One world, many cultures: Margaret mead and the limits to cold war anthropology

History Workshop Journal

Volumn 68, Issue 1, 2009, Pages 149-172

  Mandler, Peter ^a  

^a GONVILLE AND CAIUS COLLEGE   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ANTHROPOLOGY; ARTICLE; CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY; CULTURAL FACTOR; ECONOMICS; EDUCATION; EMPIRICAL RESEARCH; ETHNIC AND RACIAL GROUPS; ETHNOLOGY; HISTORY; HUMAN; INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION; LEGAL ASPECT; PERSONNEL; POLITICAL SYSTEM; PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECT; PUBLIC HEALTH; SOCIAL CHANGE; SOCIAL WELFARE; SOCIOLOGY;

ANTHROPOLOGY; COLONIALISM; CULTURAL CHARACTERISTICS; CULTURAL DIVERSITY; CULTURE; EMPIRICAL RESEARCH; HISTORY, 20TH CENTURY; HUMANS; INTERNATIONALITY; POLITICAL SYSTEMS; POPULATION GROUPS; PUBLIC HEALTH; RESEARCH PERSONNEL; SOCIAL CHANGE; SOCIAL SCIENCES; SOCIAL WELFARE;

EID: 70349631191     PISSN: 13633554     EISSN: 14774569     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/hwj/dbp008     Document Type: Article

References (101)

1. David H. Price, 'Cold War Anthropology: Collaborators and Victims of the National Security State, Identities 4, 1997-8
2. David H. Price, 'Subtle Means and Enticing Carrots: The Impact of Funding on American Cold War Anthropology', Critique of Anthropology 23, 2003
3. David H. Price, Anthropological Intelligence: The Deployment and Neglect of American Anthropology in the Second World War, Durham NC, 2008, esp. pp. 265-72
4. Laura Nader, 'The Phantom Factor: Impact of the Cold War on Anthropology', in Noam Chomsky, Richard C. Lewontin, Laura Nader, Richard Ohmann, Immanuel Wallerstein and Howard Zinn, The Cold War and the University: Toward an Intellectual History of the Postwar Years New York, 1997, esp. p. 123
5. Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World, Princeton, 1995
6. James Ferguson, 'Anthropology and Its Evil Twin: "Development" in the Constitution of a Discipline', in International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge, ed. Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard, Berkeley, 1997, pp. 150-75 (but cf. the more nuanced formulations of the editors in their introduction, pp. 14-15)
7. David C. Engerman, Modernization from the Other Shore: American Intellectuals and the Romance of Russian Development, Cambridge MA, 2003, esp. pp. 273-85
8. Michael E. Latham, 'Introduction: Modernization, International History, and the Cold War World', in Staging Growth: Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War, ed. David C. Engerman, Nils Gilman, Mark H. Haefele and Michael E. Latham, Amherst and Boston, 2003, esp. pp. 4-5
9. Nils Gilman, 'Involution and Modernization: The Case of Clifford Geertz', in Economic Development: An Anthropological Approach, ed. Jeffrey H. Cohen and Norbert Dannhaeuser, Walnut Creek CA, 2002, which does however differentiate a 'more innocent' period before the late 1950s;
10. Rebecca Lemov, World as Laboratory: Experiments with Mice, Mazes, and Men, New York, 2005, chap. 9.
11. I make such a broader argument myself in 'Deconstructing "Cold War Anthropology"', in The Cold War in Pieces: New Perspectives on Postwar America, ed. Duncan Bell and Joel Isaac, forthcoming.
12. Margaret Mead, 'Discussion', in Anthropology and Society, ed. Bela C. Maday, Washington, 1975, p. 13.
13. For an account of neo-Freudianism that seeks to explain its failure to penetrate professional psychoanalysis, see Neil G. McLaughlin, 'Why Do Schools of Thought Fail? Neo-Freudianism as a Case Study in the Sociology of Knowledge', Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 34, 1998.
14. But see further Robert A. LeVine, 'Culture and Personality Studies, 1918-1960: Myth and History', Journal of Personality 69, 2001, for a reminder of other (and earlier) currents within the 'culture and personality' field.
15. Margaret Mead (hereafter MM) to Molly Harrower Erikson, 5 July 1944: Ruth Benedict Papers, Vassar College, Box 12/6
16. MM to Gregory Bateson, 7 June 1944: Margaret Mead Papers, Library of Congress, R3. Other participants included Rhoda's husband Alfred Métraux and the relief specialist Erwin Schuller, who had helped Mead devise her theses on Anglo-American relationships during the 'fieldwork' of 1943.
