- Explain how anthropology broadens ideas about human nature by comparing societies.
- Distinguish cultural realities from ethnocentric assumptions about ways of life, marriage, and relations between the sexes.
- Describe Mead's views on responsibility, nationhood, social change, medicine, individuality, and the human sciences.
Seeing Humanity Through Anthropology
Anthropology examines human life comparatively and challenges romantic images of societies unlike our own.
Only in recent generations, Mead's introduction suggests, have people begun to examine humanity objectively through anthropology. Her field experience among peoples described at the time as “primitive” supplied knowledge that she analyzed and interpreted.
In this conversation, Mead and the young anthropologist William Mitchell consider contrasting societies, cultural assumptions, marriage, relations between women and men, social responsibility, rapid change, medical progress, and the place of the individual.
The Invented Paradise
Mitchell describes a familiar fantasy about a tropical island: carefree people dance beneath palms, avoid work, bathe in the sea, wear flowers, and enjoy unrestricted relationships. Mead says she repeatedly encountered this image when preparing to visit Samoa in the 1920s.
Mead argues that this fantasy says more about the observer's wish to escape obligations than about the people being observed. Samoans and Tahitians did not possess the effortless happiness that outsiders projected onto them.
Many such communities occupied jungles, Arctic regions, or malaria-ridden mangrove swamps because expanding civilizations had displaced them from more livable territory. Where food was extremely scarce, hundreds of acres might be needed to support one person.
Their lives reflected the difficulty of finding food and the distrust that grew when people did not understand the causes of recurring disease, poverty, and misfortune. The supposed happy primitive was therefore an outsider's invention, not a reliable description.
How a Society Acquires Its Tone
Small groups can develop sharply different emotional patterns because a few influential people may redirect the culture.
In New Guinea, Mead could find trusting, affectionate, friendly people on one mountaintop and, only ten miles away, a highly suspicious and cannibalistic group. Their proximity did not give them the same ethos.
When a Few Lives Alter the Whole Group
In a community of five or six hundred people, the fate of only a few leaders can turn the culture in a new direction. If five leading figures die in warfare, a headhunting raid, or an epidemic while five others survive, the survivors gain unusual influence over what follows.
Large societies also change under the influence of particular leaders and ideas. Mead names Henry VIII, Cromwell, Abraham Lincoln, and Hitler as people who shifted societies toward good or evil. In a population of only five hundred or a thousand, which individual dies can matter even more.
Who is one person whose survival or death could have substantially redirected your community, school, or country?
Societies as Laboratories of Human Possibility
Comparative study reveals what people can learn, how they can live, and what kinds of people they can become.
Mead proposes treating every society as a laboratory for studying possibilities within human nature. A society may demonstrate that people can do something observers had assumed was impossible.
Such evidence lets people reconsider culture-bound and ethnocentric assumptions about learning, living, and human character. A wider sense of possibility can then guide changes consistent with a society's own ideals.
Why Americans May Assume Their Way Is Best
Mead links American ethnocentrism to people leaving other countries in the expectation of something better, then emphasizing their success to relatives who remained behind. This gradually encouraged an image of America as the best possible world.
The country also benefited from a vast continent with extensive resources and opportunities to build ways of life less constrained by the past. According to Mead, that good fortune also fostered a narrow understanding of possible social arrangements.
Mead extends the point to other countries that had prospered in recent history, including Great Britain and Scandinavian countries. Anthropology can help such societies recognize that each culture is recent, distinctive, and only one among many human arrangements.
Questioning Assumptions About Marriage
Mead rejects an invented evolutionary ladder of marriage forms and identifies monogamy as the basic worldwide pattern of pair relations.
Marriage shows how culture-bound judgments work. A monogamous society may encounter different sexual or marital practices and immediately conclude that its own arrangement is right while the other group is wrong.
Nineteenth-century thinkers placed their own society at the summit of evolution. Because they treated monogamy as superior, they assumed that peoples assigned to lower positions must have begun with entirely different forms.
- Group marriage, a theoretical arrangement anthropologists had not actually found.
- “Mother right,” supposedly marked by uncertainty about fatherhood.
- Polygamy.
- Monogamy, presented as civilization's final achievement.
Mead calls this progression largely mythical. Across the world, monogamy has been the fundamental form of human pair relations.
Polygamy requires substantial resources and was never common across an entire population. A king might have a thousand wives, a chief two hundred, or a few powerful village men six or seven each, while most marriages remained monogamous. Mead also describes polygamy as one way of providing for widows.
