A Conversation with Margaret Mead

and William Mitchell 1959

0:20

Voiceover: Only within the last dew generations has man turned to look objectively at himself... to study his own position in the pattern of the world through anthropology.

Margaret Mead, internationally known anthropologist of the American Museum of Natural History has come to this tower room of the museum year after year to analyze and interpret the knowledge she has gained from living among the primitive peoples of the world.

Today Margaret Mead stops work on her latest book to talk with William Mitchell, young anthropologist.

Mead: All that's disappeared today and now we're all in one boat.

Mitchell: As I've been telling my friends about this impending trip of mone to the south seas, I keep getting the stereotype of the happy savage. You know, the carefree people, dancing the hula all day on a tropical island with swaying palm trees and breezes and all.

Did you come across that?

1:13

Mead: Well of course I had it 100% in the 20's when I went to Samoa, because the south seas in those days just represented this wonderful escape. Even the Samoan or the Tahitian who were the real image of the happy savage, of course weren't anything like as happy as they look to us, because we just put them in a category of they don't have to do what we have to do. They don't have to wear clothes. They can just bathe in the sea. They can have fresh flowers around their neck. They can make love to a different girl every night and she's always beautiful and nobody minds. They don't have to do any work. That was the picture.

But for most of the parts of the world where "savages" live, they live in them because they're savage and difficult places and people from civilization have pushed them out of all the liveable parts and into the jungle and the arctic that is so sparsely furnished with food that it takes hundreds of acres for one man. It's a horrid, malaria infested mangrove swamp where most of the primitive people in the world live and the life that they live is a reflection of how hard it is to get food. How much they distrust each other because they don't understand what are the causes of the disease and the poverty and the things that overtake them, on and on. So this whole image of happy primitive man is one that we've cooked up out of our heads. On the whole, at the same time of course, there are many people who are much happier than others.

Samoans were happier on the whole — better fed, gayer, happier — than any of the peoples that I know in New Guinea. An even in New Guinea, you find fairly trusting, warm, friendly people on one mountain top, and you go 10 miles away and you find a very suspicious, cannibalistic, savage sort of people.

Differences of this sort, differences in what we sometimes call the ethos, the emotional tone of a society, can grow up very easily with these small groups.

You only have to look at say a tribe of five or six hundred people, and look at the leading people in it. And suppose we kill five of them and leave the other five alive. Suppose they're killed in war, or a head-hunting raid, or in an epidemic. How would they tip the culture in another direction and just as we know that even in our great societies, an ideology, a few leaders with some new ideas can give a tremendously changed tilt to the whole of the human society.

You take Henry VIII and Cromwell, Abraham Lincoln, Hitler, tipping them for good or for evil, you can imagine what can happen when you've only got maybe 500 people or 1,000 people, so the death of one person instead of another makes all the difference. And you get a tilt in one direction or another.

4:22

Mitchell: I supppose that just about everyone is fascinated with the study of exotic peoples and reading about them, but how do you feel the anthropologist can apply all this varied information to the understanding of say our own civilization?

4:37

Mead: What we have to do is to take each one of these societies as a kind of laboratory in which we study some of the possibilities of human nature. And then come back and say 'human beings could do this' that we thought we couldn't do. And we have to re-examine our own culture-bound ethnocentric notions of how people can learn and how they can live, and what kind of people they can be and then re-examining our own notions and widening them so that we have a far greater sense of what people might do, could do, and then we can go ahead and make changes that are constant with our own society and with our own ideals.

5:21

Mitchell: Now you mentioned about peoples sometimes being culture-bound such as believing that their own society is the best, has the best ideology and way of life and all, and how do you cope with that sort of problem, particularly with Americans that feel, that very often feel, that they have the best society in the whole world?

5:42

Mead: Yes of course. Americans are particularly likely to have this point of view because we're made up of people who left other countries because they thought America was going to be better. And when they got here were pretty busy showing their cousins they'd left behind how much better it was, so that we gradually built up a picture of the best of all possible worlds, and we've been extraordinarily fortunate too because we had this great empty continent with vast resources on which we could build new ways of life unfettered by the past.

6:15

But of course in doing it we've ended up with this pretty narrow notion. So that one of the most useful things anthropology can do, especially for Americans, and there are some other countries that need quite a lot of it too: Great Britain, the Scots, Scandanavian countries, all of them. They're fortunate countries that have fared very well in recent history and tend to feel that they have the best solution to the world. They can all profit by a knowledge of the contrasts between themselves and other societies and realising that their culture is, comparatively speaking, very recent, very special and only one version of the way in which human beings can do things.

