Margaret Mead’s Legacy: Continuing Conversations

Contributors include Mary Catherine Bateson, Elaine Charnov, Faye Ginsburg, Bridget Hayden, Nancy Lutkehaus, Michaela di Leonardo, Emily Martin, Marcyliena Morgan, Esther Newton, Rayna Rapp, Judith Shapiro, and Lesley Sharp.

“Cultural icon,” professional maven, “true public intellectual,” staff-toting “prophet,” and even, “Mother of the World” and “Grandmother to the Nation” – such are the phrases that have surfaced in descriptions of Margaret Mead. She was an “indomitable,” “controversial” and “revolutionary” woman in her personal style, her topical interests and her methodological concerns. She was opinionated, she was difficult, and, as a result, at times she seems to loom larger than life even decades after her death. But she’s ours – as a Barnard graduate, an anthropologist, a New Yorker, an American and as a world citizen. These characteristics most certainly mark the cultural icon: we celebrate Mead’s life because she was daring, outspoken and willing to experiment with new topics, ideas, and technologies. Her face has graced a U.S. postage stamp and even a wall at Epcott Center, because she stands out as remarkable woman of her times. Margaret Mead was, during her lifetime, a “household word,” her activities rendering anthropology intelligible to the average American. As these conference presentations attest, there is also a timelessness about Margaret Mead’s character, so that she emerges, most certainly, as a woman of our time, too.

What, then, do the presenters at the conference teach us about Margaret Mead? First, that by the late 1920s Mead had emerged as a vanguard figure within the burgeoning field of American cultural anthropology, and she then defined, throughout the rest of her life, a series of trajectories for the discipline both within its own professional boundaries and in the everyday world beyond. As Rayna Rapp underscores, even decades after the publication of Sex and Temperament, Mead would prove pivotal to 1970s, second wave feminist anthropological concerns. Knowledge of Mead is crucial, too, to the lives of contemporary women. Thus, as Marcyliena Morgan shows us, Mead is “absolutely a liberating force” for young African American women currently engaged in anthropological pursuits. More generally, throughout her lifetime, Mead was an ubiquitous presence in American culture – offering opinions in a wide array of venues, ranging from late-night talk shows, to the floor of the U.N., to her monthly column in Redbook, so that we might just as easily have encountered her in the halls of the American Museum of Natural History as on the shelves at grocery store check-out counters.

As such, throughout the twentieth century Mead’s presence defines several significant rites of passage, within a wide array of realms as well as for a host of players. Consider, for instance, the emergence of anthropology in the public sphere; or the indomitable presence of women in our discipline (and, as this conference attests, Barnard’s own central position in this development, too); or, perhaps, the rapid ascension of photographic media as a significant research tool; as well as (as Faye Ginsburg in particular underscores) the ascension of the indigenous production of ethnographic films. With just this handful of examples in mind, one can argue that, without Mead, the world (or at the very least anthropology) could never be the same. I offer this statement not as a romantic reading of her life, but as an observation based on the power of her pioneering spirit. No matter how difficult, or peculiar, or even controversial she may have been, it was her daring and experimental character that enabled Mead to shape the trajectory of our discipline in radical ways. Thus, her ghost still haunts our discussions of gender, ethnocentrism, biological reductionism and the politics of visual representation even now in the twenty-first century. She has transformed us and, as such, the collective anthropological mind as well.

A question that surfaces regularly in conferences such as this that celebrate Mead’s life is, why does Mead lack a counterpart today? That is, why has no one taken up her staff and become the public prophet of anthropology? One might easily argue that the discipline is much larger (and, thus, more fragmented), rendering such a singular role impossible in this current world of ours. Further, it is certainly difficult to dispute that her own unique character and talents are difficult to match. As Nancy Lutkehaus underscores, very early in her life Mead recognized (and harnessed) the power of “social dialogue,” “creating,” as Emily Martin so aptly puts it, “conversational relationships with [her] audience.” This was a process that allowed Mead simultaneously to teach and discuss ideas, as well as cull new data for her own future use. I am impelled to stress, though, that anthropology, as it is practiced today, does in fact harbor a host of policy watchdogs (a number of whom appear here at this conference). As Lutkehaus says of Mead, she spoke out regularly on “issues of social importance”; as the presentations at this conference reveal, so, too, do all of the women sitting here. Granted, they do not appear regularly on network talk shows, nor do they write for Redbook, but they offer their opinions in, for example, The Nation (as did Mead and does Micaela di Leonardo now), and they speak regularly before scientists whose actions most certainly shape our individual and collective reproductive and other technocratic futures. It was Mead, of course, who made such career trajectories possible. This is also what, in fact, the Margaret Mead Award (granted by the American Anthropological Association) celebrates: the lives of anthropologists whose writings have truly made a difference in the world.

So, here we stand at Barnard College, an institution with a long tradition of training outstanding – and, often, very famous – women in anthropology. Mead, like Barnard, always valued women’s voices, granting them a level of social sophistication, intellectual wisdom, and cultural relevance that far surpassed the works of several generations of other writers in the field. For me, though, perhaps her greatest strength – and what makes her so dear to me – is, first, her charisma and, second, her unfailing optimism about the possibilities of culture, and the people who generate it. In trying times, we do well to celebrate her life, draw from her work and follow a path staked out by this woman, one whose life was so rich, so unusual and so rewarding.