9
In 1928, a book dedicated ‘to the girls of T’au’, a small island in the Manu’a Group of the Samoas, was published by William Morrow and Company in New York and became a surprise best-seller across the United States. Reviewed respectfully by many academic peers in fields as diverse as anthropology, psychology, and sociology, it was also greeted by sensational headlines in the popular press, egged on by its canny author. ‘Samoa Is the Place for Women’, one headline read; another called it ‘Where Neuroses Cease’.1
If its success was rare for a book of academic science, so too was its evocative writing, three hundred–odd small and well-spaced pages of vivid descriptions of T’au, of ‘soft, barbaric singing’ and ‘lovers slipping home from trysts beneath the palm trees or in the shadow of beached canoes’, of ‘fishing by torch-light’ with ‘the curving reef [gleaming] with wavering lights’ and ‘the mellow thunder of the reef and the whisper of lovers’.2 Although the whole book is written in this lively and accessible prose, its main subject is education: not formal systems of schooling, but instead ‘the process by which the baby, arrived cultureless upon the human scene, becomes a full-fledged adult member of his or her society’.3
One might imagine beginning such a book by reflecting on the differences between labour and social reproduction in these two worlds: who cooks, who hunts, and the like. This text begins instead with a broad denunciation of the ‘unsettled, disturbed status of youth’ in the United States, a state of affairs that the text blames on the various neuroses of modern life. In order to understand this ‘problem of youth’, the author wrote, it was necessary to find a subject whose strangeness made her habits and mores more visible, who spoke ‘a language the very sounds of which were strange, a language in which nouns became verbs and verbs nouns in the most sleight-of-hand fashion’, who ‘slept upon the floor’, whose ‘house was a mere circle of pillars, roofed by a cone of thatch’, and who could be studied by a dedicated ethnographer willing to spend several months ‘speaking their language, eating their food, sitting barefoot and crosslegged’, doing her best ‘to minimize the differences between us and learn to know and understand’.4
This author was not the first or the last Western anthropologist to reflect on the cultures and sexualities of exotic women without spending much time contemplating the political and economic forces shaping the lives of, and separating her from, her subjects.5 Instead of this detailed reflection on the causes and expressions of difference, this book’s focus on the fact of difference itself had lofty aims and high hopes: to learn from ‘the diverse and gracious patterns’ of supposedly primitive people to understand that people’s ‘one set of human gifts, one set of human values … an art, a social organization, a religion, which is their unique contribution to the history of the human spirit’.6
Samoa’s cultural contribution to the human spirit included, according to this text, a great deal of frankness about sex and sexuality. Its author did not mention her own sex or sexual education. ‘The seventeen-year-old girl’ in Samoa, she wrote, ‘does not wish to marry … It is better to live as a girl with no responsibility, and a rich variety of experience’.7 Promiscuity and premarital sex, she wrote, were rampant: and this led to fewer sexual neuroses, fewer conflicts, and more openness about natural processes like menstruation and childbirth.
Conservatives were horrified at the book’s un-moralistic, breezy endorsement of what it described as a kind of utopia of casual premarital sex. How could an anthropological tome on a tiny and faraway land become such a cultural sensation? Its subtitle holds the clue: ‘A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation’ clearly states the transaction being performed here. While the book was dedicated to the girls of T’au, these girls, and their cultural habits related to their coming of age as women, were its subjects, and not the people to whom it was addressed. The girls of T’au were a measuring stick against which Western Civilization could come to know itself, a rosy savage alternative to the conflicted and impossible Modern.
This anthropological and ethnographic balancing act was, as we have already seen in the Weimar sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld’s world journeys and studies of ethnographic sexology, and Roger Casement’s anti-colonial cruising, central to the formation of modern homosexual identities in the West. Domestic rebels against bourgeois European sex-gender systems looked to colonial subjects, whose sex-gender systems were being burlesqued and misrepresented by Western ethnographers as part of the project of colonization, for examples of how same-sex desire and eroticism had been integrated into community life.
Nineteenth-century anthropologies and ethnographies typically were explicitly racist and derogatory, producing categories of ‘savages’ to justify and extend colonial rule. The homosexualities inspired by such ethnographies tended to see ‘savages’ as being stuck in the past, and therefore understood ‘savage’ homosexuality as a present-day echo of the past, a kind of living version of Europe’s own Greek ancestors. This slim book about Samoa belonged to a different school: one which thought it could apprehend differences between and patterns of culture essentially on their own terms.
These anthropologists operated in a world system dominated by white colonial powers, in which their position at the core allowed them to travel the world searching for subjects they could render legible to domestic audiences. While reaping the spoils of colonization they also found themselves transformed by the people they interacted with. Some worked in state institutions developing neocolonial policy, others advocated for transformative social change. Some of them understood the Western ‘us’ and the Other as coexisting in time, some reproduced a categorical difference between the ‘us’ and the Other, and some did both at the same time.
Many of these thinkers were pioneering women, queers, Jews, and people of colour in the academy, yet as a group they regularly reproduced and enacted racist, misogynistic, and homophobic violence. Their ideas and influence shaped virtually every progressive twentieth-century social movement in the Global North, and were, not least because several of them were queer, enormously influential in the development of gay liberation movements. Emerging as a group of radical and often socialist critics of mainstream American and European culture and then disciplined by the mid-century Red and Lavender scares purging communists and queers, they became some of the most influential intellectuals of the post–World War II liberal-internationalist national security state.
