Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (55 page)

Psychoanalysts and novelists were not the only people analysing the shortcomings of civilisations. Anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers, and reporters were all obsessed by the same theme. The 1930s were an especially fruitful time for anthropology. This discipline not only offered implicit comparison with, and criticism of, the capitalist way of life, but provided examples of more or less successful alternatives.

Franz Boas still dominated anthropology. His 1911 book
The Mind of Primitive Man
made clear his loathing of nineteenth-century ideas that took for granted the inherent superiority of white Westerners. For Boas, anthropology ‘could free a civilisation from its own prejudices.’ The sooner data from other civilisations could be gathered and assimilated into the general consciousness, the better. Boas’s powerful and passionate advocacy had made anthropology seem a thrilling subject and an advance on the outmoded ethnocentrism of previous decades and the vague biologism of psychoanalysis. Two of Boas’s students, Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, produced highly influential studies that further undermined biologism. Like Boas, Mead and Benedict were interested in the link between race, genetics (still an infant subject) and culture. Mead had a master’s degree in psychology, but like many others she found anthropology more alluring and had been inspired by Ruth Benedict. Reticent to the point where her fellow students thought her depressed (they hated what they called her ‘castor oil’ faces), Ruth Benedict began to inspire respect. She and Mead eventually formed part of an influential international network of anthropologists and psychiatrists which also included Geoffrey Gorer, Gregory Bateson, Harry Stack Sullivan, Erik Erikson, and Meyer Fortes.

