Margaret Mead Life in a Box Series 1. World War II

http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/mead/oneworld-char.html 2. Child’s Drawing

http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/mead/ 3. One of Mead’s Poem

http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/mead/mead-shaping.html 4. Tchambuli (Chambri) Lake

http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/mead/field-sepik.html 5. Mead with Two Samoan Women

http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/mead/field-samoa.html

Critique of Mead

http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/mead/field-manus.html Field Notes

http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/mead/field-sepik.html Card in Board Game

http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/mead/oneworld-char.html

World War II

http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/mead/images/mm0238b.jpg Rumors Cost Us Lives. Offset lithograph, ca. 1941-1945.

“One of the problems social scientists addressed during the war was how to manage rumors. Seemingly innocent conversations could, in wartime, provide damaging information to the enemy. In response to requests from women's groups, the War Department drafted a "Code of Wartime Conversation," which reminded: "What it is not safe to print, it is not safe to say!"

This poster from the Library's collection was part of the American campaign to prevent careless talk.”

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Child’s Drawing

"Catching Fish in a Net" by Kilipak, New Guinea, male age 13.

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Poem

Margaret Mead. "Traveler's Faith," in Song of Five Springs. Hand-bound volume, probably compiled for Ruth Benedict, ca. 1927.

While Mead was best-known as an anthropologist, poetry was her earliest published work.

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Tchambuli (Chambri) Lake

Tchambuli Lake, ca. 1933.

“Mead and Fortune settled among the lake-dwelling Tchambuli (now Chambri) in early 1933. They were led there by Gregory Bateson, who studied the nearby Middle Sepik culture of Iatmul. Mead wrote of the lake: ‘On its black polished surface, thousands of pink and white lotuses and blue water lilies are spread, and in the early morning white osprey and blue herons stand in the shallows.’”

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Mead with Two Samoan Women

Margaret Mead sitting between two Samoan girls, ca. 1926.

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Critique of Mead

http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/mead/images/mm0129s.jpg

Alfred L. Kroeber. Letter to Margaret Mead, May 14, 1931.

“In a 1931 review of Growing Up In New Guinea, Alfred Kroeber (1876-1960) criticized Mead for her ahistorical outlook and for not including sufficient ethnographic data to support her conclusions. He also noted that she had an aesthetic gift for conceptualization "approaching genius." Kroeber had been Franz Boas' first Ph. D. student and was one of the most eminent anthropologists of the time. Mead was troubled by his critique and wrote him to thank him for the praise he gave her in the review and to answer his criticisms. This letter is Kroeber's response.”

Field Notes

http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/mead/images/mm0140bp1s.jpg Margaret Mead. Notes on squares from Tchambuli trip, ca. Spring 1933.

“From the discussions she had with Bateson and Fortune along the Sepik, Mead attempted, ultimately unsuccessfully, to articulate a unified theory of culture and personality. She referred to this as the theory of "squares." It was based on a fourfold system, with "compass points" labelled North ("caring possessive"), South ("careful responsive") , East ("careful possessive"), and West ("caring responsive").

This is an early attempt by Mead to diagram the squares. Note that she has included the names of some of her friends on the diagram, and the names of cultures. She has put herself at the southern point, along with sociologist Helen Lynd (1894-1982). At the North she has listed Franz Boas; to the northwest, Ruth Benedict; to the northeast, Karen Horney. Tchambuli men are to the southwest and women to the northeast. Mundugumor are northern and Arapesh southern.”

Card in Board Game

http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/mead/images/mm0247gs.jpg Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. "Disaster for Dictators: Crippled Industries," "Danger for Democracies: Corruption in Industries," "Danger for Democracies: Destruction of Food," and "Disaster for Dictators: Food shortage," playing cards for board game, ca. 1940.

This series of cards comes from a board game developed and marketed by Mead and Bateson as part of their work on national defense and morale. The game is premised on "the basic ideas that Democracies and Dictators play by different rules and work with different values." The game was designed so that it could be played by both children and adults. "Ideally," wrote Mead, "for propaganda purposes it should be played by the whole family with Papa explaining the points." Despite Mead's efforts to sell the game to Parker Brothers, it was never commercially produced.

