Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today we are opening
up a file that is absolutely massive. It's part
adventure story, part intellectual revolution,
and honestly, it's got enough drama to fill a
dozen tabloids. Oh, at least. We are looking
at a figure who didn't just study culture. She,
uh... She became a culture unto herself. We were
talking about the one and only Margaret Mead.
It is genuinely impossible to overstate her footprint.
Right. I mean, when most people hear the word
anthropologist. the image that pops into their
head is Margaret Mead. Yeah, the cape, the stick.
Exactly, and she wasn't just an academic writing
for other academics and, you know, dusty journals.
She was a celebrity. She was a cultural icon
who fundamentally changed how the Western world
thinks about things as personal as adolescence,
sex, and gender. She really was an icon. I mean,
that look she had later in life, the cape, the
big walking stick, she looked like a wizard or
something. She cultivated that image. Oh, for
sure. But the reason we're doing this deep dive
today is... just because she was famous. It's
because the questions she asked, what, almost
100 years ago now? They are the exact same questions
we are screaming at each other about on the internet
today. That's it. That is the mission of this
deep dive. We want to unpack the life of the
woman who was, you know, arguably the most significant
public voice in anthropology in the entire 20th
century. Okay. And for that, we have sources.
What are we working with? We have pulled together
a serious stack. We've got her biographical records.
We've got her own ethnographies, which are surprisingly
readable, by the way. She was a great writer.
That's rare for an academic. Very. And we also
have the academic critiques that tried to, well,
destroy her reputation. And her private letters,
which reveal a very different side of her than
the public knew. And I have to say, just reading
through the biographical stuff. The sheer adventurousness
of this woman is staggering. It's incredible.
I mean, picture it. It's the 1920s. She's in
her early 20s. And she decides, you know what?
I'm going to go to American Samoa. Alone. Alone.
That is not a casual trip today. In 1925, that
is like going to the moon. It was incredibly
bold, but she wasn't just going for the thrill
of it. You know, she was going on a scientific
mission. Right. And to understand why she went
and why her work just exploded the way it did.
We have to frame this around the heavyweight
title fight of the 20th century. Nature versus
nurture. The classic battle. Is it our DNA or
is it our upbringing, our biology or our culture?
Exactly. And Mead walked right into the center
of that battlefield. Her work became the primary
ammunition for the argument that culture and
nurture plays a much, much bigger role than biology.
So she's team nurture. She is the captain of
team nurture. And this concept of cultural relativism,
that there isn't one right way to be human, that
was the hill she planted her flag on. Okay. I
love that framing. And for you listening, the
learner, as we like to call you, stick with us.
We're going to move beyond the dry academic dates
and facts. We want to get to those specific aha
moments about human behavior that Mead uncovered.
And we are absolutely going to get into the messy
stuff, the controversies, and the secrets. Because
science is rarely a straight line, and Margaret
Mead's life certainly wasn't. Okay, so let's
jump in. Section one, the Samoan bombshell. The
big one. We have to start with the book that
made her famous coming of age in Samoa. So set
the scene for us. It's 1925. Where exactly is
she? Okay, so she arrives in American Samoa,
specifically on the island of Tau in the Manoa
archipelago. So remote. Very remote. And you
have to remember the context of the Western world
at this time. In the U .S. and Europe, educators,
psychologists, philosophers, they all held a
very, very specific view about teenagers. Which
was what? That teenagers are universally nightmares?
Essentially, yes. That's a good way to put it.
The prevailing wisdom was that the emotional
turbulence of adolescence, you know, the angst,
the rebellion, the mood swings, was biologically
inevitable. Hardwired. Exactly. They believed
that because the body is changing during puberty,
the spirit must inevitably be stormy. It was
treated as a fact of nature, like losing your
baby teeth. So if you were a parent in 1925,
the experts were telling you, look, your kid
is going to be miserable and difficult and there
is nothing you can do about it because it's part
of the human blueprint. That was the hypothesis.
That was the accepted truth. And Mead, who was
a student of the great Franz Boa. The father
of American anthropology. The father of American
anthropology. Yes. She went to Samoa specifically
to test that. She had a very simple but profound
question. Is this emotional turbulence biologically
inevitable or is it a product of society? Nature
or nurture. Exactly. Because if she could find
just one place anywhere in the world where teenagers
weren't miserable. Then the whole biological
theory falls apart. The whole thing collapses.