For Boas anthropology was, as Mead later put it, ‘a giant rescue operation’
to show the importance of culture.
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Boas gave Margaret Mead the idea that made her famous while she was still in her twenties: he suggested she study adolescence in a non-Western society. It was a clever choice, for adolescence was arguably part of the pathology of Western culture. In fact, adolescence had been ‘invented’ only in 1905, in a study by the American psychologist G. Stanley Hall (a friend of Freud).
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His
Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education
referred to over sixty studies of physical growth alone and portrayed adolescence ‘as the period in which idealism flowered and rebellion against authority waxed strong, a period during which difficulties and conflicts were absolutely inevitable.’
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In other words, it was psychologically crucial. Boas was sceptical of the idea that the problems of adolescence were purely or largely biological. He felt they must owe as much to culture as to genes.
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In September 1925 Margaret Mead spent several weeks in Pago Pago, capital of Tutuila, the chief island of American
Samoa
in the southwest Pacific Ocean.
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She stayed at a hotel made famous by Somerset Maugham in his 1920 story ‘Rain,’
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learning the basics of the Samoan language before launching on her field study.
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Mead told Boas that from her preliminary survey she proposed to spend her time on Ta’u, one of three small islands in the Manu’a group, about a hundred miles east of Pago Pago. This was ‘the only island with villages where there are enough adolescents, which are at the same time primitive enough and where I can live with Americans. I can eat native food, but I can’t live on it for six months; it is too starchy.’
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A government steamer stopped at the islands every few weeks, but she thought that was too infrequent to spoil the island’s status as an uncontaminated separate culture; the people of Ta’u were ‘much more primitive and unspoiled than any other part of Samoa…. There are no white people on the island except the navy man in charge of the dispensary, his family, and two corpsmen.’ The climate was far from perfect: year-round humidity of 80 percent, temperatures of 70–90 degrees, and ‘furious rains’ five times a day, which fell in ‘drops the size of almonds.’ Then the sun would come out, and everything on the island, including the people, would ‘steam’ until they were dry.
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Mead’s account of her fieldwork,
Coming of Age in Samoa,
was phenomenally successful when it appeared in 1928. Her introduction to the book concluded with an account of what happened on the island after dark. In the moonlight, she wrote, ‘men and maidens’ would dance and ‘detach themselves and wander away among the trees. Sometimes sleep will not descend upon the village until long past midnight; then at last there is only the mellow thunder of the reef and the whisper of lovers, as the village rests until dawn.’
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She described ‘horseplay’ between young people, ‘particularly prevalent in groups of young women, often taking the form of playfully snatching at the sex organs.’ She said she was satisfied that, for these girls, adolescence ‘represented no period of crisis or stress, but was instead an orderly development of a set of slowly maturing interests and activities. The girls’ minds were perplexed by no conflicts, troubled by no philosophical queries, beset by no remote ambitions…. To live as a girl with as many lovers as possible and then to marry in one’s own village, near
one’s own relatives and to have many children, these were uniform and satisfying ambitions.’ Samoans, she insisted, had not the faintest idea of ‘romantic love as it occurs in our civilisation, inextricably bound up with ideas of monogamy, exclusiveness, jealousy and undeviating fidelity.’
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At the same time, the concept of celibacy was ‘absolutely meaningless.’
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Samoa, or at least Ta’u, was an idyll. For Mead, the island existed only in ‘pastel tones,’ and she assumed that the picture was true for Samoa as a whole. In fact, this generalisation was inaccurate, for the main island had recently, in 1924, seen political problems and a killing. In Ta’u Mead was isolated and treated very well, the Samoans nicknaming her ‘Makelita’ after one of their dead queens. One of the reasons why
Coming of Age in Samoa
was so successful was that when her publisher, William Morrow, received the first draft of the manuscript, he suggested that she add two chapters explaining the relevance of her findings for Americans and American civilisation. In doing so, she stressed ‘Papa Franz’s’ approach, emphasising the predominance of culture over that of biology. Adolescence didn’t need to be turbulent: Freud, Horney, and the others were right – Western civilisation had a lot to answer for. The book was welcomed by the sexologist Havelock Ellis; by Bronislaw Malinowski, an anthropologist and the author of
The Sexual Life of Savages;
and by H. L. Mencken. Mead quickly became the most famous anthropologist in the world.
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She followed
Samoa
with two more field studies in the early 1930s,
Growing Up in New Guinea
(1930) and
Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies
(1935). In these books, one critic remarked, Margaret Mead took a ‘diabolical delight’ in stressing how little difference there is between so-called civilised man and his more ‘primitive’ cousins. But that was unfair. Mead was not uncritical of primitive societies, and the whole thrust of her books was to draw attention to variation in cultures. In New Guinea, children might be allowed to play all day long, but, she said, ‘alas for the theorists, their play is like that of young puppies or kittens. Unaided by the rich hints for play which children of other societies take from the admired adult traditions, they have a dull, uninteresting child life, romping good-humoredly until they are tired, then lying inert and breathless until rested sufficiently to romp again.’
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In
Sex and Temperament,
in which she looked at the Arapesh, she found that warfare was ‘practically unknown,’ as was personal aggression. The Arapesh had little in the way of art and, what she foundest oddest of all, little differentiation between men and women, at least in terms of psychology.
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Moving on from the Arapesh to the Mundugumor, on the Yua River, a tributary of the Sepik (also in New Guinea), she found a people that, she said, she loathed.
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Only three years before, headhunting and cannibalism had been outlawed. Here she recorded that it was not uncommon to see the bodies of very small children floating, ‘unwashed and unwanted,’ down the river.
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‘They are always throwing away infants here,’ Mead wrote. Babies that were wanted, she said, were carried around in rigid baskets that they couldn’t see out of and which didn’t let in much light. The children were never cuddled or comforted when they cried, so that for Mead it was hardly surprising they should grow up feeling unloved or that Mundugumor society should be ‘riddled with suspicion and distrust.’ In the third society, the
Tchambuli, fifty miles up the Sepik River, the familiar roles of men and women in Western society were reversed. Women were the ‘dominant, impersonal, managing partners,’ and men were ‘less responsible and emotionally dependent.’
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Mead’s conclusion, after this ‘orgy of fieldwork,’ was that ‘human nature is almost unbelievably malleable, responding accurately and contrastingly to contrasting cultural conditions.’