Marriage in Mead's Own Society
Mead observes that sexual morality often centers on restrictions imposed on women rather than men. She sharply remarks that making women more uncomfortable can make a society feel more moral.
Apart from religious groups that prohibit remarriage, Mead sees modern society moving toward patterns found among many peoples labeled primitive: considerable freedom in choosing a partner and in ending a marriage that fails.
Which practice in your own culture might appear unusual when judged through another society's values?
Conflict Between the Sexes: Natural or Constructed?
Mead treats antagonism between women and men as culturally shaped and especially visible during periods of changing roles.
Asked whether conflict between women and men is inherent, Mead describes the popular “war between the sexes” of her time as an invention promoted by Madison Avenue.
She connects that image to men who grew up in the 1920s and 1930s while women's position was changing. Some found the shift uncomfortable and portrayed women as predatory monsters, including cartoons of cavewomen pulling apparently delighted men by the hair.
Cultural Training and New Alternatives
Girls raised to be wholly submissive, denied education, and prevented from hearing about alternatives may remain submissive and content. Tension begins when they encounter another group or nation with different expectations.
Mead's example is Muslim women in the Middle East observing American women's freedoms. In her account, they did not wish to become men and might regard men's social role as harder; they wanted access to freedoms they saw other women possess.
Men can likewise be trained to dominate, accept responsibility, and carry the full burden. Yet Mead notes recurring complaints from men about that responsibility and even about women living longer.
Whenever relations between the sexes change, fears and fantasies can arise, including men's anxiety that women are taking control. Mead says similar patterns also appear in societies described as primitive, making transition—not biology—the central explanation.
Young People and Personal Responsibility
Recurring worries about youth lead to a harder question: how can a very large society cultivate responsibility without relying on war?
Anxiety about younger generations was already widespread before World War II. Magazines accused young people of lacking conscience, dedication, and commitment.
Mead remembers students asking whether a person ought to possess a conscience. She answered that anyone still troubled by that question had not lost conscience very completely.
After World War II and during the Cold War, concern returned. Mead asks whether individuals can retain responsibility in a society so large and complex, especially amid mass-media heroes and heroines deliberately constructed for them.
Young people increasingly thought on a national scale. A student considering college might rank every option from Harvard to the smallest nearby institution and estimate the chance of admission. Belonging to such a huge unit could weaken the feeling of personal responsibility.
Building Commitment Without War
Historically, danger and national defense helped generate patriotism and responsibility in both small New Guinea groups and large nations. Children learned about defenders such as William Tell in Switzerland, George Washington in America, and Sir Francis Drake in England.
Mead says that this kind of warfare is no longer possible: one country cannot be saved by destroying another, because a major war would bring everyone down. The challenge is therefore to create new forms of responsibility without war's old unifying role.
Moving from Nationalism Toward Nationhood
Mead contrasts rivalry among countries with responsible membership in a larger whole.
Mead believes people were only beginning to imagine the worldwide responsibilities associated with nationhood. Unlike adversarial nationalism, this approach asks countries to understand themselves as parts of a shared whole.
Who Faces the Greater Transformation?
Industrial societies may confront more radical change than the peoples they describe as developing because they have no existing model to copy.
Discussions of global change often focus on underdeveloped countries catching up with developed ones. Mead argues that this framing overlooks the drastic transformation awaiting industrial societies themselves.
She predicts that their next quarter-century may involve changes even more striking than those experienced by peoples called primitive. When the Manus of the Admiralty Islands changed by using Western society as a model, they at least knew what they were trying to reach.
Modern societies, by contrast, would need to create a civilization no one had previously seen. Without a ready-made sequence of steps, they would have to invent the model during the transition.
Forces Behind the Coming Changes
- Automation and the prospect of abundant power, particularly through solar energy, could dissolve the familiar relationship between energy and individual labor.
- Space exploration could bring space into humanity's understanding of its universe in an unprecedented way.
- Children then being born could encounter enormous social changes by the time they became young married adults.
The Costs and Possibilities of Saving Lives
Medical progress follows from valuing individual lives and may preserve both disability and forms of talent previously lost.
Mitchell asks whether saving more lives through medicine might increase the number of people he calls “second rate.” Mead begins her answer with the moral foundation of medical progress: the desire to preserve each individual life.