So she embeds herself in Samoan life. She's living.
there she's learning the language watching the
girls taking notes what did she actually find
she found a world that was um radically different
from 1920s america just fundamentally different
In what ways? Well, first, she observed that
children in Samoan society were largely ignored
until they were about 15 or 16. Ignored. Yeah.
I mean, they were cared for, but they weren't
the center of the universe, like, say, an American
child might be. They had very little social standing.
But paradoxically, that lack of standing gave
them effectively greater freedom. That's interesting.
So because they weren't important. Nobody was
breathing down their necks all the time. Exactly
right. There wasn't this intense pressure to
succeed, to conform, to decide your entire future
at age 14. They just they existed. They did their
shores. They played. And that lack of pressure
made a difference. A huge difference. But the
biggest difference, and this is the one that
made the book a sensation, was the attitude towards
sex. I feel like we can't talk about mead without
talking about this. She described a society that
was. Let's say much more relaxed than the U .S.
at the time. Relaxed is a good word. She described
a society with what we would call casual, non
-monogamous relations. So sleeping around was
just normal. For young, unmarried people, yes.
It wasn't seen as a moral crisis. She also noted
that the Samoans were much more comfortable with
biological realities. things like menstruation
which were you know totally hush -hush and shameful
in america were just facts of life there no stigma
a distinct lack of what she called sexual neuroses
there wasn't all this guilt and anxiety and fear
wrapped up in it and she explicitly writes about
love affairs among unmarried young people she
does she paints this picture of you know love
under the palm trees She detailed how adolescents
had the freedom to experiment with different
partners. It was seen as a normal part of growing
up, of learning about relationships. So it wasn't
about finding the one right away? Not at all.
It was about exploration. She even noted that
homosexual relationships were present and were
not stigmatized in the way they were in the West.
Really? Yeah, it was viewed as part of that playful,
experimental phase of life. It wasn't about identity.
It was just an experience. Now, was it a total
free -for -all or were there some rules? Oh,
there were definitely rules. It wasn't anarchy.
She specifically mentions the topo. The what?
The topo. She was the ceremonial princess of
the village. And the topo absolutely had to be
a virgin. The honor of the entire village depended
on it. Okay, so there was a double standard there,
in a way. A very specific one, tied to rank and
ceremony. But for the average girl, the restrictions
were minimal. The main concern was avoiding pregnancy
outside of a stable relationship. But the act
itself wasn't seen as sinful. And so the aha
moment she reaches is massive. She's looking
at these girls who are going through puberty,
same hormones, same bodily changes, American
girls. But they aren't having breakdowns. Exactly.
They aren't fighting with their parents. They
aren't miserable and angsty. They're growing
up. Mead concluded that adolescence in Samoa
was not stormy. It was perhaps the most peaceful
and easy time of a person's life. Therefore.
Therefore, teenage angst is cultural, not biological.
It is a product of our specific civilization,
our specific pressures, our monogamous traditions,
and our specific hangups about sex. That is a
huge mic drop for 1928. It's an earthquake. It
basically told American parents and the whole
establishment, your kids aren't miserable because
they're teenagers. They're miserable because
of how we live. It was revolutionary. It shifted
the blame from biology to society and it made
her famous. I mean, overnight famous. But we
have to address the elephant in the room because
decades later, this entire body of work came
under very, very heavy fire. Enter Derek Freeman.
Derek Freeman. a New Zealand anthropologist,
and when I say he was her critic, I mean he made
it his life's work to dismantle her legacy. Wow.
He published two big books, one in 1983 and another
in 1998 after Mead had died, notably just attacking
her findings from every possible angle. Okay,
so what was his core argument? Did he just think
she misinterpreted some things? He went much,
much further than that. He argued that Mead was
either deliberately lying, which is a huge charge,
or... And this is the more famous claim that
she was hoaxed. Yes, he famously claimed that
the young Samoan girl she interviewed had been
pulling her leg. It's called the hoaxing theory.
So the idea is they were just telling her these
wild tall tales about their sex lives because
they thought it was funny. That's the theory.
That she was this naive young American woman
and they were just having a laugh at her expense.
