American anthropologists have a PR problem. We know it, and it bothers us. A left-of-center discipline finds it difficult to get across its cultural criticism in a country with center-right mass media. To make matters worse, the discipline is cursed by the fact of having ancestors who hang around, whose contemporary public presence seems greater than anything the anthropologists of this world can muster. The greatest of these anthropological ghosts is Margaret Mead, whom some anthropologists have never forgiven for her celebrity. Even for those of us who admire her, her presence and that of a few other ancestral figures, like Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict, throw a glaring light on our own lack of a public voice.

The three books in the history of American anthropology reviewed here all focus on the relation of the discipline to the wider society. Two of them concern Mead (1901–78), and were written by anthropologists, Nancy Lutkehaus and Paul Shankman, with professional connections to Mead and her work. The third, by historian John Gilkeson, surveys the period in which Mead became the most publicly prominent of all American anthropologists, a period when anthropology itself became influential in the American academy. Alas, both Mead's story and Gilkeson's history end with the waning of anthropology's influence on the American public.

Nancy Lutkehaus describes her book as an “analysis of the role of anthropology in twentieth-century America as seen through the lens of Mead's celebrity and her role as a public intellectual” (xiii). Lutkehaus became interested in “Mead as a cultural icon” almost from the beginning of her association with her, when she went to work for Mead in 1972 as an undergraduate assistant (xi). Lutkehaus continued to work for Mead as a graduate student, when she began to realize that Mead's celebrity was coupled, inside her discipline, with considerable denigration of her scholarship. Such criticism reached a remarkable climax with the publication of Derek Freeman's attack on Mead five years after her death.Footnote ¹

Lutkehaus's book is organized according to “four categories of images that recur in media representations of Mead throughout her career” (6–7)—Mead as modern woman (two chapters), as anthropologist (four chapters), as scientist (one chapter), and as public intellectual and celebrity (two chapters). The narrative for each of these topics is chronological, but, as we move through them, we cover the same temporal territory. This repetitive or overlain narrative allows Lutkehaus to throw new light on some well-studied materials, like Mead's early ethnographic expeditions (in Samoa, Manus, and the Sepik River region of New Guinea) and the public's responses to the books that came out of them.

One of the central themes of Lutkehaus's narrative is that Mead was the right person for her times. Some of her less famous disciplinary colleagues were jealous of Mead's success, attributable in their eyes to luck or to pandering to the public, but Lutkehaus makes a good case that the times, the zeitgeist, “needed” a Margaret Mead. Mead's career tracked what we might call the mainstreaming of American feminism. Her father's mother had been a teacher, and her mother studied at the University of Chicago, where she was influenced by progressives such as Jane Addams, Thorstein Veblen, and John Dewey. Mead's mother went on to complete a master's degree in sociology at Bryn Mawr, with research on the adaptation of Italian immigrants to rural New Jersey. Mead thus was heir to an earlier tradition of women who wielded professional expertise in the service of social reform, a tradition she came to revise and renew in a culturally relativistic form suited to the twentieth century. More generally, Mead's generation of undergraduates in the 1920s profited from their mothers’ militant gender politics, which liberated them both from some of the gender and career constraints on earlier generations of women and from the need to be politically active to overcome them. Mead and her college classmates could focus with a typically modernist self-absorption on the lives they wanted to construct for themselves, from careers to marriages to friendships.

Mead's initial fame grew out of press coverage of her first field research in 1925, on adolescence among Samoan girls. Mead used the term “flapper” (as a synonym for “the adolescent girl”) in an interview, and “the press easily made the connection that Mead was studying ‘the flapper in her primitive state’” (45–6; Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 15 August 1925). The diminutive Mead looked like a flapper, yet she was also a scientist, and a woman scientist at that, one who had set off on an apparently daring mission to study “primitive” people in “the South Seas.” This “combination” of attributes made Mead particularly “noteworthy,” Lutkehaus observes (51). And Mead took full advantage of her newsworthiness by following the advice of her publisher, William Morrow, to add the final two chapters to Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) in which she drew lessons from Samoa for American parents and children (86). According to Lutkehaus, “these chapters . . . provided a successful model of cultural commentary and comparative ethnography that Mead continued to use in her subsequent books and public speaking for the rest of her career” (86).