Perhaps no single person better exemplifies these contradictions than Margaret Mead, the author of that book dedicated to the girls of T’au, Coming of Age in Samoa: a queer woman who hid her queerness from a phobic public. She pursued enthusiastic and passionate relationships with both men and women, was a pioneering woman in academia, and was a scholar who in that career-launching text combated scientistic racism by praising Samoan sexual and social mores as superior to American ones. Yet she also wrote, in the book’s introduction, that she had chosen to travel to Samoa because ‘in complicated civilizations like those of Europe … years of study are necessary before the student can begin to understand the forces at work within them … A primitive people without a written language present a much less elaborate problem, and a trained student can master the fundamental structure of a primitive society in a few months.’8
Born in 1901 and dying in 1978, Mead’s life spanned the emergence of the United States as a dominant imperial force in world politics.9 Shaped by her own sense of difference and outsider status as a queer woman, Mead focused her scientific research and advocacy on the description of cultural difference and the use of cultural relativism to combat the rigid hierarchies of scientific racism, and to question the sex-gender system that othered her in her home culture. Blind to the meaning of the enormous economic and racial privilege of her upbringing, she helped to construct post-war American racial liberalism: a political world-view that understands anti-racism in terms of ‘color-blindness’ rather than resistance to structural racial capitalism, is deeply invested in the exceptionalism of the United States, and collaborated with the US national security state’s destructions of and incursions into the self-determination and liberation struggles of colonized peoples.10 This racial liberalism was also, as Lee Baker and others have argued, a key part of ‘color-blind’ discourses in the United States that minimize racial inequality and disconnect understandings of capitalism from understandings of the origins of race and racism.
In a photograph taken during her Samoan fieldwork in the early 1920s but not published until her career-retrospective memoirs were released in the 1970s, Mead stands in Samoan dress facing a camera, holding hands with a Samoan woman named Fa’amotu. Fa’amotu was older than Mead’s target age of study, and of an elite social class that is not the principal subject of Mead’s book (indeed, Mead seems uninterested in class in both her descriptions of Samoa and of America). As Mead’s ‘sister, companion, and friend’, Fa’amotu can be, as Joyce Hammond and others have argued, considered a co-creator of Mead’s images and ideas. In this photograph, the two of them stare into one another’s eyes and appear to flash one another a conspiratorial grin. To the contemporary viewer the queer implications are startling and immediate. Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, the photographs of Fa’amotu that Mead had published in Coming of Age in Samoa, as well as in newspaper articles placed to promote the book, were far less intimate in their posing and framing.11
In one image, and in the history of its circulation and reception, we see Mead’s queerness and its relationship to her research interests, her dressing herself in the clothing and cultures of others, her posing those cultures as though they loved and welcomed her, her desire to manage the public’s understanding of her by showing and revealing herself differently over time, her willingness to play fast and loose with scientific description, and her genuine tenderness for some of the people she interacted with and wrote about. This photograph is a metonym for Mead’s complex life and legacy as the ‘matriarch of liberal consciousness’ in 1950s and 1960s America.12
When Mead was born on December 16, 1901, she had, astonishingly for the time, both a mother and a grandmother who had been college-educated.13 Her mother, Emily Fogg Mead, had attended Wellesley College for Women and the University of Chicago and did graduate work at Bryn Mawr College; her father Edward had studied economics at Chicago before becoming a professor of finance at the Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania. From birth, in other words, she was steeped in an unusual degree of wealth, an unusual degree of intellectualism, and an unusual degree of educated women. In a late-in-life published dialogue with James Baldwin bearing the almost painfully 1970s title A Rap on Race, Mead insisted that she had been raised without any racial prejudice whatsoever: ‘I have never been in the position of believing that I had any right because I was white … I have neither been scarred nor specially benefited by being white.’14
She had learned about race as a child, she recalled. ‘We had two old Negro men in the neighborhood’ who had been slaves, one of whom had ‘a very fat, very black wife’ who had been raped by a white man, as Mead recalled her mother telling her as a child, careful to recall that her mother ‘insisted on calling [the Black neighbour] Mrs’.15 Mead used this story to claim that her experience had been ‘a straight reversal’ of ordinary American experience. In fact, claiming this kind of born immunity from racism, as though her mother calling the descendants of slaves ‘Mrs.’ and not immediately assuming that all Black men were out to assault white women erased the difference between herself, descended directly from the Mayflower, and her neighbours, who were one generation away from chattel slavery.16
Mead’s father studied and promoted corporate growth and consolidation.17 When Margaret was born, her mother had just published an article on the role of advertising in business which argued that advertising enlightened and educated the masses.18 Emily Mead also wrote a dissertation on Italian immigrants in New Jersey when Margaret was a small girl, a decision Margaret praised throughout her life as having shown her that women could work and raise a family, but also a decision – which Margaret did not spend much time reflecting on – that was dependent on the Meads having the means to employ cooks, nurses, and other domestic servants.19
The family was a progressive one, and so Margaret was educated under the new ‘scientific’ child-rearing of L. E. Holt, who, as Nancy Lutkehaus writes in her biography of Mead, urged restraint in emotion to protect small children from being stunted or smothered ‘by an overabundance of motherly love’.20 Mead remembered her childhood differently in different memoirs and notes: sometimes recalling a positive childhood that had shaped her into a crack fieldworker and sensitive and introspective person, at other times remembering her father as a bully and unpredictable disciplinarian who cheated on her somewhat frigid mother.21
At the age of eleven, Mead was enrolled at the Buckingham Friends School, an independent Quaker school founded in 1794. At this time, deep and even romantic friendships were often encouraged between girls. Such friendships, writes the historian Lois Banner, ‘were viewed as an innocent outgrowth of the emotionality of adolescence … Girls were expected to have a “best” friend or a “bosom” friend; such relationships were often called “smashes” or “crushes” ‘.22 It was not generally assumed that such bonding could ever lead to genital contact or interfere with apparently normal heterosexual development.