And what was his version of Samoa? He painted
a picture of a society that was the polar opposite
of Meads. He claimed Samoa was actually characterized
by extreme sexual repression, a rigid puritanical
Christian morality. The opposite of casual. The
total. opposite. He also pointed to high rates
of violence, of assault, and adolescent delinquency.
He described a society that was strict, competitive,
and punitive. Okay, so we have two completely
contradictory accounts. Who was right? Did the
academic world just turn on her after she died?
It was a massive controversy. I mean, this was
on the cover of Time magazine. It was a huge
public debate. But within the anthropological
community, the dust has settled somewhere in
the middle, though leaning pretty far away from
Freeman's most extreme claims. How so? Well,
most experts rejected his harshest criticisms.
They pointed out a few key things. First, Freeman
did his fieldwork decades later. He was there
in the 1940s and again in the 60s. That's a long
time after 1925. A very long time. And in that
period, the islands had been heavily, heavily
influenced by Western missionaries and, just
as importantly, by World War II. So he was looking
at a different Samoa than she was. The culture
had changed. Precisely. Also, he was a man. An
older man asking questions about sex. She was
a young woman asking other young women. The kind
of access and information they would each get
would be totally different. That makes sense.
So the consensus now is that, look, maybe Mead
idealized things a bit. Maybe she simplified
the picture to make her point more powerfully.
She was making an argument, not just taking notes.
Exactly. She had a thesis to prove. But was she
fundamentally wrong? Was Samoa a violent, repressed
society in the 1920s? Most anthropologists today
would say no. Freeman's portrayal was the one
that was more skewed. Her central thesis that
culture shapes personality remains valid. So
she survives the scandal, at least in the academic
world. But she didn't just stop there in Samoa.
She kept moving. Oh, she was just getting started.
And that brings us to section two, redefining
gender. Because if you think her take on teenagers
was radical, her take on men and women in the
1930s was absolutely wild. This is my favorite
part of her work because it's so incredibly structured
and elegant in its argument. Okay, so where does
she go after Samoa? She goes to the Sepik River
watershed in Papua New Guinea. This is between
1931 and 1933. And this time she is there with
her then husband, Rio Fortune. We'll get back
to it later. We will. But together they produce
a book called Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive
Societies. And the key here is the three. Right.
She studies three different tribes in the same
geographic region to compare and contrast them.
Yes. She treats it almost like a natural laboratory
experiment. She wants to know, is being a man
or being a woman? woman a universal thing? Do
these roles look the same everywhere? Spoilers,
they do not. They absolutely do not. So let's
break down the three cultures she found because
they are just wildly different. First up, the
mountain Arapesh. The Arapesh. OK, so Meade described
them as a society where both men and women displayed
traits that Westerners at the time would have
considered exclusively feminine. Meaning what
exactly? What does a feminine society look like?
They were gentle. They were responsive to the
needs of others. They were cooperative. Aggression
was deeply frowned upon for everyone. So no tough
guys. No. In fact, an aggressive man was seen
as abnormal, as a social deviant. And crucially,
both the fathers and the mothers were deeply
involved in child rearing in a very nurturing
way. Both parents were maternal. Exactly. So
in Arapesh society, being a good man meant being
gentle, cooperative, and maternal. Okay, so that's
tribe number one. And she goes, what, down the
river? Literally down the river. And she finds
the Mundugamor, who are also known as the Biwat.
And they were different. They were the complete
polar opposite of the Arapesh. She found that
in this society, both men and women displayed
traits that Westerners would call masculine.
So everyone was a tough guy here. Everyone. She
described them as aggressive, violent, non -nurturing.
They were ruthless in their interactions. Hostility
and suspicion were the norm. Wow. What about
child rearing? It was almost an afterthought.
Babies were seen as a nuisance. There was very
little warmth or affection from either parent.
Both the men and the women were expected to be
tough, combative and individualistic. So in the
first group, everyone acts like a stereotypical
1930s good mother. And in the second group. Just
a few miles away, everyone acts like a stereotypical
warrior. Exactly. A fascinating contrast. But
the third group is the one that really flips
the script. The Chambuli. Now called the Chambri.
Yes. This is the famous role reversal one. It
is. In Chambuli society, Meade observed a near
perfect reversal of Western gender roles of the
time. The women were the dominant partners. Dominant.