Mead was an astonishingly productive fieldworker in the 1920s and 1930s, and, with the success of Coming of Age, Growing Up in New Guinea (1930), and Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935), an astonishingly popular author. As Lutkehaus makes clear (27–8), crucial to Mead's success was the fact that her career developed in sync with her own social maturation through the stages of womanhood, as these were understood in the American culture of her time. Her first three popular books treated childhood, adolescence, and parenthood, and attempted, comparatively, to draw lessons from exotic cultures to be applied back home. In Coming of Age, Mead argued that adolescent girls in Samoa were freer than American girls to experiment sexually before marriage, and that such experimentation equipped them to deal more realistically with marriage than their sheltered American counterparts. Growing Up focused on childhood freedom among the Manus people, an anarchic freedom, as Mead saw it, which, combined with Manus materialism (strangely similar to that of Mead's America), did not lead to adult happiness. And Sex and Temperament famously described three neighboring New Guinea cultures with startlingly contrasting systems of gender roles.

As Mead researched and wrote these books, she herself developed from a young woman scientist (one whom her Samoan informants thought unmarried), to a married woman (indeed, a thrice-married woman), to a mother (literally, with the birth of her daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson, in 1939, and figuratively, as she was called on repeatedly in the 1940s and 1950s to give motherly advice to the nation and the world). With the birth of Mary Catherine's daughter in 1969, Mead became an American grandmother, a “priestess” and “sage” (76). Finally, with the posthumous revelation of her sexual relationships with other women, a bisexual or even “queer” Mead became iconic for some gay and lesbian Americans (78–80).

To chart these stages of Mead's growth is not to suggest that she was passive in the construction of her own iconicity. On the contrary, Lutkehaus's account shows us that Mead pioneered certain field research methods (for which she was admired by her professional colleagues) which were peculiarly appropriate for her to use in the construction of her own celebrity. Not only does a culture get the celebrities it needs, it apparently also gets the social science it needs.

Most obvious here is Mead's (and Gregory Bateson's) pioneering use of still photography and motion pictures in their Balinese research in the late 1930s. When Mead appeared as one of the first guests on the 1953 CBS Adventure series, she provided running commentary to her and Bateson's film, Trance and Dance in Bali (shot in 1937–9, produced in 1952). Subsequent television episodes included Margaret Mead's New Guinea Journal, aired in 1968 on public television, and Mead's work as a consultant for the PBS documentary series An American Family (1973). Mead also collaborated with Life photographer Ken Heyman on numerous projects, including a coffee-table photo essay, Family (1965), echoing the well-known earlier collection curated by Edward Steichen, The Family of Man (1955). Lutkehaus sees An American Family as seminal for contemporary reality television (195). Perhaps, but even more interesting, her narrative shows us that Mead was not merely media-savvy as the term is ordinarily used, to indicate manipulation of the media to promote one's image. She was meta-media-savvy. She pioneered forms of visual documentation for anthropological field research, and then made use of those documents, and her expertise concerning them, to make available materials to the mass media which promoted her celebrity.

Less obvious but perhaps even more crucial for both social science and celebrity in the twentieth century is role playing, as Mead perfected the art. Lutkehaus reports that from earliest childhood, “Mead loved pageants and plays, dress-up, and make believe” (30). And from her Samoan field trip onward, she seems to have thought of cross-cultural research at least in part as dressing up to play a role. Certainly this is one way she explained it through the media to the public. Lutkehaus reproduces a photograph from a 1927 article in the New York Sun in which Mead, “posed against a background of Samoan bark cloth, . . . hold[s] a woven skirt such as she wore [during fieldwork] . . . in one hand and a woven fiber fan in the other” (51). It would have been easy for readers to see Mead as a flapper, as an anthropologist, or as a Samoan girl. More generally, Lutkehaus's narrative allows us to see that these conflatable images of Mead in publicity materials conveyed a triply significant notion of social role: first, that anthropological research involved role-playing or, more crudely put, dressing up to “play native”; second, that a modern woman was at liberty to take up and discard roles at will; and third, most generally, that to be a “self” in modern society required role playing, just as social science itself required a theory of role playing to account for social life.Footnote ²

