Mandler - Return From the Natives

Copyright 2013 Peter Mandler

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-publication Data

Mandler, Peter.

Return from the natives: how Margaret Mead won the Second world War and lost the Cold War/Peter Mandler.

pages cm.

ISBN 978-0-300-18785-4 (cl: alk. paper)

1. Mead, Margaret, 19011978. 2. World War, 19391945Influence. 3. Cold WarInfluence. 4. Cultural relativism. 5. AnthropologyGovernment policyUnited States. I.Title.

GN21.M36M36 2013

306dc23

2012051253

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Mel, and in memory of Audrey

Contents

Abbreviations

Introduction

Return from the Natives

The journey out is also a journey home. When, at the end of the nineteenth century, the first modern anthropological fieldworkers went out in search of primitive peoples in the South Pacific and in the remoter parts of North America, they were not only looking for people different from themselves, they were looking for themselves as well. The common view then was the social-evolutionary one, that the varieties of humanity were arrayed along the rungs of a ladder of civilization, with primitive peoples at the bottom and modern Western peoples at or near the top but it was a ladder that peoples might travel along, some more slowly than others. The study of primitive peoples could therefore be a study of one's own ancestors, and perhaps not so very distant ones, either.

Some of these early fieldworkers developed such a sympathy for the primitive peoples among whom they lived that they began to doubt whether the ladder of civilization was really so long, or indeed whether it existed at all. And when the Great War dealt a series of stunning blows to the ideals of civilization those who witnessed mechanized slaughter in the fields of Flanders found it hard to feel superior to anyone, and the appeal of primitive simplicity (always an undercurrent in Western culture anyway) was vastly enhanced the anthropological enterprise changed dramatically. The ladder of civilization crashed down and appeared to come to rest on its side; the array of cultures now presented itself not vertically but horizontally. Peoples were still very different, but no longer stood in any obvious hierarchy. The idea of cultural relativism blossomed. In this new relation, primitive cultures in some ways seemed more different from so-called civilized ones: they were no longer the ancestors, just people who did things differently. This relation also offered new ways to compare cultures. Civilization was no longer the norm. If they do things differently, how does that make us look? Or, more powerfully, if they do things differently and we are no longer so obviously superior to them, so obviously the future of the past what might we learn from them?

These two impulses to use the observation of so-called primitive peoples, as the anthropologist Richard Handler has put it, Anthropologists could thus claim to be disinterested experts in intercultural or indeed international relations on a global scale.

This book is about the most famous anthropologist who ever lived Margaret Mead and her efforts to apply her tools, honed on primitive (or, as she came to call them, simple, homogeneous') peoples in the South Pacific, to problems of international relations between what she called contemporary peoples such as her own, the Americans, and her third husband's, the British. Between her return from Bali in 1939 and her return to New Guinea in 1953, Mead did no fieldwork among simple, homogeneous cultures and devoted herself very largely to theorizing, writing and lobbying on issues relating to contemporary, mostly Western, cultures. This period uncoincidentally spans the years of international crisis leading to the Second World War, the war itself and the renewed crises of the early Cold War. It represents one of the peak periods of social scientists involvement in public policy and a peak period, too, in their engagement with the popular imagination. Mead was determined that anthropologists should not lose this opportunity. The economists had won the First World War: that is, after the war they had become government's most trusted academic advisers. Here was anthropology's chance to take a place alongside them. Between the late 1930s and the early 1950s, her steel-trap mind fastened on the problems of international relations that mattered most to policymakers and the general public how to prevent a European war; once war had broken out, how to cement Anglo-American relations and how to defeat the Germans and the Japanese; then, after 1945, how to come to terms with the Russians and the Chinese; and, finally, how to create a new world order embracing all the peoples of the world.