They were the ones with the shaved heads, which
was a sign of their status. She described them
as brisk, efficient. practical, business -minded
managers. They controlled the fishing and the
marketplace. They provided the food. They ran
the show. So they were the breadwinners, the
bosses. The bosses. They were impersonal and
in charge. And the men, what were they doing?
The men were the artists. They were the ones
concerned with aesthetics and ceremony. She described
them as being emotionally dependent on the women.
And catty. I saw that in the sources. That was
her word. She said they spent their time gossiping,
engaging in petty rivalries, and worrying about
their appearance wearing elaborate curls and
ornaments. They were focused on whether the women
approved of their art and their looks. That is,
I mean, for 1935, that must have been absolutely
mind -blowing to read. It was a bombshell. And
here is the aha. Moment. The genius of the book.
Mead synthesized this perfectly. She argued that
temperament, what we might call personality or
gender expression, is not linked to biological
sex. Because if it were biological, men would
be aggressive everywhere. Precisely. If biology
dictated that men are leaders and women are followers,
then the Chambuli wouldn't exist. Right. If biology
dictated that women are naturally nurturing and
men are not, the Arapesh wouldn't exist. So she
comes to this really revolutionary conclusion.
If one tribe can make everyone gentle and another
can make everyone aggressive and a third can
make men feminine and women masculine, then we
can't say that passivity is naturally female
or aggression is naturally male. Right. She basically
laid the groundwork for the modern distinction
we make between sex, the biological parts you're
born with, and gender, the social role you learn
to play. The costume you wear. The costume your
culture hands you. She showed that a society
can take a biological male and mold him into
a gentle nurturer or take a biological female
and mold her into a dominant, aggressive leader.
The possibilities are, as she put it, It connects
so directly to modern thought. I mean, the conversations
we are having right now about gender fluidity,
about non -binary identities, Mead was providing
the cross -cultural data for that 80, 90 years
ago. She was. She was doing it by physically
stepping outside her own culture to see that
the rules we live by aren't laws of nature. They're
just stories we tell ourselves. Which is a powerful
idea. Now, speaking of how she gathered this
data. She was also innovating the actual tools
of the trade. She was. And that takes us to section
three, visual anthropology and the ethics of
observation. Because she realized at some point
that writing things down in a notebook wasn't
enough. No, especially when you're studying things
that are nonverbal, like dance or religious trances
or the subtle ways a mother holds a baby. You
need to see it. So where does this innovation
happen? This happens in Bali from 1936 to 1938.
And this time she was with her third husband,
Gregory Bateson. Bateson. Okay, so he's on the
scene now. And in Bali, they went heavy on the
tech. Massively heavy. For the time it was cutting
edge, they took 25 ,000 photographs. And they
shot 22 ,000 feet of film. This was just, it
was unprecedented in anthropology. How did they
even process all that in the field? That's an
incredible amount of material. It was a monumental
effort. But the goal was to capture what they
called culture at a distance. To create a truly
objective record. What was the methodology like?
Were they just pointing a camera at things? It
was much more systematic than that. The method
was fascinating. Mead would be sitting there
with her notepad, scribbling these rapid -fire,
moment -by -moment notes about the social interactions.
Okay. While Bateson, who was a brilliant photographer,
operated the camera, capturing the same moments
on film, so later they could sync the visual
record with the written observation. That's a
whole new level of data collection. It was, and
works like their film, Trance and Dance, Bali
come from this period. It really birthed the
entire field of visual anthropology. But Mead
didn't just take snapshots of cultures. She was
also one of the first to commit to long -term
study, right? Yes, and this is another one of
her major contributions. We have to talk about
her work with the Manus people in the Admiralty
Islands. This is the longitudinal study, the
one where she kept going back. She did. She first
went in 1928, and then she returned over and
over again for five decades. She wrote the book
New Lives for Old in 1956, and it was a stunning
document. Why? What did she see? She watched
a society move from what we'd call the Stone
Age to the Atomic Age in a single generation.
That's an incredible amount of change to witness
firsthand. It was, and she was there for some
of the most dramatic parts of it. This is where
we get the story of the noise. The noise, what
was that? It sounds ominous. It was a cargo cult
phenomenon. I've heard that term. What does it
mean? It was a kind of millenarian religious
event. After World War II, the villagers had
seen all this incredible Western technology,
the cargo from the military bases, and a movement
arose believing that a new age was coming instantly.
