Methods As an ethnographer, Mead's primary research method was
participant observation through living in communities for extended periods of time. Beginning with her first field study in Samoa, she often concentrated her research on childhood, adolescence, sexuality, and kinship. In examining these topics, Mead created multivocal ethnographies that considered the lives of women and men, girls and boys alongside one another. During fieldwork with
Gregory Bateson in Bali in the 1930s, she used still and motion photography extensively, creating one of the earliest film archives of anthropological research. Mead and Bateson's subsequent culture-at-a-distance work also involved studying films to characterize foreign cultures. These innovations led to her being called the "mother" of visual anthropology. During World War II, Mead turned her attention to studying her own American culture and to conducting studies of national character, which she envisioned as being important both for the war effort and for an internationalist future after the war. She organized, along with Ruth Benedict until her death in 1948, the Columbia University project Research in Contemporary Culture. These studies involved reviewing cultural materials and interviewing nationals of the culture under study, methods more accessible under wartime conditions. The method and numerous studies conducted under it were published in
The Study of Culture at a Distance (1953), edited by Mead and Rhoda Métraux. Mead was also concerned with studying social change and modernization, particularly in the context of prior research. She conducted return field visits of her own and oriented new ethnographers in Bali, Manus, the Admiralty Islands, New Guinea, and Samoa. The book includes analyses of how children were raised and educated, household structure, sex relations, dance, development of personality, conflict, and how women matured into old age. Mead explicitly sought to contrast adolescence in Samoa with that in America, which she characterized as difficult, constrained, and awkward.
Coming of Age tackled the question of nature versus nurture, whether adolescence and its associated developments were a difficult biological transition for all humans or whether they were cultural processes shaped in particular societies. In her introduction, Mead notes that American and European psychologists, educators, and philosophers have argued that the turmoil of adolescence in their societies is driven by biology. Her book takes a skeptical approach to the idea that The physical changes which are going on in the bodies of your boys and girls have their definite psychological accompaniments. You can no more evade one than you can the other your daughter's body changes from the body of a child to the body of a woman, so inevitably will her spirit change, and that stormily. Mead instead believed childhood, adolescence, gender, and sex relations were largely driven by cultural practices and expressions. By conducting fieldwork in what she called a "simpler society" and among "primitive groups who have had thousands of years of historical development along completely different lines from our own," she sought to find a comparative case to answer the questions: "Are the disturbances which vex our adolescents due to the nature of adolescence itself or to the civilisation? Under different conditions does adolescence present a different picture?" and studied missionary records from Samoa during his doctoral training at Cambridge. In 1965, he began fieldwork in Samoa, motivated in part by skepticism of Mead's research. He criticized Mead's work in a 1968 paper to the Australian Association of Social Anthropology, arguing that Mead had mischaracterized Samoa as a sexually liberated society when in fact it was characterized by sexual repression and violence and adolescent delinquency. Freeman pointed to police records and other historic data to show that Mead's claims about low-violent crime and sexual violence in Somoa were simply not true. Though many anthropologists rejected some of Freeman's harshest criticisms, the
Mead–Freeman controversy greatly tarnished Mead's public image and played a part in debates about cultural relativism, multiculturalism, and nature and nurture.
Manus In 1928–29, Mead and Fortune visited
Manus (in the
Admiralty Islands) for six months, now the northernmost province of Papua New Guinea, and traveled there by boat from
Rabaul. She amply describes her stay there in her autobiography, and it is mentioned in her 1984 biography by
Jane Howard. On Manus, she studied the Manus people of the south coast village of Peri on Shallalou Island. Her research resulted in
Growing Up in New Guinea (1930) and a technical study titled, "Kinship in the Admiralty Islands" (1934); Fortune published
Manus Religion (1935). "Over the next five decades Mead would come back oftener to Peri than to any other field site of her career.' Mead wrote a study of social changes in Peri between her two field visits of 1928–29 and June to December 1953, published as
New Lives for Old (1956). Mead saw her return visit as a chance to study the impact of technological change, including the replacement of traditional architecture with "American-style" housing, and social transformation. Between the two visits, there had been several major social changes: The people of Manus became Catholics around 1930. Next, the Admiralty and Solomon Islands were occupied by the Japanese and then made into a strategic location for the American military and over a million soldiers had deployed through them. The movement's leader, Paliau Moloat, advocated in 1953 for unity among villages and ethnic groups, working for village development rather than for Europeans, and eventual independence for Papua New Guinea. In
New Lives for Old, Mead interpreted the movement's millenarian religious component, "The Noise" as a component of the society's modernization: the movement led by the native leader Paliau, which attempted to understand and incorporate the values and institutions of the Western world, to build a real modern culture of its own, complete with democratic government, schools, clinic, universal suffrage, money, individual and community responsibility, was the stuff out of which abiding, steady social change comes. Counterpointed to this, facilitating and retarding, was a nativistic cult, a 'cargo cult' called in Manus The Noise, in which men shook like leaves in the grip of a religious revelation that promised them all the blessings of civilization, at once, without an effort on their part except the destruction of everything they still possessed. Mead was joined by researchers Theodore and Lenora Schwartz, In 1970,
National Educational Television produced a documentary in commemoration of the 40th anniversary Mead's first expedition to New Guinea. Through the eyes of Mead on her final visit to the village of Peri, the film records how the role of the anthropologist has changed in the forty years since 1928.