7:02

Mitchell: This brings us back again to the concept of culture-boundness. Say for example, the kind of misconceptions that can arise when we apply our concept or idea of what the marriage pattern for a society should be — such as in our society it's monogamy — to a group who allow promiscuous sexual relationships. And then we say that they are bad while we are right.

7:28

Mead: I know ... well, this has several variations. The notion that savages of course do things differently from the way we do.The notion that we're superior, monogamy is superior and we're superior and therefore the people that we put on a lower scale couldn't possibly behave the way we do. And then a lot of odd beliefs in the 19th century about evolution.

You see they've put us at the top of the scale, so whatever we were had to be farthest away from what the most primitive man was. So they invented something called group marriage. (Which we never found anywhere.) And then we went from group marriage to mother right — nobody knew who the father was — and then finally up to polygamy, and then to monogamy. This flower of civilization that we have.

Now this is mainly, we think today a myth. That monogamy is the fundamental form of pair relations in the human species. It takes a lot of money to have polygamy. And this is just a way of looking after widows. Polygamy's never been very widespread for the whole of the population. You can have a king with a thousand wives, or you can have a chief with 200 wives, or you can have the two or three strongest men in the village, maybe have six or seven wives, but the basic form of marriage right around the world has always been monogamy.

8:56

And some people of course, have the kind of monogamy that you can't remarry again, especially widows. Most sexual morality is based on what you make women do, not on what you make men do. And the more uncomfortable we make the women, the more moral we feel we are.

Now we have today what could be technically called brittle or serial monogamy because the minute you permit divorce, of course, people may all be monogamous at any one moment, but they're not married to the same person. And today, except for those religious groups that don't permit remarriage, we are moving towards something that is a good deal like a good many very primitive people: a fair degree of freedom of choice and a fair degree of freedom of divorce, if a particular marriage doesn't work out.

9:50

Mitchell: The point you made about the more we make women uncomfortable, the more moral we are, is both amusing and true, and it brings us to the old, old story of the war between the sexes. Do you feel that this is an inherent conflict bewtween men and women?

10:12

Mead: It's an invention of Madison Avenue at the moment I think, where for quite a long time now we've had a group of men who came up in the 20s and 30s, at a period when the position of women was shifting, and have found it very awkward. And in the world of today there are a fair number of men, in New York city, who like to picture women as rapacious monsters and we get Thurver drawings, and we get terrible pictures of, oh, cavewomen draging men around by the hair while he, a man, folds his arms and looks blissful as if he liked it. And this is being very heavily built up in the United States. It's being fed by European notions. When Europeans come over here they think that American women have a great deal of freedom they didn't have and they emphasize ... it's going to be fed again, incidentally, as we get more Middle Easterners and Indians, and Chinese looking at the situation in this country because they're absolutely horrified that women are treated like people and they will have all sort or nightmares as to what is likely to result.

I don't think you can say there's any antagonism between the sexes. There is antagonism between certain kinds of men and certain kinds of women. And you can set a society up to minimize that antagonism or to maximize the antagonism.

If you bring girls up to be submissive, completely. Never let them hear about anybody who isn't submissive. Never educate them. You can keep them submissive, and quite content. But of course if the next tribe has a different sort of thing, or the next nation, then you may have some difficulties. And that's what's happening for instance in the Middle East today.

It isn't that Muslim women want to be Muslim men. They were perfectly happy being Muslim women. They thought the men had much the more difficult role in the society, but they would like to have the freedom that American women have which is quite a different thing.

12:20

So if you bring the men up to be dominant and responsible and take all the load. And then give them all the load, and don't sympathise with them, they don't mind. But today you get a continual complaint by men of the amount of responsibility they're expected to bear. And they also complain because women are living longer. That's one of the things they're complaining about.

So that at any point in history when the relationship between the sexes are changing, you're likely to get all sorts of things. Nightmares on the part of the men that the women are taking control — you get them way back in primitive society too.

13:01

Mitchell: When I first came in here today you said that you were working on this book for children here, and it seems that you might be concerned, along with many other people, about the role that children have in our society and what we want for them in the future.

13:15

Mead: We did a lot of worrying just like this in the beginning of World War II — just before World War II. Magazines were just filled with attacks on the younger generation. It has no conscience, no dedication, no committment, nothing. And I remember, I was talking to a group just before World War II and the students set up questions, and one of the questions was: "Ought one to have a conscience?"

Well if you're still worrying as to whether you ought to have a conscience or not, you haven't lost your conscience very far. Since World War II and all these years of the Cold War and the uneasy peace, we've again had a lot of discussion and a lot of worry about what kind of young people we're bringing up. Is it possible in a society as big and complex as this to have much sense of individual responsibility anymore? Are people majorly influenced by the mass media, by synthetic heroes and heroines that are constructed by the mass media or what sort of responsibility do we have today?