As a girl, Mead preferred stereotypically feminine clothing, and in her memoir would write of her horror at ‘the thought of having one of those vague masculinizing diseases’.23 At the same time, she had on the wall of her childhood bedroom a reproduction of the painting Aurora by Guido Reni, in which a confident goddess urges her blushing male lover forward in a chariot.24 (Reni’s portrait of St Sebastian would be crucial in the life of the young Yukio Mishima, discussed later in this book.) From a young age, she viewed herself as one of two twins, one of whom had disappeared, and that she was seeking this lost twin of the mind and soul in many of her interpersonal relationships.25
As the third generation in her family of college-educated women, Mead began her studies at DePauw University in Chicago in 1919 before transferring to Barnard College to complete the remainder of her degree. A childhood interest in writing fiction and poetry drew her towards studying English, but she double-majored in psychology as well, driven to achieving a self-made success apart from a future identity as a wife or a mother.
At college, as the 1920s dawned, Mead bobbed her hair and joined a circle of friends called the Ash Can Cats who idolized Edna St Vincent Millay – especially her famous poem about a candle that burns at both ends.26 Sexual experimentation was rife among this group. Mead was, at this time, already engaged to Luther Cressman, whom she would marry after her graduation in 1923, but Mead was a supporter of the new free love that sexologists were promoting.
It was in her senior year at Barnard that she made the fateful decision to take a class in anthropology. While women were still not being admitted to Ivy League universities, Barnard College was then, as it is now, affiliated with Columbia University. The Barnard anthropology class was taught by an anthropologist at Columbia named Franz Boas, who was in the middle of instigating a revolution in anthropological and ethnographic thought.
Boas was born in Prussia in 1858 to a secular Jewish family that was friendly with Karl Marx and steeped in mid-nineteenth-century liberalism. After studying geography and philosophy, Boas began travelling to remote corners of Canada to study Inuit adaptations to their harsh physical environment. At that time, German anthropology was dominated by physical anthropologists, who understood differences between peoples as being related to a rigid evolutionary hierarchy of races in which white Europeans were the most developed. Boas, instead influenced by an older strain of German ethnology that approached difference outside of questions of evolution and determinism, began to develop an interest in the cultural patterns of the supposedly ‘savage’ people he was studying. Alienated by increasing anti- Semitism in Germany, Boas travelled to the United States and began teaching at Clark University and taking annual expeditions to the Pacific Northwest, where he studied the Kwakwaka’wakw, a First Nation of present-day British Columbia.
Boas, write the historians Ned Blackhawk and Isaiah Wilner, ‘drew upon what he … learned among Native peoples to present an alternative approach to modernity’.27 In a flurry of books published just after the turn of the twentieth century, when Boas had moved to New York and begun teaching at Columbia University, he began to deconstruct and disprove dominant ideologies of scientific racism and the inherent superiority of white and Western peoples. This approach, known as cultural relativism, was founded on fundamentally unequal and racist systems of knowledge production – Boas, the white expert, constructing Indigenous subjects and extracting knowledge from and about them. But it also provided, as Blackhawk and Wilner have argued, opportunities for those Indigenous people to participate actively in dialogues with anthropologists. The ideas that Boas developed – which helped found the discipline of cultural studies and deeply influenced virtually every strain of twentieth-century progressive thought – were accompanied by a radical shift in his academic practice. Boas’s graduate students included women and men and Native and Black scholars – scholars who were also subject to racist and misogynistic treatment from both within and outside his circle – at a time when this was quite rare.
One of these pioneering women was Mead’s teaching assistant when she took her fateful first class with Boas: Ruth Benedict. Benedict had had a similar progressive and proto-feminist upbringing to Mead, and was at this time already finishing her PhD. While Mead at first resisted Benedict and the discipline of anthropology itself, she became more and more fascinated by the older woman’s strange anti-style and her confident intelligence. The two became closer and closer, and as Margaret’s undergraduate years came to a close in March of 1923, Benedict encouraged her to enter the PhD program at Columbia.
Although Benedict was married with a home in the suburbs at that time, she only spent weekends with her husband, and wrote in her diary that she desired women ‘to lie once with beauty, breast to breast’.28 Margaret, too, was recently married, and the two of them entered into a relationship with one another that their respective marriages only made seem more secure and more possible.29 The sexual cross-pollination that had characterized the Ash Can Cats also characterized the anthropology department at Columbia: like the Bloomsbury Group or the Lebens reformers in 1920s Germany, this was a group of liberated, privileged, and well-educated bohemians for whom traditional notions of morality and propriety were passé.
Both Mead and Benedict had, during their affair with one another, affairs with Edward Sapir, who, like Benedict, was seventeen years Mead’s senior. Sapir was one of Boas’s first graduate students, who extended Boas’s cultural approach into the study of linguistics and the relationship between languages and cultures. While Sapir and the other men who surrounded Boas considered themselves welcoming of their women colleagues, Mead later recalled that the welcome was equivocal and tainted with misogyny.30
Boas structured the department in the German style, with himself as the only full professor and all others working on contracts underneath him. One of these new contract professors was Benedict, who had finished her PhD and who became, Mead would remember, Boas’s ‘Left Hand’, his ‘second self’.31 While this involved a significant amount of administrative and other gendered labour, it also involved mentoring undergraduate and graduate students, including the Black novelist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston. Hurston spent six years between Barnard and Columbia studying with Boas and Benedict in various capacities. That a queer Black woman studying Black folklore and religious practices found space and encouragement in the profoundly white-supremacist 1920s at a white-supremacist institution like Columbia University demonstrates how remarkable Boas’s circle was. That she experienced significant racism and misogyny while there, including from her white female colleagues and advisers, demonstrates the limits of the politics and practice of this circle.