Ruth Benedict’s
Patterns of Culture,
published the same year as
Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies,
might have been called ‘Sex and Temperament, Economic Exchange, Religion, Food Production and Rivalry in Three Primitive Societies,’ for the two books had much in common.
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Benedict looked at the Zuni Indians of New Mexico (native Americans were called ‘Indians’ in those days, even by anthropologists), the Dobu of New Guinea, and the Kwakiutl, who lived on the Pacific coast of Alaska and Puget Sound. Here again large idiosyncrasies in culture were described. The Zuni were ‘a people who value sobriety and inoffensiveness above all other virtues,’ who placed great reliance on imitative magic: water was sprinkled on the ground to produce rain.
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Children were whipped ceremonially from time to time ‘to take off the bad happenings.’
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Ownership of property – in particular the sacred fetishes – was in the matrilineal line, and the dominant aspect of Zuni life, religion apart, was its polite orderliness, with individuality lost within the group. The Dobu, in contrast, were ‘lawless and treacherous’; ‘the social forms which obtain in Dobu put a premium on ill-will and treachery and make of them the recognised virtues of their society.’
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Faithfulness was not expected between husband and wife, broken marriages were ‘excessively common,’ and a special role was played by disease. If someone fell ill, it was because someone else willed it. Disease-charms were widely sold, and some individuals had a monopoly on certain diseases. In trade the highest value was put on cheating the other party. ‘The Dobu, therefore, is dour, prudish and passionate, consumed with jealousy and suspicion and resentment. Every moment of prosperity he conceives himself to have wrung from a malicious world by a conflict in which he has worsted his opponent.’
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Ecstatic dancing was the chief aspect of Kwakiutl religion, and inherited property – which even included areas of the sea, where halibut was found, for example – was the chief organisational basis of society. Immaterial things, like songs and myths, were forms of wealth, some of which could be gained by killing their possessors. The Kwakiutl year was divided into two, the summer, when wealth and social privileges were honoured, and winter, when a more egalitarian society prevailed.
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Benedict’s chapters reporting on primitive societies were bracketed by polemical ones. Here her views clearly owe a huge debt to Boas. Her main theme aimed to show human nature as very malleable; that geographically separate societies may be integrated around different aspects of human nature, giving these societies a distinctive character. Some cultures, she said, were ‘Dionysian,’ organised around feeling, and others ‘Apollonian,’ organised around rationality.
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And in a number of wide-ranging references she argued that Don Quixote, Babbitt, Middletown, D. H. Lawrence, the homosexuality in Plato, may all best be understood in an anthropological context, that is to say
as normal variations in human nature that are fundamentally incommensurable. Societies must be understood on their own terms, not on some single scale (where, of course, ‘we’ – whites – always come out on top). In creating their own ‘patterns of culture,’ other societies, other civilisations, have avoided some of the problems Western civilisation faces, and created their own.
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It is almost impossible now to recover the excitement of anthropology in the 1920s and 1930s.
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This was an era before mass air travel, mass tourism, or television, and the exploration of these ‘primitive’ societies, before they changed or were killed off, was one of the last great adventures of the world. The anthropologists were a small number of people who all knew each other (and in some cases married each other: Mead had three husbands, two of them anthropologists, and was for a time Benedict’s lover). There was an element of the crusade in their work, to show that all cultures are relative, a message wrapped up in their social/political views (Mead believed in open marriage; Benedict, from a farming family, was self-educated).

Benedict’s book was as successful as Mead’s, selling hundreds of thousands of copies over the years, available not just in bookstores but in drugstores, too. Together these two students of Boas, using their own research but also his and that of Malinowski and Mead’s husband, Reo Fortune, transformed the way we look at the world. Unconscious ethnocentrism, not to say sexual chauvinism, was much greater in the first half of the century than it is now, and their conclusions, presented scientifically, were vastly liberating. The aim of Boas, Benedict, and Mead was to put beyond doubt the major role played by culture in determining behaviour and to argue against the predominating place of biology. Their other aim – to show that societies can only be understood on their own terms – proved durable. Indeed, for a comparatively small science, anthropology has helped produce one of the biggest ideas of the century: relativism. Margaret Mead put this view well. In 1939, lying on her back, her legs propped against a chair (‘the only posture,’ she explained, ‘for a pregnant woman’), she jotted down some thoughts for the foreword to
From the South Seas,
an anthology of her writing about Pacific societies. ‘In 1939,’ she noted prophetically, ‘people are asking far deeper and more searching questions from the social sciences than was the case in 1925…. We are at a crossroads and must decide whether to go forward towards a more ordered heterogeneity, or make frightened retreat to some single standard which will waste nine-tenths of the potentialities of the human race in order that we may have a too dearly purchased security.’
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