Mead took up and discarded kinship roles even as she was studying kinship systems, always with an eye to her posterity (literally) and to her celebrity. Mead married Luther Cressman in 1923, but played the role of an unmarried maiden during her Samoan research. Cressman, she thought, would make a good father, but when she learned she would not be able to conceive a child, she divorced him and married anthropologist Reo Fortune in 1927. Fortune, she thought, would not make a good father, but would be “useful” for “a division of labor in anthropological research” (since he could study the men while she studied the women). Later, when Mead decided to try to conceive a child, she divorced Fortune and married Bateson, “another man . . . she felt would be a good father,” in 1937. As Lutkehaus laconically remarks, “being married . . . was another role Mead liked to assume” (62–3). While Lutkehaus is not unmindful of Mead's penchant for manipulative behavior in the service of her career (171), she does not go into the gory details of the famous in-the-field Mead–Fortune–Bateson triangle, when Mead and Bateson cruelly maneuvered Fortune into granting Mead a divorce so that Mead's public reputation would not be affected.Footnote ³

This, of course, is the dark side of Margaret Mead. Yet Lutkehaus reminds us that anthropologists should be grateful to her for her many positive contributions. Her popular books (which her colleagues admired at least for the excellence of her writing) taught the American public that anthropologists specialized in knowledge of other, remote societies—and that such knowledge could be used to throw comparative light on social arrangements back home. And many of those books were paired with professional monographs which her colleagues had (if grudgingly) to admit to be excellent examples of scientific work.Footnote ⁴ Beyond print, Mead intrepidly experimented with other media (radio, film, television) not only for scholarship, but for getting the anthropological message to a wide public. As Lutkehaus puts it, “Mead and the media” were willing to “capitaliz[e] on certain of her attributes and accomplishments so that . . . her celebrity increased . . . But Mead also believed that anthropology should be of interest and of use to everyone” (236–7).

Too bad, perhaps, that Mead did not live to confront the most devastating of her colleagues’ challenges to her image, that posed by the 1983 publication of Derek Freeman's Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth. The gods of public relations give, and they take away. A celebrity is always vulnerable. Mead spent a lifetime building her public image (as Lutkehaus notes, “the person Mead became best at performing was herself” (236)). Freeman (1916–2001) mounted a sustained assault on that image over a twenty-year period, a work of personal vindictiveness which Paul Shankman dissects in The Trashing of Margaret Mead.

Shankman's book, which is at once fascinating and saddening, reviews the media controversy surrounding, and then following, the publication of Freeman's book. Shankman provides a succinct account of Freeman's career, piecing together as much as he can about Freeman's “difficult” personality (37). He also reviews Mead's early career and her fieldwork in Samoa, as well as Samoan responses to Mead's book and, later, to the Mead–Freeman controversy. Finally, he situates the controversy in its time, the culture wars of Reagan-era America, and tries to assess it after twenty-five years.

Shankman conducted ethnographic research in Samoa between 1969 and 2001, on economic development and “Samoan migration to New Zealand, Australia, and the United States” (244). He met both Mead and Freeman, but was not close to either. When he began teaching at the University of Colorado in 1975, he had undergraduates read Coming of Age and an unpublished draft of Freeman's book, “unintentionally . . . teaching a version of the controversy” before it began (244). When it broke, he, like many other regional experts, was asked to comment. And like most of those who refused to side with Freeman, Shankman was harassed and belittled by him.