And how would this new age arrive? Supernaturally.
They believed their ancestors would return on
ships or planes, bringing the cargo with them.
And to prepare for it, they had to destroy their
old world. Destroy it. They destroyed their traditional
possessions, their tools, their masks, their
ritual objects. They threw them into the sea.
Meade describes them shaking like leaves, caught
up in this religious fervor, believing that the
Western goods and way of life would just appear.
That is terrifying and fascinating. They destroyed
their own history, hoping for a new future. It
was a radical, desperate act. But what's so interesting
is how it evolved. It didn't just fizzle out.
It turned into something called the Paleo movement.
It was Paleo. Paleo was a local leader, a visionary,
and he channeled that desire for change into
a political movement. movement. He pushed for
a new way in the local TikTok Pisin language,
Nufalahasin. And this wasn't about magic anymore.
No, it was practical. It was about embracing
Western style governance, building schools, opening
clinics. It was a push for modernization from
within on their own terms. And Mead documented
the entire arc from magical thinking to political
action. She showed how a culture can completely
rewrite its own operating system when it decides
to. That's an incredible story. However. We can't
look at this era of her research without seeing
some of the cracks in the ethical foundation.
No, we can't. We need to talk about the somatotyping
studies. Yes. This is the darker side of the
research, and it's important to confront it.
In 1953 and 1954, Mead and her team were interested
in... body types you know the idea of endomorph
mesomorph ectomorph right the different body
shapes they wanted to see how body type might
relate to personality and cultural adaptation
and to study body types you need to see the body
you need to see the body they took nude photographs
of the villagers hundreds of them okay this is
where the modern listener goes Whoa, did they
consent to this? And that is the absolute core
of the controversy. Critics like the anthropologist
Leonora Forstall have pointed out that consent
was often sought from the Australian colonial
authorities. The government. The colonial government,
yes. Not necessarily from the villagers themselves
in a way we would consider informed consent today.
So the government said go ahead and the subjects
just had to deal with it. Essentially. There's
a huge power imbalance. Now, Mead defended it
later in her life. She viewed it as United Nations
business, which is a strange phrase. She argued
it was medically useful and necessary for science.
But that doesn't really hold up now. Not at all.
Looking back, it highlights the extractive nature
of some of that early anthropology. It's the
Western scientists treating indigenous people
as data points, as specimens. It's a part of
the history we absolutely have to acknowledge.
And that wasn't the only instance of questionable
methods, right? There was an issue with the Omaha
fieldwork. Yes. This was earlier, in 1930, in
Nebraska. She was studying the Omaha tribe. Her
husband at the time, Rio Fortune, was working
openly as an anthropologist. But Meade decided
to go undercover. Undercover. She posed merely
as his wife. She felt that if she was seen as
another researcher, the Omaha women would clam
up and wouldn't give her the real story. But
as just a wife, she could sit with him, gossip.
And get the information nobody else could. Exactly.
She used that accent. And what did she learn?
She described the Omaha as a broken culture.
She was heartbroken by what she saw, the devastating
impact of the Dawes Act, the loss of their land,
the economic ruin, the social collapse. She saw
people whose culture had been shattered by government
policy. So it's complex. She was exposing this
horrible injustice that was done to them, but
she used a level of deception to do it. Precisely.
The ethics are murky. The slogan, the personal
is political, was a thing in the 70s, but it
applied to Mead's work and her life decades earlier.
That's a perfect transition because that brings
us to section four. We cannot understand her
work without understanding her private life.
It was complicated. That's an understatement.
For someone who made a living studying marriage,
kinship, and family structures, her own kinship
chart was, let's call it a spiderweb. It was.
Okay, so she had three husbands. Let's run through
the roster. First was Luther Cressman. She married
him in 1923. He was a theology student who later
became an archaeologist. She later referred to
it as her student marriage. That feels a little
dismissive. He certainly thought so. But they
were very young. It was a marriage of its time
and it ended when her career took off and he
wasn't part of that vision. Then came husband
number two. Rio Fortune. Rio Fortune, the New
Zealand psychologist and anthropologist, the
collaborator we mentioned in New Guinea. The
one she was with for the big gender studies.
Yes. And by all accounts, that was a volatile,
brilliant, and incredibly difficult marriage.
