attitude and an angry, if vague, rejection of mainstream culture. In this sense, deviance means the youthful impulse to be different, to act out, and to perform discontent.

Yet the term deviant, as Margaret Mead used it in Coming of Age in Samoa, meant something both more structured and more flexible, and is useful especially for understanding women who do not conform to social norms. For Mead, deviance could
mean a “deviant in a downward direction, or the delinquent” (95), or it could mean an “upward” deviance, or “those who demanded a different or improved environment, who rejected the traditional choices” (94). This is judgmental and seemingly neocolonial terminology, placing girls who strove to be more Western through missionary education and career ambitions in the “upward” trajectory, while those who were rejected by their peers in the “downward” camp. Even so, Mead’s idea of deviance refers to a woman who wanted different life choices, whatever those choices may be.

But is there room for different life choices in practice? Mead argues that deviant girls in Samoa were doing something more radical than nudging gender norms—they were “following a plan of life which would not lead to marriage and children” (96). This held true for the women pursuing “upward” deviance through education and work, and “downward” deviance through their own personality defects. In Bangalore, I found that women who did not follow this script were thought of as deviant in a negative sense—that is, I did not find the flexibility of Mead’s deviance, which seems to allow for different choices. The “career woman” or “modern woman” was talked about in my fieldwork as so focused on her career, or on partying, or both, that she was risking her chance to be a wife and mother (see the Hindi movie “Turning 30!!!” for an example of the worst-case scenario for a modern woman in Mumbai, or—as one of my friends put it—“any Bollywood movie ever”). For the young technology workers in Bangalore with whom I worked, for men as well as women, being married was important to their future status within their families and society more generally, including the workplace. Marriage was a constant worry for my female friends, especially as they reached their late twenties, and was a background worry for men as well, but without the same time pressure. Becoming a mother seemed secondary to the concern of whom and when to marry.

A few of my female friends in Bangalore were not interested in getting married. For example, one woman I know is twenty-seven and single partly because she chooses not to fit the “traditional” wife mold. Her large personality often intimidates people—especially men. She finds her job in tech stressful, saying she would like to quit and start her own business or NGO. She has many friends and has dated but not very seriously. She feels disappointed with men and admits to me that she may enjoy her life more overall if she stays single, but knows that in her family and in India generally, it is not acceptable to be a single woman over the age of thirty. However, she does not think she wants to get married—it would mean giving up a lot of her freedom and probably her job. She is a “deviant” in that she is not willing to compromise in the ways she imagines she would have to if she marries. She wants different life choices than the ones she feels are on offer.

What about women who want other life choices, whether they are married or not? In terms of career, many—not all, but many—of the female technology workers in Bangalore with whom I spoke said they wanted to keep working and get promoted after marriage and children, instead of acting as temporary and cheap labor. This desire was even more precarious because of their subordinate position in global outsourcing, making their labor both outsourced and “pinksourced.” They also wanted different career choices, as they had followed the expected engineering track and now wanted a bit more creativity. In terms of personal life, many wanted more emotional connection in their relationships than they thought their parents had. They also wanted close friends of the same and opposite sex, as support for new aspirations and a way to share their feelings. For women who identified as bisexual or lesbian, the stakes of avoiding marriage were that much higher—as those I knew were not out to their families, different life choices were more restricted and all the more necessary. Fianlly, older women also resisted expectations, forming friendships that allowed them to travel without their husbands or start new businesses.

Mead applied the term to the young women she researched, and thus brought attention to the way the concept of deviance is gendered. What is deviant for a man versus a woman differs in terms of place, time, and social position, yet it always differs. In my work, I came to understand that women risk being considered deviant if they resist the work of marriage and child rearing, and can signal this in many ways even if they are married and/or have children. All of the women I have mentioned above—from women who never want to marry to those who have grandchildren—could be signaling their deviance. However, what makes a deviant man? Perhaps lawbreakers, but in Bangalore a bachelor may be unusual but not deviant, nor is a married man with no children. When considering the seeming embrace of a popular feel-good feminism in parts of India, the idea of the “deviant girl” reminds me how gender norms resist change even when pop culture might indicate otherwise.

Mead, Margaret. 2001 [1930]. Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation. New York: Perennial Classics.

In my first introductory anthropology class of the year, I spoke a bit about the figures I consider “founding” to cultural anthropology, and asked if anyone had heard of them. Franz Boas, I inquired? After a pause, one woman tentatively asked, “Isn’t he the father of anthropology or something?” Yes, ok, close enough. She allowed that she had learned about Boas in another anthropology class. Bronislaw Malinowski? One hand went up in the back. A bearded young man said, “I’ve heard of him, but that’s probably because my girlfriend is an anthropology major.” Yes, that would explain it. And then I asked, Margaret Mead? Silence. I was frankly taken aback. I realize her popular appeal peaked from the 1920s through the 1960s, ancient history to this generation of students. However, she is consistently remembered in our field as possibly the most famous anthropologist to date. She wrote popular columns in national magazines about sexuality, gender, and childhood in the US. Coming of Age in Samoa was a massive bestseller and is still in print. The controversy over her research in Samoa was headline news in anthropology for years. The recent bestselling novel Euphoria fictionalizes her life.

