Margaret Mead Today: Mother to the World

LOOKING like a cross between a stern schoolmarm and an impish witch, the short (5 ft. 2 in.), broad-beamed woman in a floor-length, toga-like gown marched onto the stage at the American Museum of Natural History last week, clutching her ever-present forked walking stick. Then, peering at the overflow audience of nearly 1,500, Margaret Mead, who at 67 is something more than an anthropologist and something less than a national oracle, undertook one of her favorite tasks. She told her audience what is afoot in the world and some good ways to improve it.

The subject of the lecture, her third in the museum's annual Man and Nature series, was social change. Dr. Mead argued that primitive societies barely perceived change; a child repeated almost exactly the lives of his parents. In more advanced societies, which changed faster, children often abandoned their parents' ways and modeled their behavior on teachers or heroes. Now, however, the kind of change fostered by technology has removed even those models. Youths today, she argued, are like children of wilderness pioneers--the first natives in a new world. "For the first time in human history," she said, "there are no elders anywhere who know what the young people know." Parents who would understand what their own generation has wrought, she implied, will have to reverse the traditional pattern and let their children teach them what the real issues and questions are.

Like the other 60 or so lectures she delivers each year, this one was packed with provocative opinion, and necessary forays into social science jargon were leavened with literate wit. Unmistakably, the dogmatic pronouncements were drawn from Margaret Mead's 44 years as a pioneering field researcher. "I have seen what few people have ever seen," she says, "people who have moved from the Stone Age into the present in 30 years--kids who say, "My father was a cannibal, but I am going to be a doctor!' "

Her career as a disciplined observer of human behavior began when she was nine: her economist father and sociologist mother encouraged her to record the speech patterns of her younger sisters in a notebook. As a child, Dr. Mead once recalled, she precociously read "hundreds of books a year and every magazine, allowed or forbidden, that came into the house." By the age of 13 she was ghostwriting papers for members of a women's self-improvement society near her home in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. She arrived at Manhattan's Barnard College the very model of a liberated young woman with a passion for social reform.

Instead of entering politics, she decided to earn a Ph.D. in the then unfamiliar field of anthropology. Under Franz Boas, the founder of American anthropology as an academic discipline, she caught the conviction that study of primitive societies could teach sophisticated Western man a good deal about his own institutions--and about changing them. At 23, she set off for six months alone among remote fisherfolk in American Samoa. The result of her research, published in 1928 when she was 26, was Coming of Age in Samoa.

In jargon-free, almost lyrical prose, Coming of Age described how a cultural web of ritual, taboo, kinship and history formed the typical Samoan personality. Growing up is "so easy, so simple," she found, because "Samoa is a place where no one plays for very high stakes, suffers for his convictions or fights to the death. Caring is slight." The book became a bestseller and basic reading for introductory social-science courses; it is still in print. Though the work broke no theoretical ground, Margaret Mead's conclusion that the Samoan teen-ager was calm and free from trauma provided solid proof that "adolescence is not necessarily a specially difficult period in a girl's life" and, by extension, that so-called "human nature" is almost infinitely plastic.

By the time the book came out, Margaret Mead was at work on her second field trip, to the Admiralty Islands of New Guinea. She has made eleven visits to far-off South Sea islands,-first studying peoples relatively untouched by modern civilization, then returning to gauge their dramatic postwar changes. She was one of the first anthropologists to use still and motion pictures to record the customs and habits of primitive societies. She was also one of the first to develop the subscience of semiotics, or the study of how men communicate by gestures.

To the dismay of her more cautious peers, she has always been ready to apply her anthropological findings to the contemporary world. During World War II, for example, she wrote a booklet telling G.I.s how to get along with British girls (because of cultural differences, she warned, they were apt to think that an American's playful advances were meant more seriously than he intended). "Margaret sees herself as the mother of us all," says Child Psychologist Martha Wolfenstein, one of her longtime collaborators.

Fierce Women. Zestfully efficient, Dr. Mead regularly goes to Broadway plays and Sunday Episcopal Church services, advises nearly 30 young anthropological field workers, serves on some seven boards and committees, writes a monthly column for Redbook magazine, and keeps 15 assistants hopping in her crowded tower office at the Natural History museum, where she is curator of ethnology. For all the familiarity of her views, she remains an original, with a capacity to shock and surprise. An enthusiast of interdisciplinary studies, she has organized countless sessions that have brought anthropologists together with men of widely varying disciplines. Although not enamored of the S.D.S., she argues that "our colleges are 400 years out of date." A fighter for equal opportunity, she favors a coed draft, although she would not give guns to women because "they are too fierce." Recently she has been recommending that Americans accept their society's evolution toward two different types of marriage: "individual marriage" for young couples not intending to have children and "parental marriage" for couples desiring offspring.

"As an anthropologist," says one colleague, "she is not a Jesus. She is a St. Paul." Paul, of course, was not welcomed unequivocally by his fellow Christians, and for all her prestige, Dr. Mead is not considered beyond criticism by her colleagues. Younger anthropologists sometimes dismiss her broad field inquiries as no more substantial than "a wind blowing through the palm trees." Other Pacific investigators have produced evidence that runs counter to her assessments of tribal personality. Most of all, anthropologists stand aghast at the way her powerful mind sometimes links fact and implication with little more than pure faith. One of her sternest critics, Columbia Anthropologist Marvin Harris, says dryly: "The courage of one's convictions is a blessing with which Mead has been liberally endowed." She permits few ripostes. When attacking the wrongheadedness of a fellow scholar, says a cowed friend, "she is truly like one of those terrible Indian goddesses, standing on her victims with her tongue sticking out."

The Whole of Life. Nonetheless, she has been proved right so often that her critics have to take her seriously--and she is unlikely to give them a rest. In December, Margaret Mead officially retires from her job at the museum, but she will keep her office there, install a new hall on the "Peoples of the Pacific" and continue to write. She is helping to organize the social science division for Fordham University's new Lincoln Center college and plans to keep on making trips to the South Pacific.

Margaret Mead has been a powerful catalyst in making anthropology relevant to contemporary man--and now, obviously, is no time to quit. "At this moment in history," she says, "we have virtually the whole of man's life spread out before us--people who are living as they may have lived for the past 30,000 years and astronauts who are beginning to live as we will live tomorrow. On my first field trips I worked with the comforting knowledge that everything I reported was unique, vanishing, and would be useful for anthropology. Today those people and I live in the same world, and my knowledge of their past has changed the world climate so that it is ready for them to assert their rights as human beings. It's sentimental to object to the fact that people are coming into a world community. We're not going to go back."

-On several trips she worked successively with two husbands, from both of whom she is now divorced. "Anthropological marriages are like theatrical marriages," she says succinctly. "They add more of a strain to the relationship."

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