In and of itself, the kind of controversy Freeman provoked in 1983 was not new for anthropologists. There is a long history in the discipline of famous “cases” in which two well-respected ethnographers presented opposing interpretations of the same culture.Footnote ⁵ What was new was the way in which the promotion of Freeman's book sparked a media uproar to which anthropologists did not know how to respond. Harvard University Press had made a prepublication copy of the manuscript available to the media, and when the New York Times broke the story on 31 January 1983, it was pitched in black-and-white terms as a debunking or at least a challenging of Mead. Where Mead had found sexual permissiveness in Samoa, Freeman found puritanical repression—indeed, a cult of virginity! And while Mead took differences between Samoan and American adolescence as evidence that psychosocial development was culturally patterned, not biologically determined, Freeman took the similarities he saw (sexual repressiveness and parent–child conflict in both cultures) as evidence for biologically grounded cultural universals. Conservative op-ed writers picked up on the larger strand of Freeman's argument, which indicted a cultural relativism which he and they imagined as promulgated by Mead—indeed, enshrined by her popular Samoan book as a reigning cultural myth. Meanwhile, several anthropologists who were asked to comment initially demurred, not having seen the book.

By the time of Freeman's 18 March 1983 appearance on NBC's Donahue show, the framing of the controversy was set. Shankman gives a fascinating account of the episode, in which Freeman, it seems, was much more skilled than the other guests (Mary Catherine Bateson and Samoan specialist Bradd Shore) in using television to his advantage, despite probing questions from Donahue. Bateson and Shore tried to consider the substantive issues at stake as open to debate. Freeman evaded complexity by insisting on his own authority (“I am a scientist,” he exclaimed at one point) and by belittling the other guests, whom he viewed as his opponents (35–6). As Shankman shows, throughout the long years of controversy, Freeman portrayed himself as the champion of science, while never engaging his critics in a way most scholars would consider to be scientifically constructive.

Shankman devotes four chapters to Mead's Samoan research, in which he evenhandedly reviews her findings and methods, critiquing her where he thinks the evidence warrants it, but ultimately judging that her work had real strengths. He points out the ways in which the concluding arguments of Coming of Age go beyond the data. In addition to describing sexual freedoms, Mead had documented “the limits on premarital sex for adolescent girls” (108, emphasis in original)—precisely the material Freeman found decisive. Yet when Mead spoke to Americans about American mores, she stressed “just how progressive Samoan girls were compared to American girls” (108) while ignoring the contrary evidence which she had nonetheless reported. Shankman concludes that unlike most of her professional peers, Mead was willing to go “beyond simply describing and analyzing Samoan adolescence” to “offer her own opinions . . . to a nonprofessional audience” (108–9). At the same time, he notes that Mead's scholarship, especially as presented in Social Organization in Manu'a, provided data and insights that future scholars of the region could build on.

More interesting, because less well known, are the materials on Freeman. Freeman spent nearly four years in Samoa, during World War II, learning the language well and having a “princely title in the Samoan system of rank” bestowed upon him by the Samoan people with whom he lived (49). He wrote a postgraduate diploma thesis at the London School of Economics on Samoan social structure, but went on to earn his PhD (Cambridge, 1953) with research on the Iban of Borneo. His professional career (at the Australian National University) was based on his Borneo work, but in 1961 he had a “delusional episode,” or perhaps a “mental breakdown” in Borneo (54), which led the government there to prohibit his return.

As an alternative research site, Samoa beckoned. Meanwhile, he had been moving away from his earlier scientific viewpoints, in which he stressed the importance of culture and social structure, toward psychoanalysis and ethology. What seems to have happened is that Freeman's intellectual development dovetailed with his psychological difficulties and led to an obsession with Mead and Coming of Age in Samoa. He claimed in the preface to Margaret Mead and Samoa that he knew in 1943 that it would one day be his “responsibility” to refute her and her work (58), although in his long pursuit of Mead he never made use of his Samoan thesis, nor did he consult Mead's scholarly work on Samoan social structure. Instead, Freeman argued that Mead had calumniated Samoan culture, portraying it as sexually permissive when in fact it was puritanical (6). As a fieldworker, he argued, Mead was inexperienced, and had been duped, or “hoaxed,” by her Samoan informants.Footnote ⁶ Worst of all, American cultural anthropology had taken its cue from Mead's 1928 book, lapsing into an unscientific relativism while rejecting biological factors which demonstrably affected human behavior.

