Return from the Natives: How Margaret Mead Won the Second World War and Lost the Cold War

by Peter Mandler

Celebrated anthropologist Margaret Mead, who studied sex in Samoa and child-rearing in New Guinea in the 1920s and '30s, was determined to show that anthropology could tackle the psychology of the most complex, modern societies in ways useful for waging the Second World War. This fascinating book follows Mead and her closest collaborators—her lover and mentor Ruth Benedict, her third husband Gregory Bateson, and her prospective fourth husband Geoffrey Gorer—through their triumphant climax, when Mead became the cultural ambassador from America to Britain in 1943, to their downfall in the Cold War. Part intellectual biography, part cultural history, and part history of the human sciences, Peter Mandler's book is a reminder that the Second World War and the Cold War were a clash of cultures, not just ideologies, and asks how far intellectuals should involve themselves in politics, at a time when Mead's example is cited for and against experts' involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Genres: Anthropology, History

384 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Alex Golub · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a very closely researched, well-written, and even-handed account of Mead, Benedict, Bateson, (some Cora Du Bois), and culture and personality during WWII. I'd recommend it for anyone trying to cut through the politics and history surrounding the debates of this period. I felt like I learned a lot about Mead -- bravo to Mandler for his work on this fascinating and under-scrutinized period of Mead's life and anthropology's involvement in politics.

[Cassidy Brinn]

After Margaret Mead had studied laid-back Samoans, native Americans, grim Manus fishers, three Sepik tribes, and the dancing people of Bali, she headed back to America and found herself stuck there. Because of the war, she couldn't travel to any exotic locales. Instead, during this time, she and many other anthropologists applied their tools to modern cultures -- in Mead's case, America, England, Germany, and Russia. Drawing on neo-Freudian ideas, she looked at how different family practices in these nations encouraged different temperaments and relationship styles.

The paycheck for these explorations came from the American government, which in the post-Vietnam world looks inherently suspect. Indeed, many anthropologists advised on psychological techniques meant to defeat the enemies of the hot and cold wars. Mandler spends a lot of space insisting that it's too simplistic to say that all anthropologists were corrupt. Mead in particular had lofty intentions - she wanted to find ways to promote intercultural understanding so that different nations could get along peacefully without being subsumed into a uniform monoculture.

In 2017 we know her mission failed. When during the Eisenhower administration the government stopped wanting "long-hairs" in government, anthropologists lost some clout, but of course that's not the only reason. Another problem is that, as she did occasionally acknowledge (like in the preface to Coming of Age in Samoa) the nations she was examining don't really have uniform cultures. Her tools left no room for considering the effects of class or race for example; for her "the British" meant the British upper class. And, as the fascinating and too-short last chapter explains, some of the exotic tribes are less allergic than cultural relativists to the idea of tossing tradition aside in favor of a monoculture -- seeing as that monoculture includes modern health care, technology, and the other luxuries of "over-developed" countries.

Nonetheless, I found myself entranced with the idea of pursuing a more profound understanding of cultural differences between modern nations and was fascinated by the snippets of this work that Mandler deftly provides.

[Mills College Library]

306 M272 2013