Mead enjoyed her graduate studies rather more than her new marriage. She had married Luther Cressman in 1923 but insisted on sleeping in separate bedrooms, even during their honeymoon. Luther was studying for a PhD in sociology, and the marriage settled down but remained uninspiring. Both Margaret and Luther had regular affairs with other women, and Mead and Benedict’s relationship in particular began to deepen. Benedict, in their biographer Lois Banner’s words, characterized Mead as ‘her daughter and protégée in anthropology, her partner, lover, and best friend … her blithe spirit, who could lift her moods’.32 ‘When I’m happy’, Benedict wrote, ‘your love makes me sing tera-lira, and when I’m blue it holds a livable world before my eyes.’33
As Mead approached the time when she would travel somewhere to do the ethnographic fieldwork for her thesis, she resisted the idea of studying Native Americans, as most of Boas’s women graduate students had done, influenced both by the relative ease of travel and by Boas’s own work among North American Indigenous societies. Amelia Earhart was exploring the world; Mead, too, wanted to go farther than Arizona or New Mexico. Boas recommended Samoa, as he was seeking a student or acolyte to disprove a competing anthropologist’s claim that a period of adolescent angst was a universal and biologically rooted part of human lives.34 Torn between her affairs with Sapir and Benedict, not to mention her husband, Mead welcomed the opportunity to travel alone – she specifically insisted that Luther not accompany her on her trip. Before departing, she took long duo trips with both her husband and with Benedict, who encouraged her to abandon her affair with the possessive and jealous Sapir.
Clark Wissler, a Boasian who ran the anthropology department at the Museum of Natural History in New York City, joined Boas in urging her to study sexuality and especially the sexuality of young women in Samoa. This was, after all, only thirty-odd years after Gauguin had travelled to Tahiti and helped construct the South Seas as a primitive, erotic, louche Paradise in the eyes of Western art-viewers and readers. In the intervening years, the United States had begun staking out ever-greater land claims in the Pacific. White businessmen with United States backing overthrew the Hawaiian Indigenous regime in 1893, and by 1898 the territory had been colonized by the US. The Spanish-American War led to the cessation of Guam and the Philippines (along with Puerto Rico in the Caribbean Sea) to the United States; when an independent and democratic republic claimed power in the Philippines, the United States invaded to quash the insurrection in a war that led to over two hundred thousand Filipino civilian casualties. The island chain of Samoa had been colonized by the United States and Germany, with New Zealand taking over Germany’s holdings after the First World War; it was used primarily as a naval base for the expanding global American armed forces. Mead arrived, therefore, not on a dreamy desert island cut off from the rest of the world, but at a node of US imperial power already visited regularly by soldiers and missionaries.
If the prominence of the primitive idyll as radical utopia had much to do with Boas and his circle’s work, then Mead’s trip to Samoa was the perfect Boasian project: a trip to the idyll to dissolve American sex norms against the free love of supposed savages. In other words, the success of Mead’s book on Samoa was not an accident: Mead and her mentors carefully selected the location in order to maximize the possible domestic cultural and political impact of her research.
Upon arriving in Samoa, first spending several weeks in a language and customs crash course, and then transferring to the small village on T’au, Mead considered having an affair with a young Samoan in order to better understand youth sexuality. Her notes and letters reveal that she spent at least one night with a young man from the village who was, as Lois Banner writes, ‘the most experienced man in matters of the heart’, who ‘had told her about the amours of his friends with complete candor’.35
In any case, Mead based the majority of her fieldwork on conversations with young Samoan women, with whom, as a woman, she was able to spend what was then an unprecedented amount of time in intense and intimate fieldwork. Midway through her stay she wrote to Boas complaining that she was not getting any good or interesting material, but by the end she had gathered a great deal of data, including charts discussing menstruation and sexual experiences, both homo-and heterosexual.
While in Samoa she had continued to keep up an intense exchange of letters with Benedict. Complaining to her about Sapir and her husband, Mead wrote that she felt ‘ecstasy’ when thinking of Ruth, fantasized about kissing her, and wrote, ‘Knowing you … has been the same blessed peace-giving effect as knowing there is a god’.36 In return, Benedict described her feelings for Margaret, advised her to give up Sapir, and described her own free love practice, which involved romantic encounters with several other women, including PhD students she met at conferences.
Over time, however, as Margaret’s confidence in the work she was doing in Samoa grew, she seemed to need Benedict and her support less and less, and to become somewhat more conflicted about homosexual relationships in general. It was on the Australia-to-Europe leg of the boat back from Samoa that she met, and fell head over heels for, the strapping young scholar Reo Fortune, who was travelling from his native New Zealand to London to study. Upon her return to New York, Mead set herself to divorcing her husband and pursuing Fortune.
Lois Banner understands Mead’s observations about Samoan sexuality in Coming of Age in Samoa – especially her observations about homosexual behaviour between young Samoan girls, which she describes as an accepted peripheral practice for heterosexual unions – as being influenced both by her desire to promote free love and her desire to convince Fortune to marry her despite her ongoing relationship with Benedict. ‘The whole business’, she later wrote about in a dream journal she had been keeping, ‘is an expression of a suppressed fear that after all I am primarily a homosexual person.’ In the diary, Banner writes, ‘she crossed out homosexual and wrote heterosexual above it’: further evidence for her confusion.37
The book, when published, made Mead a star. This, as historians such as Micaela di Leonardo have written, was the result of a variety of important trends in 1920s American mass culture, all of which the book seemed to embody: panic about youth and the creation of the category of the adolescent as a figure of the popular imagination, an increase in discussions of psychology, shifting roles for women, and the use of the primitive as a utopic figure.38 Mead’s America was in some ways as simplistic as her Samoa: she assumed that upper-class American mores could stand in for all people’s way of life. Decolonial political movements and the schools of anthropology that they influenced would later come to criticize Mead and the Boasians for their assumptions that so-called simple cultures like those in Samoa could be best apprehended by a foreign white graduate student with only several months of training. Postcolonial anthropology also emphasizes that it, too, is specific to its time and place: any given anthropology is nothing more or less than one particular group of people’s way of understanding another part of the world at a given time.
After her study of teen girls in Samoa was greeted warmly (with the notable exception of her former lover Edward Sapir, who came to detest both the book and Mead and denounce both in profoundly misogynistic terms), Mead next set herself to studying the coming of age of Indigenous people in islands north of Papua New Guinea. Mead travelled to New Guinea with her new husband Reo, who had switched from psychology to anthropology under the force of her personality.