17. The term seems to have been coined by Bateson to describe the work being done by the various members of the Washington group: Ai-li Chin to Ruth Benedict, 24 May 1943: Benedict Papers, Box 112/10
18. MM to Molly Harrower Erikson, 5 July 1944: Benedict Papers, Box 12/6.
19. See Peter Mandler, 'Margaret Mead Amongst the Natives of Great Britain', Past and Present, August 2009.
20. See the valuable argument along these lines by Federico Neiburg, Marcio Goldman and Peter Gow, 'Anthropology and Politics in Studies of National Character', Cultural Anthropology 13, 1998.
21. Margaret Mead, 'The Study of National Character' (1951), in Margaret Mead, Studying Contemporary Western Society: Method and Theory, ed. William O. Beeman, New York and Oxford, 2004, pp. 94-5.
22. MM to Gregory Bateson, 10 May 1945: Mead Papers, R3.
23. MM, 'Learning to Live in One World', draft chap. 1, draft chap. 2, pp. 1-5: Mead Papers, I28.
24. Margaret Mead, 'Human Differences and World Order', in World Order: Its Intellectual and Cultural Foundation, ed. Frederick Ernest Johnson Institute for Religious Studies, 1945.
25. She retained some faith in human universals, but at this point aligned herself with Benedict in maintaining a distance from what she saw as the more evolutionary, teleological approach of Gorer and Kluckhohn - see Mead, 'Human Differences and World Order', pp. 44-5,
26. and Margaret Mead, 'The Comparative Study of Cultures and the Purposive Cultivation of Democratic Values, 1941-1949', in Perspectives on a Troubled Decade: Science, Philosophy, and Religion, 1939-1949, 10th Symposium, ed. Lyman Bryson, Louis Finkelstein and R.M. MacIver, New York, 1950, pp. 89-93.
27. MM to Gregory Bateson, 10, 15 Aug. 1945: Mead Papers, R3.
28. MM, 'Learning to Live in One World', 'Probably Part I also V or VI', 20 Aug. 1945.
29. MMto Thayer Hobson (William Morrow & Co.), 11 Aug., 24 Aug. 1945; 'Atomic bomb interviews', 11-12 Aug. 1945; 'Key reactions to the Atomic bomb', 11 Aug. 1945
30. MM to Melville Jacobs, 27 Aug. 1945: Mead Papers, E4; MM to F.B. 'Monte Phillips, 27 Aug. 1945: Mead Papers, C13.
31. MM to Gregory Bateson, 15 Aug., 22 Aug. 1945: Mead Papers, R3; 'Proposed Plan for International Relations Book', 'outline prepared as guide to RFB', 11 Sept. 1945: Mead Papers, I28.
32. It appears not to be true that either she or her colleagues in the Foreign Morale Analysis Division of OWI were responsible for the decision to retain the Emperor, though it was a position they strongly advocated: John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War, New York, 1986, pp. 138-9
33. John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Aftermath of World War II, New York, 1999, pp. 280-6
34. Price, Anthropological Intelligence, pp. 174-99.
35. Ruth Benedict to Clyde Kluckhohn, 16 May 1946: Benedict Papers, Box 14/4.
36. Ruth Benedict to Nathan Leites, 30 March 1946: Benedict Papers, Box 14/ 3. Her initial proposal to Columbia in November 1945 was for a 'European seminar': Ruth Benedict to Duncan Strong, 14 Nov. 1945: Benedict Papers, Box 13/8; see also Ruth Benedict, 'The Study of Cultural Patterns in European Nations', Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences 2nd series, 8, 1946, pp. 274-9.
37. Price, 'Subtle Means and Enticing Carrots', pp. 376-8.
38. Mead later claimed that she had no idea why Benedict picked the cultures that she did: 'I know why she said she picked them afterwards, in terms of how they were to be used, but why other cultures were rejected, why she picked the number that she did, and several things of that sort, I don't know, and no one else does...': 'Naval Research Conference. Wednesday, September 13, 1950. Cultural Contexts of Group Integration': Mead Papers, G8.
39. Benedict in fact changed the formal orientation of the project from study of foreign cultures to study of American nationals of foreign origin in order to deflect suspicions of espionage. ONR Advisory Panel on Research in Human Relations, 3-4 Oct. 1946, transcribed proceedings, 28: Mead Papers, G8.