When societies did not care about saving every person, discoveries occurred but little was done with them. Mead sees a definite connection between valuing individuals and investing large amounts of money, effort, and time in medical research.
The result includes more survivors with lifelong disabilities or particular weaknesses—people who might previously have died. Mead mentions intellectual impairment, blindness, deafness, allergies, and unusual sensitivities, but regards this as a small cost of a society committed to every life.
Saving Abilities Once Lost
Medical survival may also preserve kinds of genius that earlier generations could not retain. Mead suggests that genetic linkages might join exceptional skill or imagination with conditions that formerly killed children, such as diabetes or forms of epilepsy.
The task, then, is to widen the range of people treated as fully human and design society so that deaf people, blind people, and people with varied disabilities can live within it. Greater human variability may also bring greater collective ability.
Individual Meaning in a Vast World
The scale of humanity can seem diminishing or ennobling, while modern communication gives individual acts unprecedented reach.
The idea of an individual with a single life is itself culturally particular. Many people understand a person as passing through repeated incarnations, while Western religious traditions have often grounded earthly meaning in an afterlife.
At times, attention to life after death left almost no time for worldly concerns. Every generation must decide how society, its past and future, and religious views will give significance to an individual's life.
Does Scale Reduce or Increase Human Importance?
Mead states that more people were alive at that moment than had lived altogether up to some point in the nineteenth century. The meaning assigned to that scale depends on perspective.
One interpretation produces the idea of “mass man”: each person appears diminished simply because many similar people exist. That view assumes ten people on Earth would each be more valuable because each formed a larger share of humanity.
Mead counters that ten people could build only a meager little society. An individual's importance need not rise merely because that person occupies a larger proportion of the total population.
Knowledge of Earth's long history, the possible reach of the future, and space exploration can therefore make humanity feel either dwarfed or ennobled. Mead presents that interpretation as a choice.
Technology adds a further possibility by making individual actions resonate. A composer or poet can reach a potential audience greater than any counterpart in earlier periods.
Entering the Age of Human Sciences
Mead ends by presenting systematic study of human behavior as both a major opportunity and a responsibility for humanity's survival.
Mead tells Mitchell that he is beginning fieldwork at what may be the most exciting point in human history. Anthropology, psychology, and research on young children had advanced far enough to provide growing knowledge of human behavior.
She compares this emerging understanding with the natural sciences, whose knowledge enabled the achievements of the preceding hundred years. Human sciences could apply similar method, knowledge, and dedication.
A different attitude would still be necessary because these sciences concern human beings rather than things. For Mead, the next twenty-five years would be decisive both for human survival and for contributions that might shape thousands of years to come.
Common misconceptions
Watch out: People in so-called primitive societies generally lived carefree lives in easy tropical surroundings.
Instead: Mead describes that image as an outsider's fantasy; many such peoples lived in harsh regions where food, disease, poverty, and distrust made survival difficult.
Watch out: Human marriage evolved through a fixed ladder from group marriage to monogamy.
Instead: Mead calls that sequence largely mythical and says monogamy has been the basic worldwide form of pair relations.
Watch out: Antagonism between women and men is universal and inherent.
Instead: Mead argues that particular women and men may conflict and that social arrangements can either increase or reduce the antagonism.
Lesson recap
- The carefree “happy savage” is a projection that hides the severe environments and survival pressures faced by many societies.
- A society's ethos can be redirected by the survival or death of only a few influential people, especially in small populations.
- Comparative anthropology expands the known range of human possibility and exposes culture-bound, ethnocentric assumptions.
- The proposed evolutionary ladder of marriage forms is mythical; monogamy has been the basic pair pattern, while polygamy was limited and resource-intensive.
- Conflict between the sexes is culturally shaped rather than inherently universal, and changing roles often generate anxiety.
- Worry about youth repeatedly returns, while large-scale society makes personal responsibility harder to feel.
- Because major war can no longer safely unite a country, Mead looks from adversarial nationalism toward responsible nationhood.
- Industrial societies must invent an unprecedented future as automation, energy, and space exploration transform life.
- Saving every life may preserve more disability, but it can also protect forms of talent and human variation once lost.
- Modern scale may dwarf or ennoble the individual, while mass media can give a person's work extraordinary resonance.
- The developing human sciences may contribute to humanity as profoundly as natural science transformed the material world.
Across these topics, Mead's central method is comparison: arrangements that appear natural inside one culture become only one set of human possibilities when placed beside other societies.