Oh, so. Sources describe him as possessing a
puritanical jealousy. He was intensely competitive
with her. He was brilliant, a great intellectual
partner, but reportedly also physically violent.
Wow. It was a partnership of work. but a nightmare
of a relationship. It burned very hot and then
burned out completely. And then number three,
Gregory Bateson. The Englishman. Gregory Bateson,
he was the soulmate. And how did they meet? This
is where the drama really kicks in. It is. They
met while she was still married to fortune. In
fact, while all three of them were doing field
work together on the Sepik River. Wait, all three
of them? All three of them. In the field. In
New Guinea. Imagine the tension in that tent.
That is a reality show waiting to happen. It
truly is. She and Bateson fell in love. She divorced
Fortune and married Bateson. And that was the
longest marriage. It was from 1936 to 1950. They
had her only child, a daughter, Mary Catherine
Bateson, who also became an anthropologist. And
when that marriage ended. When Bateson left her
for another woman, Mead was absolutely devastated.
Really? Completely. The sources say she never
really got over it. She kept his photograph by
her bedside for the rest of her life. So the
husbands are a huge part of her story. Yeah.
But they're only half of it. Not even half, really.
We have to talk about the women in her life.
Yes, we do. And this is where the sources, particularly
her letters and biographies written after her
death, are very clear, even if he wasn't always
public about it at the time. Let's start with
the big one. ruth benedict ruth benedict another
giant of anthropology she was meade's instructor
at bernard college her mentor her lover and her
lover yes they were partners it was an intense
lifelong intellectual and romantic relationship
benedict was probably the most important single
person in her life And later in life, she had
another long -term female partner. She did. After
Bateson, she lived with the anthropologist Rhoda
Mitro from 1955 until her death in 1978. Their
published letters concern a deep, loving, romantic
relationship. They were life partners. It's amazing
how much of her life was about challenging norms,
both in her work and in her home. They were one
and the same for her. There's that one anecdote
that I think sums up her attitude perfectly.
The story about burning the letters. Oh, the
beach scene. Yes. Before she went to Samoa, she
had a... pretty intense relationship with the
famous linguist edward sapir okay but he was
very traditional he wanted a wife who would stay
home support his career he was completely unsupportive
of her ambitions to go into the field you want
to put her in a box very conventional box so
when she finally got to samoa this moment of
liberation for her she took all his letters went
down to the beach and burned them she literally
set fire to the past to clear the way for her
future it's so cinematic it's a declaration of
independence Now, with all this complexity, did
she ever label herself? Did she call herself
bisexual or lesbian? She actively refused labels.
She never openly identified as lesbian or bisexual
in the way we might use those terms today. When
pressed, she called herself a mixed type. A mixed
type. What did she mean by that? It was her way
of saying she wasn't one thing or the other.
There's a famous quote from a friend of hers
who observed that Meade loved women's souls and
men's bodies. Wow. Spiritually homosexual? That's
how the friend put it. It's a fascinating distinction
suggesting an intellectual and emotional intimacy
with women and a different kind of connection
with men. And she had a whole theory about this,
about life stages. She did. This is so ahead
of its time. She suggested that a perfect balance
for a human life might be to have homosexual
relationships in your youth for exploration and
intimacy. Okay. Then heterosexual relationships
in midlife for the purpose of procreation and
raising a family. Right. And then returning to
homosexual relationships in old age for companionship.
Wow. Talk about fluidity. She's not just talking
about being one thing for your whole life. She's
proposing that your orientation can and should
evolve as you age. It's a radical idea even today.
And she was writing about this in her Redbook
column. Wait, hold on. She's writing about this
in Redbook, the magazine at the grocery store
checkout. Yes. In the 60s and 70s, she had a
column where she... brought these anthropological
ideas to a massive mainstream American audience.
She wrote a column where she said, and I'm paraphrasing,
bisexuality isn't something new, but the acceptance
of the human capacity to love members of both
sexes is. Bringing it to the masses. She believed
that the capacity to love wasn't limited by gender,
and she wasn't afraid to say so. That leads us
perfectly into our final section, section five.