40. 'Naval Research Conference. Wednesday, September 13, 1950. Cultural Contexts of Group Integration': Mead Papers, G8; Mead, 'Study of National Character', pp. 94-5
41. MM to Geoffrey Gorer, 12 Nov. 1946: Mead Papers, B5. See also Mead and Benedict's summation of the rationale to the RCC team at the end of their first year, in RCC General Seminar Minutes, 18th General Seminar, 26 May 1948: Mead Papers G14.
42. Compare Geoffrey Gorer, 'Themes in Japanese Culture', Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences, 2nd series, 5, 1943,
43. with Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture, Boston, 1946.
44. Gorer presented the swaddling hypothesis 'in the form in which he expects to publish it' at an RCC seminar in February 1948: Minutes, 10th General Seminar, 5 Feb. 1948: Mead Papers, G13. Gorer, Benedict and Mead had been talking through psychological theories of the Russian national character - based on psychosexual orientation and on childrearing but not yet swaddling - probably since at least the spring of 1945; see notes of conversations (April 1945?), transcribed 5 Oct. 1947; Gorer to MM, 30 April 1946; MM, 'Points', 1 Aug., 18 Sept. 1946: Mead Papers, M39. Although Mead had been thinking about the connections between swaddling and adult character, stimulated by her neo-Freudian contacts, since the mid 1930s, she did not discuss these connections with Gorer until after he had developed the full-fledged swaddling hypothesis on his own. MM to Gorer, 14 Nov. 1950; Gorer to MM, 20 Nov. 1950: Mead Papers, B6.
45. All quotes from the monographic version, Geoffrey Gorer and John Rickman, The People of Great Russia, 1949, using the reprint in Margaret Mead, Geoffrey Gorer and John Rickman, Russian Culture, New York and Oxford, 2001.
46. Engerman, Modernization from the Other Shore, pp. 270-6.
47. More plausible is Engerman's recent identification with the new Cold War framework of early applications of modernization theory to Russia, emanating from the Russian Research Centre at Harvard: David Engerman, 'To Moscow and Back: American Social Scientists and the Concept of Convergence', in American Capitalism: Social Thought and Political Economy in the Twentieth Century, ed. Nelson Lichtenstein, Philadelphia, 2006, esp. pp. 47-8.
48. Harold Orlansky, 'Destiny in the Nursery', Commentary, June 1948, esp. p. 567
49. Robert Endleman, 'The New Anthropology and Its Ambitions', Commentary Sept. 1949, esp. pp. 288, 291
50. David J. Dallin, 'Exterminate the Russians?', New Leader, 29 Oct. 1949, p. 2
51. David J. Dallin, 'The New Anti-Russians', New Leader, 27 May 1950, pp. 9-10
52. Boris Shub, 'Soviets Expose American Baby', New Leader, 17 June 1950, pp. 11-12
53. Bertram D. Wolfe, 'The Swaddled Soul of the Great Russians', New Leader, 29 Jan. 1951, pp. 15-18
54. David J. Dallin, The New Soviet Empire, London, 1951, pp. 56-66.
55. See, for example, Scott Lucas, Freedom's War: The US Crusade Against the Soviet Union, 1945-56, Manchester, 1999, esp. pp. 68-78 on the period just before the Korean War, and pp. 278-80 on the superficial understanding of others implied in 'Free World' universalism;
56. John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy during the Cold War, rev. edn, Oxford, 2005, esp. pp. 101-7, 126-39
57. on intellectual and popular attitudes moving in the same direction, see John Fousek, To Lead The Free World: American Nationalism and the Cultural Roots of the Cold War, Chapel Hill, 2000, Benjamin L. Alpers, Dictators, Democracy, and American Public Culture: Envisioning the Totalitarian Enemy, 1920s-1950s, Chapel Hill, 2003, chap. 9,
58. and Wendy L. Wall, Inventing the 'American Way': The Politics of Consensus from the New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement, Oxford, 2008, pp. 242-84.
59. From Linton's review of an earlier Gorer book in Scientific American May 1948, pp. 58-9
60. for similar characterizations, see Endleman, 'The New Anthropology', pp. 286-7.
61. David Riesman, 'Comments on Professor Kluckhohn's Paper, Human Development Symposium', 5 Feb. 1955: David Riesman Papers, Harvard University Archives, HUG(FP) 99.12, Box 12.