Somatyping Beginning with a village meeting she led in December 1953, Mead conducted studies of the physical body types (or "
somatypes") of villagers, with the assistance of Theodore Schwartz and Foerstel in 1954 and of Schwartz, and Barbara Heath in 1968. The studies required photographing villagers of all ages in the nude, and Foerstel records that "the villagers were told that an examination of their physical types would enhance human knowledge."
Mead and her husband Reo Fortune conducted fieldwork among the
Omaha people from June to October 1930. Fortune openly presented himself as a anthropological reasearcher, tracking the comparative question of why Omaha culture lacks the trance-based visions that are significant in surrounding cultures. Mead presented herself only as the wife of an anthropologist, while clandestinely gathering fieldnotes on the lives of Omaha women and girls. She described this method as necessary to access the information she gathered, and in turn claimed she had an ethical obligation to anonymize her uninformed research subjects. In
The changing culture of an Indian tribe, the Omaha are pseudonymized as "The Antlers." Mead's work was concerned with "culture change" under the influence of the United States, and her assessment of the process was overwhelmingly negative: her work refers to the Omaha as "a broken culture." ====== Mead undertook fieldwork in the Sepik River watershed of New Guinea with her husband Reo Fortune from 1931 to 1933. The main result of her ethnographic fieldwork was
Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies. In the book, Mead profiled three
New Guinea cultures with distinct gender systems, and explored the question of what happens when an individual’s emotional disposition is at odds with society’s gender expectations. The focus of the book is temperament, that is patterns of personality and emotions, and "with the cultural assumptions that certain temperamental attitudes are 'naturally' masculine and others 'naturally' feminine." The three societies in question were all in the
Sepik River basin of
Papua New Guinea: the Mountain Arapesh people, the
Mundugumor (or Biwat) people, the Tchambuli (now spelled
Chambri) people. Mead describes how "each tribe has certain definite attitudes towards temperament, a theory of what human beings, either men or women or both, are naturally like, a norm in terms of which to judge and condemn those individuals who deviate from it." Mead concluded that:If those temperamental attitudes which we have traditionally regarded as feminine—such as passivity, responsiveness, and a willingness to cherish children—can so easily be set up as the masculine pattern in one tribe, and in another be outlawed for the majority of the women as well as for the majority of men, we no longer have any basis for regarding such aspects of behavior as sex-linked.The distinction between
femininity and
masculinity on the one hand, and
biological sex on the other presaged the
sex–gender distinction, which is at the core of the sociology of gender roles and a central concept in feminist thought. The book is divided into four parts, covering "the Mountain-Dwelling Arapesh," "the River-Dwelling Mundugumor," and the "Lake-Dwelling Tchambuli," and finally in Part Four, analyzing the socialization into gendered temperament across these societies and in the West. Mead's characterizations of each of the three peoples has been subject to vigorous scholarly debate, including by her research collaborator and ex-husband Reo Fortune (on the Arapesh), Nancy McDowell (on the Mundugumor), and Deborah Gewertz and Frederick Errington (on the Tchambuli),
Bali From 1936 to 1938, Mead and Gregory Bateson conducted fieldwork in
Bali, mostly in the village of Bajoeng Gede. They also worked from a former Rajah's palace in Bangli, and from a custom-built "pavilion in the courtyard of a Buddhistic Brahman family in the village of Batoean." Balinese culture is heavily influenced by external cultures of Indian
Hinduism,
China, and
Java, but Mead and Bateson sought a field site that would give them access to the "cultural base upon which various intrusive elements had been progressively grafted over the centuries." Bajoeng Gede, which is located near
Kintamani in Bangli District, seemed to them lacking in Hindu cultural imports, had only a handful of literate record keepers, and by elaborate Balinese standards, relatively simple ritual life. and completed seven short films including: •
Karba’s First Years: A Study of Balinese Childhood, 1952, 20 minutes. •
A Balinese Family, 1951, 20 minutes. •
Trance and Dance in Bali, 1952, 22 minutes. •
Learning to Dance in Bali, 1978, 13 minutes. Mead and Bateson published
Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis, which included 100 photographs, in 1942. Mead has been credited with persuading the
American Jewish Committee to sponsor a project to study European Jewish villages,
shtetls, in which a team of researchers would conduct mass interviews with Jewish immigrants living in New York City. The resulting book, widely cited for decades, allegedly created the
Jewish mother stereotype, a mother intensely loving but controlling to the point of smothering and engendering guilt in her children through the suffering she professed to undertake for their sakes. Mead worked for the
RAND Corporation, a US Air Force military-funded private research organization, from 1948 to 1950 to study Russian culture and attitudes toward authority. As an
Anglican Christian, Mead played a considerable part in the drafting of the 1979 American
Episcopal Book of Common Prayer. == Personal life ==