14:26

I think it is true that people are more impressed by the size of the enterprise. They're impressed with the size of this country. When youngsters start planning to go to college today they think over all the colleges in the United States and arrange them in order and figure out what their chances are to get in — everything from Harvard down to the smallest little college in their own community.

They're thinking in national terms and this means they have less sense of responsibility because it's such a very big unit to be part of. So there are serious questions in how we're going to give a real sense of responsibility to the adolescents who are growing up at this perios in history.

15:11

Mitchell: A lot of people thnk that we have to depend upon war to stir up patriotism and to develop the responsibility of the individual towards his country.

15:20

Mead: Well of course this has been true in the past. Whether you were thinking even of little primitive groups in the middle of New Guinea or thinking of great nations. It's been the time when the country was in danger and people had to come to defend it that has been used as a way of building up patriotism. And in the memory of such defence, whether you're Swiss children growing up on William Tell or American children growing up on George Washington, or English children growing up on Sir Francis Drake, the picture of the heros that saved the country and the men who fought with them, has been, in the past, a very important element in building up a sense of responsibility. And there's no denying it. So we're rather up against it in the world today when we realise that we can't have this kind of warfare anymore. That there is no way that you can save your own country at the expense of another country.

16:20

And this is a new situation really. That if there is a major war everybody goes down equally, and there won't be any people left at all. And this presents a pretty complicated problem in the development of people's new kinds of ... well, one of the words I like to uswe is "nationhood", rather tha nationalism.

The idea of nationalism was each country all for itself, as over against the others. Either because they were going to attack it, or because it wanted to attack them, annex them or exploit them or do something with them.

Now nationhood, on the other hand, is one of these words where, like brotherhood and motherhood, or statehood, it's a good word, and it means you're part of something, part of a whole, and we're just beginning to think of what it would be like to have the kind of responsibility that goes with nationhood in the world.

17:19

Mitchell: I suppose we as anthropologists are more aware of the very drastic social, cultural and political changes that are going on among the primitive peoples all over the world, and we certainly have many, many studies that attest to this transition, such as your work with the Manus in the Admiralty Islands. But what about the rate of change that is going on among the civilized peoples of the world?

17:44

Mead: That's something people neglect a good deal of the time. We always talk today about other peoples catching up with us. We talk about underdeveloped countries and we treat ourselves as a developed country and we forget that we're probably going to go through a change in the next quarter of a century that may be even more drastic and striking than the changes that these primitive peoples have gone through.

Partly because, when a primitive group like the Manus make a change and use us as a model, they've got a model. Now we're going to have to make a change into a kind of civilization that no one has ever seen. We're going to have to invent the model as we go along. That's much more difficult of course, and the steps aren't all laid out for you.

And the whole effect of automation, of man having unlimited power — as we expect we will have when we really begin to get solar energy. So the whole ratio between energy and individual work will disappear. The possibility of at least exploring space and including space in our view of the universe we live in, in a way we never have before.

18:56

All of these things are going to make tremendous changes in our sociey and we can expect that the children born today are going to see enormous changes by the time they're young married people.

19:11

Mitchell: Now suppose we had an anthropologist writing many years hence. How do you think he would characterize our civilization?

Mead: I think if he were to look back, and look back as an anthropologist, he'd look back very much the way we can look back and we see the first men who knew how to keep fire, but didn't know how to make it, wandering up into colder country and entirely dependent upon that fire. And we look back and we see that if someone had let the fire go out, the only group that had moved ahead might have been destroyed.

So that at some point in history, the future of civilization as we know it, may have depended on very few men in one place. Now if we were looking back, or an anthropologist was looking back a thousand years from now, I think he'd see this age as a period when the whole future of mankind, again depended on what one generation did.

And of course what he'd also see is that we haven't realized this yet. That instead we're caught in the struggle of new nations, intoxicated with the possibility of nationhood, or a nationalism unfortunately, in many instances. We're caught with the struggles between ideologies that appear incompatible. We're caught with intoxication with new gadgets. We're caught with the fact that we can keep people alive longer and keep more of the people who are born alive till they grow up.

20:48

We're intoxicated and preoccupied by a whole series of points that evade the major point and that is the survival of the human race.

Mitchell: As our medical knowledge increases, does this mean that we're going to have more and more people but of second rate calibre?

21:06

Mead: In the first place we have to realize that all our medical knowledge that we've built up today, depends on, or has depended upon historically, on our willingness and desire to save each individual life. As long as we didn't care about saving each individual, medical discoveries were made and very little was done with them. There's a definite relationship between valuing each individual and great sums of money and effort and time that we put into medical research. And its a very small price to pay for the kind of society that will value each individual.