Once again, she set herself to analyse a population before they had been contacted by too many Westerners. Mead’s aim this time was even broader: to analyse the question of nature versus nurture, to understand the limits of human nature itself through an analysis of, in Mead’s words, ‘the brown sea-dwelling Manus’. She wrote, ‘In their vaulted, thatched houses set on stilts in the olive-green waters of the wide lagoon, their lives are lived very much as they have been lived for unknown centuries. No missionary has come to teach them … no trader has torn their lands from them.’39
Here, Mead is careful to denounce ‘the white man’s diseases’ and the practices of colonization, and to emphasize that she chose this culture to study because it was ‘without economic dependence on white culture’.40 Focusing on the coming of age of the sea-dwelling Manus people, she contrasts them with the inland Usiai, with whom the Manus traded fish for inland-grown goods. Once again, her account is thick with poetic descriptions: ‘To the Manus native’, she writes, ‘the world is a great platter, curving upwards on all sides from his flat lagoon village where the pile houses stand like long-legged birds, placid and unstirred by the changing tides.’41 Contrary to her portrayal of Samoan society, which she praised in contrast to the United States, she found Manusian society to mirror the conflicts, double standards, and materialism of the US; fascinated by these similarities, she would return several times in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.42
Like many progressive intellectuals in the 1930s, Mead (and Benedict, and other Boasians) fell into doing a significant amount of government and government-supported work in the 1930s and 1940s. The anti-fascist Popular Front in the United States brought together liberals and radicals, and the fight against Naziism legitimized participation in American military efforts for a generation who might otherwise have been more critical of the US national security state.
Mead and the other Boasians, battling dominant narratives of scientific racism, understood themselves as anti-racist. Communism became associated with fights for racial equality in the United States, fights in which many anthropologists found themselves pursuing common goals with Communists or fellow travellers. But in the 1930s, Mead busied herself with a return to New Guinea, where she wanted to study the ‘natural sex-temperament’ of people who had been reported by earlier generations of anthropological explorers to combine strict sex roles with the possibility of third-sex and transgender ways of being. Once again, she travelled with Reo; first meeting and staying with the Arapesh, who had a way of understanding sex difference that was so incompatible with the Western one that Mead at first rejected the possibility of researching them, once again demonstrating her practice of adapting her fieldwork to fit her research concepts and design.43
After crossing to another river valley, Mead and Fortune met another anthropologist, the English researcher Gregory Bateson, who was studying another group of people in the same region. At the same time, the relationship between Fortune and Mead was beginning to strain: Mead began to distrust his anger and he to resent her prominence and success. Lois Banner describes Mead as going through a ‘midlife crisis’ at the tender age of thirty-one, finally concluding that ‘she didn’t have to be responsible to anyone or anything, she could now do what she wanted’.44 She dropped Reo like a hot potato and fell for Gregory Bateson.
Bateson came from a progressive upper-class background like Mead, and shared her commitment to free love; he had fallen in, while studying at Cambridge, with a male-only society that met at an inn called the Half Moon run by an eccentric, sandal-wearing prophet, Noel Porter, who was friends with Havelock Ellis, Edward Carpenter, and Magnus Hirschfeld. Bateson had seemingly had an affair with Porter, and unlike Fortune seemed relatively unfazed by Mead’s active bisexuality.
While she was wooing Bateson, she was still in regular contact with Ruth, signing her letters ‘I love you, love you’ and repeatedly characterizing Bateson and Benedict as similar kinds of intellectual partners, whereas Fortune had been an unfortunate aberration.45 ‘I feel now that when I violated every dictate of my own temperament … and went away with him and left you,’ she wrote Benedict. ‘I started on a course which had nothing in the world to do with me, really.’46 As her relationship with Bateson developed, so too did a new understanding of the sex-gender systems she had come to New Guinea to study.
The book she ended up writing on this trip characterized the three New Guinean peoples with whom she had stayed according to a three-part theory of sex and gender there. The Arapesh and Mundugumor, Mead reported, did not distinguish between men and women, whereas the Tchambuli did – but the Tchambuli reversed Western sex roles.47 Separate from this finding was the argument that sex and gender systems themselves should be understood as entirely culturally relative, a major departure from then-dominant assumptions about the biological nature of sex and gender roles.
With Bateson, she developed a system of understanding sex and gender called ‘the squares’, a chart with one male-female axis (defined according to traditional Western sex roles) and one axis of ‘temperaments’, from rational and calculating to oceanic, mystic, spiritual.48 Like Magnus Hirschfeld’s ‘sexual steps in between’ and other sexological characterizations of the early twentieth century (and via Bateson, it may have been directly influenced by those ideas), this scheme was an attempt to make space for homosexual and gender non-conforming peoples and desires.
Nonetheless, it used, as Hirschfeld and the sexologists did, a so-called ‘primitive’ Other as a solvent for conventional Western thinking about sex-gender roles. It also often mischaracterized and misunderstood the societies against which it measured Western concepts of sex and gender, and like much Boasian anthropology could produce an understanding of cultures as flat, fixed, and singular. Even the ‘Western gender roles’ with which our readers are more likely to be familiar are far less fixed than Mead assumed. Gender roles vary between ‘Western’ societies, they vary within them by region, race, and especially class, and they have varied over time. Mead was content to assume that she could understand a ‘primitive’ society in only several months, content to treat her non-state interlocutors as passive material for her research to exploit, and content to substitute the gender roles and cultural traits of the anglophone bourgeoisie for how people live in ‘the West’, writ large.