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SUBSECTIONS: National Character - Technology & Social Change Margaret Mead As a Cultural Commentator

"Learning to Live in One World"

National Character

When Mead and Bateson returned to the United States in 1939, she was pregnant with their daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson, who was

born that December. In this period, the couple prepared their Balinese materials for publication and began using their professional skills to assist the Allied war effort in the U.S. They contributed their expertise as social scientists to groups that applied the behavioral sciences to such issues as problems of morale in wartime. Early in 1942, Mead went to Washington, D.C., to head the National Research Council's Committee on Food Habits. This committee applied anthropological methods to problems of food distribution and preparation in war-affected countries. Also as part of the war effort, in 1942 Mead published And Keep Your Powder Dry, a book on American national character.

During World War II, anthropologists used the techniques they had developed in small-scale societies to analyze the "national character" of so-called complex societies. By gathering information from immigrants to the United States, as well as from published sources and films, they studied culture "at a distance." Such research was used to guide government and military policy, to further cooperation among wartime allies, and to plan for a postwar world. Similar studies continued after the war with the Research in Contemporary Cultures project, which was led by Mead after Ruth Benedict's death in 1948.

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Exhibition Overview - Object Checklist

Public Programs Read More About it - Credits

Exhibition Sections: Shaping Forces - To the Field

and Back "Learning to Live in One World"

To commemorate the 100th anniversary of Margaret Mead's birth, the Library of Congress presents a selection of materials from its extensive Mead collection, which came to the Library after her death. The corpus of notes and other field materials that Mead preserved are available to scholars interested in evaluating and building on her research. Totaling more than 500,000 items, the Margaret Mead Papers and South Pacific Ethnographic Archives is one of the largest collections for a single individual in the Library. The collection includes manuscripts, diaries, letters, field notes, drawings, prints, photographs, sound recordings, and film. For this exhibition, items have been selected from the collection to document major themes in Mead's life and work.

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Poets and Anthropologists

While Mead was best-known as an anthropologist, poetry was her earliest published work. Mead, Benedict, and their colleague Edward Sapir (1884-1939), a famous linguist, all shared a love of poetry, reading and critiquing each others' verse. Sapir found Mead's poem "Traveler's Faith" to be "delicate" and advised her to "cultivate that very charming simplicity you have latent in you. Your verse will be your own."

Margaret Mead.

"Traveler's Faith," in Song of Five Springs.

Hand-bound volume, probably compiled for Ruth Benedict, ca. 1927.

Manuscript Division (44

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Tchambuli Lake, ca. 1933.

Gelatin silver print Manuscript Division (179)

Tchambuli (Chambri) Lake

Mead and Fortune settled among the lake-dwelling Tchambuli (now Chambri) in early 1933. They were led there by Gregory Bateson, who studied the nearby Middle Sepik culture of Iatmul. Mead wrote of the lake: "On its black polished surface, thousands of pink and white lotuses and blue water lilies are spread, and in the early morning white osprey and blue herons stand in the shallows."

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Samoa: The Adolescent Girl

In 1925, Margaret Mead journeyed to the South Pacific territory of American Samoa. She sought to discover whether adolescence was a universally traumatic and stressful time due to biological factors or whether the experience of adolescence depended on one's cultural upbringing. After spending about nine months observing and interviewing Samoans, as well as administering psychological tests, Mead concluded that adolescence was not a stressful time for girls in Samoa because Samoan cultural patterns were very different from those in the United States. Her findings were published in Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), a vivid, descriptive account of Samoan adolescent life that became tremendously popular. It was published in more than a dozen editions in a variety of languages and made Mead famous. One of the reasons for the popularity of the book was that Mead had revised the introduction and conclusion of her original manuscript, adding two chapters that dealt directly with the implications of her findings for child rearing in the United States.

Though it was a popular success and has been used in numerous undergraduate anthropology classes, Coming of Age in Samoa has received varying degrees of criticism over the years. Some of her results have been called into question by other anthropologists, and she has been criticized for romanticizing Samoan life and downplaying evidence contrary to her main argument. In addition, some Samoans have found her depiction of Samoan adolescent sexuality offensive.

In addition to her popular volume on Samoan adolescence, Mead wrote a more technical account of Samoan culture entitled The Social Organization of Manu'a (1930).