The public intellectual. Because she wasn't just
a researcher hiding in an ivory tower. She was
a brand. She was a public voice. She was. And
World War II played a huge part in cementing
that role. How so? What did she do during the
war? She served as the executive secretary of
the Committee on Food Habits for the National
Research Council. Food habits. That sounds a
little... boring for Margaret Mead. It sounds
boring, but it was crucial. It was about understanding
American dietary patterns to improve nutrition
and morale for the war effort. How do you convince
Americans to eat organ meats, for example? It's
a cultural problem. An anthropological problem.
Exactly. But she also did more direct work. She
wrote manuals on how American troops stationed
in the UK should interact with the British. Oh,
I love this. A field guide to the British. Essentially.
She had to explain American courtship rituals,
you know, casual dating to the perplexed Brits
who had a much more formal system. She was using
anthropology as a tool for allied diplomacy to
prevent cultural misunderstandings between the
troops. And after the war, her influence just
kept expanding. She got involved in cybernetics.
She was a true polymath. She was a core participant
in the famous Macy conferences, which brought
together thinkers from all different fields,
math, biology, engineering, sociology. And what
was the goal there? They were trying to develop
a universal science of systems, of communication
and control. Mead was instrumental in developing
what's called second -order cybernetics, the
idea that the observer is part of the system
they're observing. Which is what an anthropologist
does. It's the definition of an anthropologist.
She saw the whole world, culture, biology, machines
as interconnected feedback systems. She really
was everywhere. And her influence reached right
into the American home. Specifically through
Dr. Spock. A huge, huge influence. Dr. Benjamin
Spock was actually her pediatrician. Her daughter's
doctor. Yes. And her observations in the field
that babies in so -called primitive societies
were fed on demand, not on a strict by -the -clock
schedule, directly influenced him. So the idea
of feeding your baby when it's hungry? Instead
of letting it cry for hours because it's not
time yet, that came in large part from Mead's
cross -cultural work. Spock promoted breastfeeding
on demand based on her research. So if you weren't
left to cry it out in a crib, you might have
Margaret Mead to thank. You might. Exactly. And
there's one more kind of strange cultural trope
she is allegedly responsible for creating. The
Jewish mother stereotype. Really? How did that
happen? Allegedly. It's debated, but the story
is she was involved in a research project studying
shtetls, the old Eastern European Jewish villages.
It was funded by the American Jewish Committee.
Okay. The study, which was part of her national
character research, described a mother figure
in that culture who was intensely loving, but
also controlling, smothering, and guilt -inducing
through her use of food and affection. That sounds
familiar. It does. And that academic description
allegedly seeped out into the popular culture
and became the comedic and sometimes problematic
trope that we know today. It is wild how many
different threads of modern culture you can trace
back to her work. She was recognized for it,
too. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom,
the nation's highest civilian honor. It was awarded
by President Carter posthumously in 1979. A fitting
honor. So let's wrap this up. We have unpacked
the Samoan bombshell, the gender revolution of
the Sepik River, the visual innovation in Bali,
the controversies, the ethical questions, and
her incredibly complex personal life. It's a
lot to cover. It is. If we look at the big picture,
what was her ultimate contribution? I think it's
that she moved anthropology from the measurement
of skulls and pottery shards, which is a lot
of what it used to be, to the study of childhood,
personality, and gender. She humanized the science.
And despite the Freeman critique, despite the
ethical questions about the photos, what is the
core takeaway that still stands? The takeaway
is her central thesis, the one she started with
in Samoa. That culture shapes us as much as biology,
maybe more. That we're not just products of our
genes. We are not just products of our genes.
We are products of how we are raised, what our
society values, what anxieties it has, and what
stories we are told about who we are supposed
to be. That's a powerful thought. It means we
have agency. If we create the culture, we can
change the culture and therefore change ourselves.
That's the hopeful message at the core of all
her work. Exactly. I want to leave you, the listener,
with a final thought to mull over. We talked
about Margaret Mead's own proposed ideal for
a human life. A society where sexual orientation
and gender roles could evolve fluidly throughout
a single person's lifetime. It's a radical idea.
It is. And I want you to ask yourself, is our
current society right now closer to her vision?
Or have we just swapped one set of rigid rules
for another? Are we truly becoming fluid? Or
are we just busy creating new, smaller, more
specific boxes to put ourselves into? That is
the question she would want us to be asking.
Thank you for joining us on this deep dive into
the life and mind of Margaret Mead. It's been
a journey. Always a pleasure. We'll see you next
time.