At the time of their publication, these works were influential on a generation of more openly queer scholars and thinkers. The anthropologist Esther Newton, whose 1968 study of drag queens helped inaugurate gay and lesbian studies in the American academy, went so far as to claim that Margaret Mead made her gay. She was, she recalls, ‘a red diaper baby’, tomboyish and unhappy amongst the rigid confines of suburban American gender roles in the 1950s, but Mead’s texts helped her ‘grasp that my adolescent torments over sex, gender, and the life of the mind could have been avoided by different social arrangements’.49 It was not that she had dreamed herself into Mead’s primitive idyll, but instead that Mead’s work, while ‘not an overt defense of homosexuality’, presented ‘a defense of cultural and temperamental difference’, and one written by a woman, to boot.50
Alongside Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture, Newton wrote, Mead’s anthropology and her status as a female scholar who had also been an ‘activist intellectual, dedicated to education and reform’, and who had done fieldwork outside the confines of the library and archive, influenced her life and study.51 Boasian anthropology, especially the work of Benedict, was also a crucial influence on Harry Hay, who co-founded the Mattachine Society, America’s first lasting gay rights organization, in 1950.52 The Boasians’ relativism, and their circulation of Native knowledge, influenced many gay activists and thinkers’ understanding of the meaning of sexuality.
This of course fits into a larger pattern we have been examining in this book of ethnographic and colonial influences on Western gay and lesbian identity formation. But this circulation was also deeply problematic. Neil Whitehead describes the Western gaze on ethnographic archives as ‘an intellectual BDSM, through which the pleasures of classification and analysis’ tie up the subject like a dominant binding a submissive to a St Andrews’s cross.53 In these encounters, the reader can imagine direct contact with the observed Other but in fact maintains a safe distance, all while the anthropological or ethnographic text imagines that the reader ‘has direct access to the erotics of the Other, as defined by colonial encounters and unequal relations of power’.54 (Remember again how Mead’s very presence in the South Pacific was thanks to US naval expansion and colonization.) This process was fundamental to the development of Western sexuality. Thinkers like Ann Stoler have shown that colonial power affected not only subjects in the colonies but also the politics and social arrangements back home in the metropolis, as classes of people (the urban poor, prostitutes, homosexuals) were classified according to categories developed in the colonies and policed with technologies developed there.55
Mead worked as several major global systems were shifting: high imperialist economies moving towards the Fordist consensus of the mid-twentieth century, scientific racism shifting towards racial liberalism, and, as the historian Peter Drucker has pointed out, an associated shift in forms of homosexuality, in which the dominance of the ‘invert’, a homosexualized figure almost exclusively penetrated who emerged alongside sexological discourses and high imperialism, was replaced with the dominance of a ‘gay’ man or woman who partnered with like people.56 The homosexual emancipation discourses of the early twentieth century were an early forerunner of this, and the work of Mead and Benedict influenced its development and directly linked colonization, racial regimes, and sexuality.
The government work Mead was doing as the winds of war began to blow in the late 1930s were not on behalf of European empires, but instead on behalf of an empire whose refusal to acknowledge itself as such is a central part of its myth: the United States. In 1939, Mead, now married to Bateson, discovered that she was pregnant, and their daughter Mary was born in New York in December of that year. Having a young child was hardly conducive to far-flung travels in the South Seas, and indeed the growing threat of war between the United States and Japan made travel in the Pacific far more difficult. Mead had been cut off, ironically, by the very navy that had first enabled her journeys.
The historian Peter Mandler analyses several major changes in Mead’s work as the war began: she was cut off from her fieldwork, and thus from her area of expertise, against which she had grounded a series of texts that were fundamentally less about the people they supposedly studied and more about the kind of society she wanted to see created in the United States. Her move was thus to ‘return from the natives’ – to write about the American national character, and to work with and within the US national security state.57
Mead and her colleagues began to turn from imagining their role as offering educative deconstructions of American society towards more explicit social engineering and direct interventions into public policy. With many other activist intellectuals, Mead and Bateson joined the Committee for National Morale, which aimed to draw public support from an isolationist and war-weary public to join in the European war effort. Increasingly in their publishing and writing, they began to focus on what they called ‘national character’, a subtle shift and evolution from the analysis of specific cultural traits they had pioneered in the 1930s.
How, Mead wondered, could anthropologists and other social scientists help build public morale in the service of a war effort? She passionately believed that social scientists had a political responsibility to engage with questions of public policy, but insisted, especially in contrast to the looming threat of Nazism, where scientific racism was being applied to murderous ends, that they could, as Peter Mandler writes, ‘propose means’ to social ends and also engage democratically with their beliefs, but that they should not ‘impose blueprints of their own’.58
To this end, Mead began to do government-funded work about diversity and America’s national character, in an effort to see the plurality of the American population as a model for future world cooperation. She took a job working for the Department of Agriculture and set out to use this limited post to help infuse federal policymaking with anthropological insight. Her 1942 book And Keep Your Powder Dry presented her view of the American national character: one which had been positively influenced by immigration and diversity.59
This book led to yet further growth of her public profile: she began to meet with Eleanor Roosevelt and published regularly in mass-market magazines like Vogue and Harper’s. After the United States formally joined the war after the attacks on Pearl Harbor, she travelled to the United Kingdom to apply herself to the question of how the differing national characters of the United States and the United Kingdom could be resolved into a singular fighting force for the war effort.
Mead later noted with pride that the Second World War was ‘a curious and unique war’ in which a broad spectrum of ‘liberals and conservatives, middle-of-the-roaders and extremists all believed that the war had to be won.’60 But the new national security state that was being built rapidly began setting its sights on domestic foes. Anthropologists – not Mead, but some of her colleagues – went to work for the War Relocation Authority and helped to run the Japanese internment camps in the western part of the country.
Mead herself delivered secret lectures at the National War College.61 New security clearances allowed the FBI, run by the fanatical J. Edgar Hoover (discussed in the next chapter), to collect dossiers on Americans who had been part of the Communist movement or were fellow travellers, including many anthropologists who had been engaged in fights for racial equality. The historian David H. Price has written extensively on the pressures this campaign of political persecution against suspected Communists and queers (the twinned Lavender and Red Scares) placed on anthropologists, especially those who had participated in anti-racist organizing.
