A Most Famous Anthropologist

By Melvin Maddocks

MARGARET MEAD: A LIFE by Jane Howard; Simon & Schuster; 527 pages; $19.95 WITH A DAUGHTER'S EYE by Mary Catherine Bateson; Morrow; 242 pages; $15.95

She isn't planning to be the best anthropologist, but she is planning to be the most famous," the elegant anthropologist Ruth Benedict once observed of her prize student at Barnard.

Few predictions by a teacher have proved to be more accurate. A half-century later, just before her death in 1978, Margaret Mead had become so famous that a lot of people who read her column in Redbook or saw her on the Tonight show did not even know that she was an anthropologist. She was simply Margaret Mead, a celebrity, as bursting with opinions as Norman Mailer, as free with advice as Ann Landers.

Should marriage vows cover more than five years? Must infants be so swaddled? Need adolescents feel guilt? Before televison cameras, on hundreds of lecture platforms, in thousands of lines of print, Margaret Mead emphatically doubted it. Flouncing her cape, thumping her cherry-wood walking stick and shouting, "Fiddlesticks!" (her battle cry against cant), she became one of those native oracles, full of cranky common sense and hearty exhortation that Americans cannot resist.

Biographer Jane Howard (A Different Woman, Families) spent five years studying the making of Margaret Mead. Mead's only child, Mary Catherine Bateson, has, like most children, gone through a lifetime trying to understand her mother and her father, British Anthropologist Gregory Bateson. Both women have produced fascinating portraits of a stubbornly enigmatic subject.

Even as a young woman of 27, about to earn her first fame as the author of Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), Mead seemed an odd sort of anthropologist. She was a city person, passionately attached to Manhattan, who positively disliked the country. She became claustrophobic in native huts. She had little taste for artifacts. Her passion was for collecting people. From the time she took charge of her playmates' games, Mead proved a relentless organizer of others, regardless of their sex. In college, she formed the "Ash Can Cats," her first extended family, and bound these classmates to her for the rest of her life.

Engaged at 16, Mead garnered and jettisoned husbands with a kind of innocent ruthlessness. She was married to Luther Cressman, a minister with an interest in sociology, when she went to Samoa. On the way back she met a young New Zealand scholar, Reo Fortune, soon to be husband No. 2. In 1932, while Fortune and Mead were doing research in what is now Papua New Guinea, they met Gregory

Bateson. Other anthropologists brought data home from the field; she returned with new husbands as well.

To be recruited into Margaret Mead's life was an intense, sometimes perilous privilege. Her cluttered sixth-floor office in the tower of the American Museum of Natural History, her headquarters for nearly 50 years, often became a stage where doors slammed and tears fell copiously.

If Mead could be exacting with colleagues, she was scarcely less demanding of her friends. People she had not seen for a while were subjected to "marathons of conversation, often exhausting." From Samoa to Greenwich Village, it seemed, she was everybody's mother--an irony not lost on Mary Catherine Bateson, now an anthropologist herself, who judged Mead to be "less than fully nurturant" when it came to her own daughter. Bateson expresses bittersweet amusement at her mother's boast that when Baby Cathy was six weeks old, "we let the nurse go and took care of her ourselves for a whole weekend."

For Mead, having a child seemed rather in the nature of a field trip. She took the notes while Gregory took the pictures. At one point, the couple contemplated setting up floodlights in order to be able to record on film any sudden, surprising move on the part of the specimen in their nursery.

Howard's biography is shrewd and intelligent and supplies all the details about Margaret Mead, down to her recipe for salad dressing. Bateson's memoir is more an act of poetic intuition. Yet she is blunter than Howard about her mother's affairs with lovers of both sexes, and more specific about the earth mother's need to be mothered herself.

How will those future generations that Mead so maternally cared about view her? These two books make the controversy started since her death by the anthropologist Derek Freeman, a professor in Australia, seem a bit beside the point. Did, as Freeman argues, Mead misread her celebrated Samoans? Were they as marvelously gentle as she thought them to be? Mead's conclusion, or wish, may have been less a matter of scholarship or research than of character. More evangelist than scientist, she appeared to believe that the ultimate purpose of anthropology is to increase a sense of life's possibilities.

If that makes her look like the last of the 19th century optimists, so be it. But with what enthusiasm, with what generosity she invited the human race to share her faith! This may be what Gregory Bateson meant when he predicted that in the years ahead people will recognize Margaret Mead's contribution as being enormous--without being able to say quite why. --By Melvin Maddocks

Excerpt

"Nobody was indifferent to Margaret Mead. She was loving, scolding, ebullient, irksome, heroic, and at times vindictive. Like most great characters, she was inconsistent. As a young girl she acted like an old lady, and as one of the fabled elders of this century she could be a coquette and even, as one of her friends said, 'a brat.' What made her unique was her energy and her ability to make the most of everything, even hurricanes, volcanoes and fractured bones. Because she was so chronically excited, she was exciting, and the excitement was contagious." --Margaret Mead: A Life