Shankman's tone throughout The Trashing of Margaret Mead is remarkably restrained. He goes to great lengths to credit Freeman's Samoan expertise and to suggest those issues on which Freeman may well have been more knowledgeable than Mead, if not “right” in some ultimate sense. He reviews what is currently known about Samoan sexuality, showing in the process how difficult it is to learn the facts of such matters, especially in a historically dynamic colonial situation, and in a culture where the rules about who can say what to whom are not easily grasped by outsiders. Shankman sketches Samoan scholars’ and laypersons’ objections to both Mead's and Freeman's portraits of Samoan sexuality, but shows also that in the current situation, in which “the majority of Samoans now reside permanently overseas” (149), one is unlikely to find simple cultural causes for attitudes and behaviors which are in any case difficult to document.

In the end, Shankman is driven—inexorably, it seems—to the conclusion that Freeman's attack on Mead, which could not stand up to scholarly review, was motivated by his personal pathologies, which he expressed as rage at Mead's celebrity balanced against a delusional sense of his own scientific standing (227–8). The most poignant moment of the story comes in an appendix, “True Confessions,” when Shankman tells us that he refused an invitation to appear on that fateful Donahue episode: “I was stunned by the offer and quickly replied that I had not seen or read the book . . . I thought to myself, This could be a disaster, and made one of the few wise decisions of my life: I . . . said no” (244–5). It is telling that Shankman retrospectively sees his decision as “wise.” Many anthropologists would probably have made the same choice, and come later to the same evaluation of it. But that, of course, is a key symptom of anthropology's public-relations problem. For a host of reasons (starting with excessive disciplinary specialization and ending with a media environment which seems to us to prize speed of communication over thoughtfulness), we anthropologists are no longer capable of playing the role Mead so relished.

And that is why The Trashing of Margaret Mead is a saddening book. Shankman has done a real service in reviewing the controversy in such detail. But we knew when it all began that Freeman was wrong even though Mead was by no means beyond criticism. We knew that no ethnographer, ever, gets it completely right, and, more important, that the facts of one ethnographic case will never suffice to “solve” so fundamental a problem as that associated with the paired terms nature–nurture. We knew also, as Shankman argues (11–15), that the media (and ultimately Freeman himself) were interested in the fact of controversy, not in the facts of the controversy. And we knew that this particular controversy, an apparently scientific challenge to an apparently unscientific but socially destructive (as conservatives saw it) cultural relativism, was interesting to the media for its political implications, not its scientific merit. Anthropologist David Schneider, for one, made all those arguments in his 1983 review of Freeman's book, a review which begins: “This is a bad book.”Footnote ⁷ What is sad, then, is that such a book commanded so much attention.

If Shankman's book is saddening, Gilkeson's is maddening. Anthropologists and the Rediscovery of America presents a stimulating overview of the development of culture theory in American anthropology in relation to trends in American intellectual life. Gilkeson's claims about the influence of American anthropologists on scholars in American history and American studies are flattering to anthropologists. They are also quite credible. But his marshaling of data to make his case, his breathless and abbreviated reading of scores of texts, strung together in the guise of a chronological narrative, is not always convincing. As was said about both Mead and Freeman with respect to Samoa, so it might be said about Gilkeson's book: there is a gap between data and argument. His arguments are always at least credible, and often downright suggestive, but it is sometimes difficult to see how they emerge from the data he presents.

Gilkeson's narrative runs from 1886, when Boas immigrated to America, bringing with him an incipient theory of culture grounded in German Romanticism and neo-Kantian idealism, to the mid-1960s, when anthropological culture theory had attained its greatest influence on the social sciences and humanities in American academia. Gilkeson organizes his story in terms of five chronologically overlapping themes (to each of which he devotes a chapter): anthropologists’ work “democratizing American conceptions of culture, putting class analysis on the agenda of American social science, rehabilitating the American character, studying American values, and reconciling American culture and civilization” (1). Gilkeson claims that he is tracing anthropologists’ intellectual influence on social scientists, intellectuals, and “educated Americans” in general (3), but to the degree his book does more than bring together published texts, it confines itself to backstage conversations (represented in letters and other archival materials). One can certainly infer anthropologists’ influence in American culture from Gilkeson's story, but without more institutional and social contextualization, the materials gathered here do not in and of themselves make the case.