62. The wording is slightly different in the published version, David Riesman, 'Comments on Dr. Kluckhohn's Paper', in Human Development Bulletin, 6th Annual Symposium, University of Chicago, 1955, p. 68.
63. For the Working Group, see MM, Memorandum, 28 Jan. 1951 (source for the quote - the final report was much more restrained); 'Tentative Outline of National Character for Working Group', 19 Dec. 1950: Mead Papers, G11; the final report, 'A Report on National Character', Feb. 1951, edited by Rhoda Métraux, is in Mead Papers, G12.
64. For the Naval Research Laboratory fiasco, see MM to Capt. Caleb Laning, 15 Sept., 26 Sept. 1950, 22 May 1951; Laning to MM, 26 Oct. 1950, 18 May, 30 Aug. 1951: Mead Papers, G4. The only report completed was 'The Ideal of "Conscious Activity" - Some Aspects of Decision Making and Communications in Soviet Theory and Practice', c. Aug. 1951.
65. For a nearly contemporaneous repudiation of a 'straight negative' approach, rejecting a proposal on 'Human Behavior Research in Psychological Warfare', see Rhoda Métraux to MM, 4 May 1951: Métraux Papers, Box 3.
66. MM to Geoffrey Gorer, 27 Aug. 1949: Mead Papers, B6.
67. MM to Geoffrey Gorer, 17 Dec. 1949: Mead Papers, R8; Minutes, Studies in Contemporary Culture, 1 May 1951: Mead Papers, G70. This was in fact Mead's final Soviet project, running from 1951 to 1952, as a last attempt to extend the psychological and anthropological dimensions of the now dominant approach at Harvard and MIT.
68. Mead and Leites had a complicated relationship which deserves further exploration; both indulged deeply in neo-Freudianism, but Leites was generally better at angling it towards policymakers. See Ron Robin, The Making of the Cold War Enemy: Culture and Politics in the Military-Intellectual Complex, Princeton, 2001, esp. pp. 128-43, dealing separately with (though without distinguishing very clearly between) Mead's and Leites's approaches, and pp. 43-55 on some limits;
69. Bruce Kuklick, Blind Oracles: Intellectuals and War from Kennan to Kissinger, Princeton, 2006, pp. 32-52
70. an older treatment which also saw the limits, Gene M. Lyons, The Uneasy Partnership: Social Science and the Federal Government in the 20th Century, New York, 1969, pp. 137-47, 170-4
71. and a more contemporary analysis, placing special emphasis on Leites, Daniel Bell, 'Ten Theories in Search of Reality: The Prediction of Soviet Behavior in the Social Sciences', World Politics 10, 1958.
72. Riesman, 'Comments on Professor Kluckhohn's Paper'.
73. Mead, 'Comparative Study', p. 103.
74. MM, 'A Report to the Preparatory Commission for Unesco on some Problems of World Educational Planning', n.d. (Oct. 1947): Mead Papers, E145. Compare the published version, 'Fundamental Education and Cultural Values', in Fundamental Education: Common Ground for All Peoples. Report of a Special Committee to the Preparatory Commission of Unesco, Paris, 1946, New York, 1947, pp. 150-78.
75. Speech to Pacific Regional Conference of UNESCO, 15 May 1948: Mead Papers, E145.
76. MM to Eliot Chapple, 19 Feb. 1944: Mead Papers, E118. Mead paid too little attention to what her SAA colleagues were actually doing during the war: Mabee, 'Margaret Mead and Behavioral Scientists', p. 7.
77. Conrad Arensberg to MM, 18 Dec. 1946; MM to Eliot Chapple, 9 April 1947; Father John Cooper to MM, 28 May 1947; 'Suggestions and Additions to the Draft of the "Preliminary Report of the Committee on Ethics"', 30 May 1947
78. MM to Alex Bavelas, 2 April 1948; Alex Bavelas to MM, 6 April 1948; David G. Mandelbaum to MM, 28 April 1948; Elliott Jaques to MM, 6 May 1948; 'Report on the 1948 Poll of the Membership of the SAA on the Report of the Committee on Ethics', 28 May 1948; 'Draft of Minutes of Discussion of the Report of the Committee of Ethics': Mead Papers, E119.
79. Only recently has there been any discussion at all of this debate in the secondary literature - see Price, Anthropological Intelligence, pp. 274-7 - but in my view Price systematically underestimates its liveliness and fruitfulness.