State repression not only harmed the livelihoods of the people it directly touched, but also shaped the entire profession’s approach to newly sensitive political questions. Even anthropologists like Mead who had jumped at the chance to work with the national security state in the Second World War were subject to FBI surveillance and investigations. And even liberals like Mead could be mistaken for Communists by overzealous investigators.
As the Cold War began, Mead continued her service on the Committee on Food Habits, and worked on a RAND Corporation study of Soviet personality types (later published as a book of anti- Communist caricature called Soviet Attitudes towards Authority); she corresponded with Richard Nixon to suggest ways he might account for Soviet personality types in his encounters with Nikita Khrushchev and even advised the State Department on various issues, including taking a hard stance on the developing anti-colonial rebellion in Vietnam.62
Despite all of this, the FBI still compiled a 992-page file on her, primarily because of her advocacy for and belief in racial equality. While Price was only able to analyse approximately half of the files due to ongoing state suppression of research into the FBI’s history of domestic repression, he does report that the FBI considered Mead a potential Communist security risk, that she had belonged to various liberal organizations that the FBI characterized as Communist fronts, that the FBI wiretapped Mead at her office in the American Museum of Natural History, that it investigated her based on her daughter’s attendance at a progressive pre-school, and that it continued keeping track of her work and her public statements until her death in 1978.
If this repression shaped the discipline of anthropology and helped move the cultural school away from its potentially most radical critiques of Western ways of knowing, it also seems to have been treated, by Mead, as part of the reality of life in post-war America.
In 1950, Bateson filed for divorce, although the two remained friends for the rest of her life. Their daughter Mary was raised, as Mead had been raised, according to the newest and most progressive methods: Dr Benjamin Spock was Mary’s paediatrician and friends with Mead; his famous psychoanalytically influenced books on child-rearing, a sensation in 1950s America, especially in progressive circles, were influenced by his medical care of Mary and by conversations with Mead about her ethnographic research.
As the 1950s and 1960s moved on, Mead increasingly moved more and more into the role of America’s ‘liberal godmother’, appearing as an expert on TV talk shows and evincing a kind of strange double response to the post-war crisis over the role of working women. During the war women had joined the work-force en masse, and afterwards, a crisis threatened. In her book Male and Female, she advocated, on the basis of research notes about tribal societies in the South Seas she had visited in the 1930s, for relatively conservative gender relations, positions that led Betty Friedan to consider Mead ‘the architect of the back-to-the-home movement of the 1950s’.63
In other public articles, however, she argued for housework to be replaced by technology and for communal family rearing. As always, her positions on public policy were doubled: radical but not too radical. Radical feminists like Kate Millett and Ti- Grace Atkinson abandoned Mead, but a later generation of feminists in the 1970s and 1980s returned to her example, referring to her as ‘super sister’ and ‘first of the Libbies’.64
Benedict had died two years before Mead’s divorce, and Mead immediately took up with her assistant on the Committee on Food Habits, a young anthropologist named Rhoda Métraux. Her early letters to Métraux reveal yet again how she understood her relationships as cyclical; she referenced Bateson and even Sapir in early letters, and in one, a Valentine’s Day letter in 1949, wrote:
It’s really very odd how little guilt over special symmetries I have. I suppose partly because I never chose asymmetrical relationships on purpose … but simply chose people who couldn’t pay attention, and then accepted their not paying attention as part of the world. Now when you write me long letters to my short ones, or poems where I have only prose – I simply feel touched and delighted – a little strange, but with a pleasant kind of surprise … as if somehow Ruth had bequeathed me a little of her beauty – by giving some sort of care into her hands – for me … I have such a firm belief that nothing in the world is too complicated – nothing that I can think up – but that you will but understand and add to it.65
The two of them remained primary partners for the rest of their lives, with Métraux’s marriage only a minor inconvenience; by 1955 they were sharing a house in Greenwich Village with their two children and collaborating on a project called Research in Contemporary Cultures. Métraux would edit much of Mead’s late-life work, and perhaps contributed to what Mead, when a 1960s interviewer commented on how much energy she had for her age, called her ‘postmenopausal zest’.66 Certainly, their love for one another did not decrease. In 1974, from Honolulu, Mead wrote to Métraux, ‘I’ve just pressed the violets and 2 little violet leaves within the unread pages of a new book. Be better, my love. Life does not make sense – you make it make sense for me – I love you.’67
During these years Mead served for a time as president of the American Anthropological Association, vice president of the New York Academy of Sciences, and was both president and board chair of the American Association for the Advancement of the Sciences. It was in 1971, while serving as the president of the AAA, that Mead fought to make sure a report on anthropologists’ collaboration with the CIA and US Army found that they had not done anything wrong by using their skills in support of murderous counterinsurgency programmes in Latin America.68
She worked to develop a graphic symbol language, supported UN projects on development, and founded the Department of Anthropology at the Lincoln Center campus of Fordham University in 1968. She also joined in with others of her Anglican faith to draft the 1979 American Episcopal Book of Common Prayer. She was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1976, and regularly appeared on talk shows and continued her writing in both academic and popular forms, including a late book of essays with Métraux called A Way of Seeing and her 1972 memoir, Blackberry Winter.
A representative article in a 1972 issue of Stars and Stripes, the magazine of the US armed forces, described her as ‘the peppery grand old lady of American anthropology’ in a write-up of a press conference she gave in Heidelberg, Germany, advocating for the abolition of laws against marijuana, discussing ‘the problem of black and white relations in America’, and the need for ‘fewer and better parents’.69 In the article (as in her dialogue with Baldwin from a year earlier, A Rap on Race), Mead is careful to indicate her support for racial integration and even the Black Power movement as she understood it (‘the growing sense of Black identity’, the article calls it). Her support for population control and work with UN and other Cold War–era bodies on contraception and population control, however, indicates the ongoing relationship between liberal anthropology and sexology and eugenics, as active in the 1970s as in the time of Magnus Hirschfeld.