That we have to save some individuals who may remain throughout life handicapped. So we can expect to have an increase in the proportion of the surviving handicapped. The sort of people who would die under primitive conditions, who are both feeble minded and poorly functioning, and many other things. But that is a small group and I think a very small price to pay.

Then we also have the whole question that we're saving people who are weaker in particular respects. We'll save more blind people and more deaf people. We'll save people with allergies and we'll save people with all sorts of curious sensitivities and probably when we do this we will also be saving kinds of genius that we've never been able to save before.

22:33

It's perfectly possible that you have various sorts of linkages, genetic linkages, that mean that certain kinds of great skills, great imaginative abilities, have perished right through the generations because we weren't able to save a certain kind of person. A child with diabetes or a child with one of the epilepsies, or something of the sort.

So I think we are going to have to widen the range of people whom we treat as human and who we build our society so they can live in it, so the deaf can live in it, and the blind can live in it, and people with special disabilities.

23:16

At the same time we may hope to have a greater range of human variability and therefore greater ability also.

Mitchell: We've talked about many, many things today: war, democracy, society and evolution and so forth, but now, what about the role of the man as a specific individual?

Mead: If the individual who has only — at least if he's an American — if he feels he only has one life to live and he's concerned with what he's going to do with that single life — of course we have to realise that our definition of the individual is pretty peculiar and special. A large part of the world thinks of the individual as someone who goes through one incarnation after another, living many, many, lives.

Traditionally, in our religious tradition, we have given meaning to the life on earth by the life after death. And sometimes we have given so much meaning to life after death that we've had almost no time at all for what was happening in the world. This was a pilgrimage. One went a weary pilgrimage through the world or it was the duty of people on earth to colonize heaven. Have been the ways people have spoken. And every generation has to deal with the problem of what kind of meaning is to be given to the life of the individual by the society he lives in. By the society he lives in, by the past the society has had, for the future that it will have and by his religious view of the world.

24:53

It's very impressive of course to realise that there are more people alive today on this earth than all the human beings who were ever alive on this earth, up to somewhere in the 19th century. That makes you stop and think. Now when you say: "what's going to happen to the individual in this world of so many more people and so much rapid change?"

It's going to be a question of how we are going to phrase the position of the individual to make his life meaningful. If he sees the fact that there are many more like him in the world as demeaning, then we talk about mass man, and there's something wrong with each one because there are more of them and we assume if there were only 10 people on earth the value of each one would be greater. But if you look at the kinds of society that 10 people once built as a very meager, small little group, you're not so convinced that the importance of each individual is increased just because he has a larger .. he himself has a bigger propostion of what's they.

25:59

So that we can see the part that each individual plays as a function of the grandeur of the whole effort. Therefore, the greater and grander it becomes, the more important each individual becomes.

Or we can feel that each individual is demeaned and reduced because of the increasing size. Because we know so much more about the length of life on earth, the possible length of the future because we know so much more about the exploration of space.

Some people feel this dwarfs man and other people feel that it ennobles him. And this is one of the choices which people are going to be presented today.

And then there's another aspect of the whole picture and that's the extent to which modern technology makes each individual act resonate. Any individual today who writes a beautiful piece of music has an audience such as no musician ever had before. Anyone who writes a poem has an immediate possible audience greater than anyone ever had before and if we see our great modern civilization with its mass media as a new kind of resonating system that can be tapped by any individual in any spot, we get a slightly different picture of whether the individual is being dwarfed or enobled.

27:23

Mitchell: You know Doctor Mead, talking with you is always rewarding and stimulating, in fact, I feel like getting on the next plane and getting right on out to the field.

Mead: Well, I hope you're going to, Bill, because You're really starting out at just the most exciting moment, maybe the most exciting moment in human history. We've gone far enough now with anthropology, with psychology, with our studies of small children, so we're beginning to know something about human behaviour. We're beginning to know the sort of thing about human behaviour that the natural sciences know and that have made it possible for them to do all the things they've done in the last 100 years and now we're just entering a period of the human sciences where we can use the same kind of method and knowledge and devotion that gave us our results in the natural sciences but combined with a very different attitude towards the world, because we won't be dealing with things, we'll be dealing with human beings.

And I think there's a possibility that in the next 25 years, in addition to being crucial for the fate of mankind, for man's survival, are going to perhaps be equally crucial for mankind for thousands of years to come because of what the human sciences — and that means anthropology (especially for you and me) — are going to be able to contribute.

28:49

Voiceover: The NBC Television Network has presented a conversation with Margaret Mead, internationally known anthropologist of the American Museum of Natural History and William Mitchell, research assocaite of the Jewish Family Service.

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