Whatever you may think about Margaret Mead, we cannot dispute that she was a major early figure in what we now call public anthropology. With the efforts of anthropologists such as David Graeber, Barbara King, Tanya Luhrmann, Jonathan Marks, Carole McGranahan, and Paul Stoller, to name just a few, we have a growing voice in the public sphere, spurred along by social media. Yet I cannot help but feel nostalgic for a time when Mead was so well known that she was widely derided in the academy as a “popularizer.” Given the value of anthropological insight for current issues—a point we all strive to make in our classes and elsewhere—I suggest that we could learn from such a popularizer now. In this blog series I will thus reconsider Mead’s work on sexuality, childhood, gender, feminist anthropology, and public change by imagining what she might make of today’s world and the questions and crises we face. 

So, would Margaret Mead tweet? Of course she would! I like to think, at least, that she would take advantage of the platform social media provides, including blogs such as Savage Minds and other forums for general readers. She would probably also make short videos that could be watched on social media. Perhaps the more interesting question is: What would she tweet or blog about? I find that Mead’s questions were, for lack of a better word, fundamentally anthropological questions. She was curious about human social rules for raising children and for gender roles, and how these varied cross-culturally. She wanted to know about “deviance” from these rules—who tends to deviate and how? She was not shy in talking about sexuality, using other cultures as a way to talk about American attitudes. She wanted to prove a woman could be an anthropologist and also studied women, which was a novel subject for the time. She was a figure in the feminist movement and wrote about women, childcare, and work for widely read women’s magazines, in articles that would no doubt have gone viral had it been possible at the time. Further, she spoke on matters of public policy and on crises of the day, including the atomic age, Vietnam, and the Cold War. She was a voice in the counter-culture movement.

But what makes her questions useful for today’s anthropologists? Aren’t they just a bit old-fashioned, formed in an era before interpretive anthropology? Yes, of course, they lack the focus on interpretation that is so important to contemporary anthropology. Her approach was also often narrow, without the holistic approach that allows for new questions to arise in the field. For the most part, she did not incorporate globalization or colonial and imperial legacies into her work, except when looking back on American society. Given that these shifts in anthropology are more or less de rigueur today, how would Mead update her approach to human social life?

In essence, I think she would use the same clear, compassionate approach to today’s problems. The issues of today mirror those of the 1960s and 70s, if her columns in Redbook are any indication, although many have become more pressing. I also think she would try to understand globalization and inequality more as a matter of power imbalance than cultural contrast. She would also have to think more about colonial and imperial legacies in the globalized perspectives of people she studied. Yet the way she asked questions is productive: how can we use the anthropological idea of culture and the variation of human perspectives to reflect on issues in our own society that everyone cares about?

Can we become as widely read or influential as Mead was in her day? Now, because stories and commentary are spread across myriad news and social media platforms, it is hard to reach a consistent audience. However, we have the power to reach many more people through multiple platforms, if what we have to say resonates with a critical mass of people. In her research and public writing, notes William O. Beeman in his preface to a collection of some of Mead’s essays on Western societies, “She wanted both for the public to learn from her experience, and for future generations of anthropologists to learn how to educate the public” (Beeman 2004: x). Above all, Beeman argues that Mead believed the anthropological approach to understanding many different perspectives could yield better ways of coping with conflict.

I am not sure that it is possible for a public intellectual in the current United States to be regarded as a popular authority figure on matters of culture or social life, much less have influence on major policy issues. Perhaps I am overstating Mead’s influence, and certainly she did not make policy decisions. However, she and other anthropologists, for better or worse, were at the table when it came to matters of culture and national security. Mead was a figure that many Americans looked to for answers to the changes they saw around them.

There are pressing issues everywhere we turn, perhaps more than at any other time in recent memory, such as shifts in gender roles and the everyday economy in many places in the world, the globally uneven influence of technology, the growing flow of migrants and refugees, and climate change. Mead found a way to think about culture and change in a way that made sense to people, by starting with basic questions about human nature, looking at cultural perspectives that seemed very different from American culture, and turning the question around to critique popular American assumptions. We have something to say, as anthropologists, and we often take these conversations beyond national and academic borders. Varied as it may be, we all feel strongly about many issues—we would not be in this field if we did not. Speaking to popular issues is something we can do well, if from a different place than the exoticism of Mead’s day. We can ask questions about human nature and look to many different points of view to critique assumptions we see around us. We do this every day in our work.

One next step, as many anthropologists have already taken, is to take these ideas beyond the classroom and our own disciplinary publications, and into popular and social media. This need not completely flatten the subtlety of our research; as Angelique Haugerud observes, “Public anthropology is not about watering down or ‘thinning’ academic work; rather, it aims to translate complicated ideas into widely intelligible and engaging language” (Haugerud 2016: 586). Perhaps most importantly, we do not have to confine our writing or commentary to the specific issues we engage in our research. We can and should use our research and ideas to comment widely on many topics. It’s what I imagine Mead would do.

Haugerud, Angelique. 2016. “Public Anthropology in 2015: Charlie Hebdo, Black Lives Matter, Migrants, and More.” American Anthropologist 118(3): 585-601.

Mead, Margaret, and William O. Beeman. 2004. Studying contemporary Western society: method and theory. Vol. 5. New York: Berghahn Books.