80. See the exchange between Mead and Mandelbaum a few years later, in An Appraisal of Anthropology Today, ed. Sol Tax, Loren C. Eiseley, Irving Rouse, Carl F. Voegelin, Chicago, 1953, pp. 135-7,
81. taken up again in David G. Mandelbaum, 'On the Study of National Character', American Anthropologist, new series, 55, 1953. Mandelbaum was sensitive to such questions in part, I suspect, like Bateson, because of his own wartime experiences in the OSS in South Asia. Later, Mead apologized for her own role in suggesting that the anthropologist was responsible to the client rather than the whole social unit. MM to Richard Adams, 8 June/17 Aug. 1960: Mead Papers, E121.
82. Margaret Mead, 'Christian Faith and Technical Assistance', Christianity and Crisis, 10 Jan. 1955.
83. A. Métraux, 'UNESCO and Anthropology', American Anthropologist, new series, 53 1951, pp. 294-300; Alfred Métraux, 'Applied Anthropology in Government: United Nations', in Anthropology Today: an Encyclopedic Inventory, ed. Alfred L. Kroeber, Chicago, 1953, pp. 880-94.
84. [Lawrence K. Frank and Margaret Mead], 'Technological Change and Mental Health', no date (c. Feb. 1950): Mead Papers, I59. This was the only concrete result of the 'Mead-Frank' proposals that were circulating through the U.S. committee for WFMH in 1949-50: See Mead Papers, E51-2.
85. Compare for example the characterization of technical assistance in Sunil S. Amrith, Decolonizing International Health: India and Southeast Asia, 1930-65, Basingstoke, 2006, pp. 85-91.
86. Claire Holt to Cora Du Bois, 12 Nov. 1950, copied to Mead: Mead Papers, B9.
87. Cultural Patterns and Technical Change, ed. Margaret Mead, New York, 1955, pp. 18-20, 291-3, 297-9.
88. MM to Thomas Gladwin, 9 May 1955: Mead Papers, E121. She did however feel she had overcompensated in the description of Burma, which in retrospect she thought was influenced by the aesthetic-antiquarian leanings of British colonial commentators.
89. Elizabeth E. Hoyt, 'Want Development in Underdeveloped Areas', Journal of Political Economy 59, 1951. Mead in turn helped Hoyt to see 'the basic need of national spirit at this particular moment'. Elizabeth E. Hoyt to MM, 20 Jan., 1 March, 8 April: Mead Papers, C22; Hoyt to MM, 25 June 1950: Mead Papers, I59.
90. Métraux, 'Applied Anthropology in Government', pp. 888-9.
91. Mead, 'Christian Faith and Technical Assistance'; Margaret Mead, New Lives for Old: Cultural Transformation - Manus, 1928-1953, London, 1956, pp. 442, 456-7.
92. Mead, 'Discussion', p. 15
93. Margaret Mead, 'Changing Styles of Anthropological Work' (1973), in Margaret Mead, Studying Contemporary Western Society, pp. 41-2, 57-9
94. Margaret Mead, 'Anthropological Contributions to National Policies During and Immediately After World War II', in The Uses of Anthropology, ed. Walter Goldschmidt, Washington, 1979, p. 154.
95. [Eliot D. Chapple], 'The Liquidation of Point Four', Human Organization 12:3, fall 1953, pp. 2-3.
96. Appraisal of Anthropology Today, ed. Tax and others, p. 136.
97. The impact of modernization theory on U.S. foreign policies of all kinds has become a subject of intense academic interest lately; nevertheless, it is worth remembering that some older studies argued that even this body of work, more closely aligned to Cold War liberalism than Mead's, had a negligible effect: See Robert A. Packenham, Liberal America and the Third World: Political Development Ideas in Foreign Aid and Social Science, Princeton, 1973, esp. pp. 243-53.
98. Mead, 'Anthropological Contributions to National Policies', pp. 147-8.
99. Montgomery McFate, 'The Military Utility of Understanding Adversary Culture', Joint Force Quarterly 38, 2005, esp. pp. 47-8
100. Montgomery McFate, 'Anthropology and Counterinsurgency: The Strange Story of their Curious Relationship', Military Review, March-April 2005, esp. pp. 29-32
101. see also George Packer, 'Knowing the Enemy', The New Yorker, 18 Dec. 2006, p. 65.