In the last year of her life, 1978, Mead developed pancreatic cancer. She employed a faith healer, a decision with which Métraux disagreed, and the two became estranged. Her last letter to Métraux was written only a few months before the end of her life, in August of 1978. ‘I am much better,’ she wrote. ‘At present I expect to come back before the end of the month. I hope you are having a good time. I love you.’70 That November, Mead died, and was buried at an Episcopal cemetery where she grew up, in Buckingham, Pennsylvania.
After her death, Mead’s work came in for a sudden flurry of criticism from all sides. Her enormous prominence in the field had previously made criticizing her or her work difficult. The first and most prominent attack on her conclusions came from Derek Freeman, a conservative evolutionary biologist whose attack on Mead’s work in Samoa was published by Harvard University Press five years after her death in 1983. His book, Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth, accused Mead of having used only one source in Samoa and of having twisted what he characterized as conservative, prim, and proper sexual customs into an unscientific advocacy for her own views on free love.
Paul Shankman’s history of this anthropological controversy describes the stakes: Freeman believed in nature over nurture, and his attack seemed to ‘damage Mead … not merely as an anthropologist but as a public figure, a feminist, and a liberal’.71 His book claimed that Mead had been ‘grossly hoaxed’ by her preconceptions and that she had ‘completely misinformed and misled the entire anthropological establishment’. He wrote in a later book that this was ‘one of the most spectacular events of the intellectual history of the twentieth century’ and characterized Mead, and by extension her credulous liberal audience, as the victims of ‘a Polynesian prank’ in which ‘giggly fibs’ came to overrule sober-minded science.72
Anthropological critics replied by attacking Freeman’s own book as a poorly researched hit job, and pointed out his critiques’ less-than-subtle misogyny. This led to an enormous public squabble between Freeman and his conservative supporters, and anthropologists intent on defending Mead, a spat that generated rather more heat than light. Shankman, for his part, describes Freeman’s argument as ‘misleading and often inaccurate’ in its characterization of Mead’s life and work.73
Far more interesting and compelling is the tradition of decolonial and postcolonial critiques of anthropology – a tradition that in Western scholarship was pioneered by a 1973 book by Talal Asad called Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, which critiqued anthropological knowledge production in the Boasian style as itself a tool of colonial domination.
Ten years later, a documentary film directed by Barbara Gullahorn-Holecek revisited Manus, that ‘flat lagoon village where the pile houses stand like long-legged birds, placid and unstirred by the changing tides’ where Mead had produced much of her work on New Guinea. The majority of the film’s interviews are devoted to the people who Mead had studied and worked with, as well as their children, many of whom were attending university, learning to read English, and could suddenly read – and react in horror to – Mead’s descriptions of their lives and customs. ‘Sometimes they tell us you go to the library and look up this book and read something about ourselves, and we ask the lecturers, “Can we do it from our background knowledge?” and they say, oh no, you have to read the book in the library,’ a woman from Manus says near the beginning of the film. ‘That’s why we get upset.’
The inland Usai and their descendants reveal that Mead’s descriptions of them were solely based on her interactions with the seagoing Manus – leading to what they understood to be a grossly inaccurate and even insulting depiction of their society. Seleao Yowat, one of the people living in the village of Bunai, says, ‘She didn’t understand our customs … At that time the customs of the two groups were very different. She never properly examined our customs.’74
In 1976, Michel Foucault wrote the following in the opening pages of the first volume of his History of Sexuality:
Something that smacks of revolt, of promised freedom, of the coming age of a different law, slips easily into this discourse on sexual oppression. Some of the ancient functions of prophecy are reactivated therein. Tomorrow sex will be good again. Because this repression is affirmed, one can discreetly bring into coexistence concepts which the fear of ridicule or the bitterness of history prevents most of us from putting side by side: revolution and happiness; or revolution and a different body, one that is newer and more beautiful; or indeed, revolution and pleasure. What sustains our eagerness to speak of sex in terms of repression is doubtless this opportunity to speak out against the powers that be, to utter truths and promise bliss, to link together enlightenment, liberation, and manifold pleasures; to pronounce a discourse that combines the fervor of knowledge, the determination to change the laws, and the longing for the garden of earthly delights.75
Tomorrow, sex will be good again. Here, Foucault writes of the powerful appeal of the ‘repressive hypothesis’, an idea embedded in the gay liberation discourses that Mead and Benedict’s work did so much to inform: an idea that arose from the longing for a mythic (even a primitive) past of earthly delights and simpler pleasures, the desire for bliss and enlightenment and liberation all wrapped up into one.
Mead herself is perhaps most famously quoted as saying, ‘Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful and committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.’76 Near the end of Gullahorn- Holecek’s film documenting those thoughtful and committed people, the regional New Guinean political figure Utula Samana proposes that any future white anthropologist studying New Guinea be offset by a New Guinean anthropologist studying social behaviours in the West. The film then cuts to a New Guinean anthropological student at the University of California who is studying American society. He is shown in happy conversation with his thesis adviser and discusses his fieldwork on tenants living in a transient hotel in East Oakland, to which he reacts in horror – homelessness would never be allowed in his supposedly primitive country.
The film, like Mead’s own work, understands education and exchange as the foundations of a future in which all the world’s cultural diversity might be preserved, explored, and shared. Nearly forty years later, in an even more cynical age, with more understanding from postcolonial scholarship about the fraught and violent nature of that exchange and production, even that seems nearly as haunted a fantasy as the idea that the forever-in-the-past girls of T’au are somewhere out there on the horizon of the known world, among the dusky marshes, dancing not for themselves but for us; so that tomorrow, we might return to nature and overcome repression; so that tomorrow, sex will be good again.