Gilkeson is more successful in the chapters in which he concentrates on a few anthropologists than in those where he flits from author to author. For example, the first chapter, “Culture in the American Grain,” moves at a bewildering pace from late nineteenth-century American deference to European high culture, represented for Americans by Matthew Arnold, to various American intellectuals’ rediscovery of their national culture from the turn of the century through the Great Depression. Along the way, we have thumbnail sketches of the work of such people as Randolph Bourne and Van Wyck Brooks; Boas and several of his students (including Mead and Benedict); and various sociologists, historians, and literary intellectuals who were influenced by the Boasians. Gilkeson's point seems to be to describe the success of “the Boasian compaign to make Americans culture-conscious” (60), but by the end of the chapter this consciousness has come to include so many apparently contradictory strands (from relativism to national pride, from cultural critique to social engineering (68)) that it is difficult to make sense of the story as a historical argument about cause and effect, or even, merely, about influence.

Chapters 2 and 4 are much more successful. Chapter 2 focuses on the ethnographic study of class in American society, as portrayed in the work of Robert and Helen Lynd on “Middletown” and William Lloyd Warner and his associates on “Yankee City.” From the publication of Middletown in 1929 to the final publications of Warner's team in the 1960s, the work of these ethnographers stimulated a remarkable range of questions, among scholars in many disciplines, concerning the existence of classes in American society; their relation to status, occupation, education, and American culture in general; and the historical direction of change in the class system (toward greater or lesser restrictions on individual mobility). Chapter 4 concerns Clyde Kluckhohn and the anthropological study of values in the 1940s and 1950s. Gilkeson shows the ways in which Kluckhohn's ambitious project (involving thirty-seven fieldworkers studying five subcultures in the area of Ramah, New Mexico) caught the imagination of a wider scholarly community concerned with both the distinctiveness and the universality of American values during the Cold War.

In these chapters, Gilkeson makes a suggestive case for the rather remarkable influence of a small discipline, anthropology, on American intellectual trends. He does this mainly by tracing webs of commentary (in book reviews, personal correspondence, interdisciplinary scholarly symposia, and backstage discussions at grant agencies and foundations). But the broad range of works and ideas considered means that his readings must necessarily be thin. In his narrative, a sentence or two, or a paragraph, often suffices as interpretive commentary on a book or complex theoretical argument. Those few readers who are well schooled in the history of anthropological culture theory will be able to follow the argument, filling in the gaps from their own knowledge. They will find that Gilkeson is amazingly knowledgeable and often incisive. But it is difficult to imagine a reader who cannot fill in the gaps making much sense of a story in which the main actors are abstract terms (like culture, class, and values) which, in the rush of the narrative, are never well defined.

Gilkeson's panoramic view of anthropological influence in the American academy will provide heady reading for anthropologists. His epilogue brings us back to earth. There, he charts the rise of cultural studies and anthropology's subsequent loss of control of the culture concept. Perhaps we can say anthropology has been a victim of its own success. Not only did the humanities and the “soft” social sciences buy into the anthropological notion of culture, but they also increasingly adopted the ethnographic method for their own purposes. It might seem that anthropology has little left to distinguish it as an academic discipline in the twenty-first century. Margaret Mead is gone, and even her ghost seems finally to have lost interest in this world (in my experience, current undergraduates have mostly never heard of her).

But while cultural studies came and went, and humanities disciplines face vicious budgetary cuts, anthropology remains fairly securely institutionalized in the American academy. It's a small discipline, compared, say, to history, with less to lose than most, or, more to the point, fewer PhDs to place each year into jobs. And while the culture concept has become thoroughly routinized, not just across scholarly disciplines, but in the wider society as well, anthropologists still control “the savage slot,” a conceptual space which modernity seems to require.Footnote ⁸ Of course, there never were any savages (or, perhaps, we are all savages), but the politics of multiculturalism and especially processes of globalization in the current neoliberal world order have combined to keep anthropology's knowledge of human diversity relevant, which is perhaps good news for the small group of anthropologists and historians who have an interest in the history of this telltale discipline.