Letters from the Field, 1925-1975: Personal Memoir with Photographs―Understanding Island Cultures in Samoa, New Guinea, and Bali

by Margaret Mead

Beginning in 1925, when at twenty-three she embarked on her first field work in Samoa, Mead sent family and friends these letters from the field “to make a little more real for them” the exotic worlds that absorbed her. In this complement to her bestselling memoir  Blackberry Winter , Mead has assembled selected letters she wrote from Samoa in 1925-26; from Peré Village, Manus, in the Admiralty Islands, in 1928-29; from the Arapesh, Mundugumor, and Tchambuli, New Guinea, in 1932-33; from Bali and the Iatmul, New Guinea, in 1936-39; from Manus again in 1953; and during brief visits in the sixties and seventies to Manus, several new Guinea sites, and Montserrat in the West Indies. Enhanced by more than 100 photographs, these intelligent, vivid, frequently funny and sometimes poetic letters help us share with Mead “the unique, but also cumulative, experience of immersing oneself in the on-going life of another people, . . .attempting to understand mentally and physically this other version of reality.”

Genres: Anthropology, Nonfiction, Biography Memoir, Memoir, Biography

416 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1977

About the author

Margaret Mead was an American cultural anthropologist who was frequently a featured writer and speaker in the mass media throughout the '60s and '70s as a popularizer of the insights of anthropology into modern American and western life but also a respected, if controversial, academic anthropologist.

Her reports as to the purportedly healthy attitude towards sex in South Pacific and Southeast Asian traditional cultures amply informed the '60s "sexual revolution" and it was only at the end of her life and career that her propositions were – albeit controversially – challenged by a maverick fellow anthropologist and literate members of societies she had long before studied and reported on. Mead was a champion of broadened sexual mores within a context of traditional western religious life.

Excerpted from Wikipedia.

Reviews

[Jacqui · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you didn't read my last week's post, you may wonder why I am so excited about Margaret Mead's eye-opening book, Letters From the Field. Even if you read me last week, you may wonder--I think I wandered a bit. Here's the synopsis: I'm writing a series on the life of earliest man--think 2 million years ago. There is little primary evidence, so I must do a lot of extrapolation based on facts. I've read scores of books that nibble around the edges, all resulting in a pretty good feel for what their lives might have been like.

One of those books is Margaret Mead's 'Letters From the Field'. She spent most of her life living with primitive tribes so she could understand their worlds. This primary research influenced every corner of her life. For example, she is widely quoted as saying:

'It takes a village'

This is her daughter's discussion of that concept:

“One of the ideas my mother got from Samoa,” she says, when asked about the concepts that shaped her childhood, “was that the way people were connected to each other was primarily based on kinship. That meant that children had a place in many households and a lot of adults were involved in the life of every child. So in raising me, my mother very deliberately created an extended family. I spent time in many households and learned different attitudes toward the world, and the rules were different. Her approach is reflected in an African proverb which is often quoted in the United States: ‘It takes a village to raise a child.’ My mother created a village for me to grow up with, and it was the existence of that village that allowed her to pursue her career and come and go and feel that I was not abandoned.”

Here are ten of my favorite quotes from 'Letters from the Field: 1925-1975':

* "It [the Samoan language] is like an elaborate jeweled costume standing quite alone waiting for the wearer to appear..."
* "...accompanied by some fifteen girls and little children, I walk through the village to the end of Siufaga, where we stand on an iron-bound point and watch the waves splash us in the face..."
* In Samoa, I found I could not understand adolescents without studying pre-adolescents.
* "They are great dialecticians and will argue for an hour over the difference between a word which means 'borrow to return the same object' and one which means 'borrow to return another of the same kind'.
* The most frequent cause of women running away is if one wife is offended with another or doubts her welcome; the husband doesn't figure largely."
* "They are quite willing to talk to use [Mead and her group] to keep us amused, as talk seems to be what we want"
* "...the only way to get a house built was to have two built, and so now we have two houses which they are completing in their own good time, but strictly in step. And the next dilemma is which one to live in."
* "There is to be a great birthday feast here in the West Palace and there won't be another for a year because there are no more children."
* "Our route home is still uncertain. We have to wait for the water to rise to get into Tchambuli; the lake is nearly dry. And we have to wait fo the water to rise for this village to do any ceremonies. At present it simply eats, drinks, sleeps and has seances about crocodiles."
* "They understand how to tell time and set a meeting for 'one o'clock'. But there are only two clocks and one watch in the village and the meeting is less likely to start on time than when meetings were set by the sun. They have learned about dates, but they have no calendars, so what day it is, is a matter for protracted discussion... They want good materials and good equipment, but they cannot write to order it nor have they any way of sending money."

[Nadya · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the introduction she acknowledges that long stays in the field enable an anthropologist to observe details that would have otherwise remained unobservable , and that in this sense fieldwork is a 24 hour activity . She emphasizes that the letters she wrote home while in the field were not a substitute for proper field notes; they were a different kind of documentation. Her letters, most often than not, are written to her family and her friends and thus give us a more personal glimpse into the life of an ethnographer. (I did not read each letter thoroughly.)

[Valerie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection was surprisingly excellent, and is useful introduction to field anthropology. Spanning 50 years and mutliple field sites, the letters provide a commentary on the changes within the profession over the 20th c., as well as changes within the places she studied. A real delight to read, especially for her early, pioneering years.

[Julie H. Ernstein · Rating 4 out of 5]

These are a fascinating sample of letters spanning a half-century of fieldwork from renown cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead. These letters are as informative of Mead's unconventional life as they are the history of anthropology and anthropological theory.

[Trisha Owens · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyable read about life of Margaret Mead and her travels to Samoa...a series of letters and photos of her incredible and fascinating work...

[Nico Esquenazi · Rating 2 out of 5]

Son cartas, testimonio de expediciones de Margaret dirigidas a sus amigos, amores y familiares.
Las descripciones y las formas de la época se ven un poco fuertes en alguna de las cartas, en referencia a los aborígenes y autóctonos que vivieron la suerte de servidumbre en su tiempo....

[Shelley Diamond · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book much more than Coming of Age in Samoa.

[Simon Kirkendall]

pretty good, would not recommend

[Lillogerbillo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ho incontrato per la prima volta l'autrice alle superiori durante una lezione. Ma ho apprezzato il suo coraggio, la sua persona e il suo metodo solamente perdendomi fra le sue lettere. Credo sia il modo migliore di conoscere più intimamente qualcuno e comprendere appieno i suoi studi.

[Abby]

I got this in a used bookstore. Between the pages were a pressed maple leaf and one flattened grass floret.

Anthropology is still the field of inquiry that leaves me most flummoxed, and I majored in it. As an undergrad, I spent long periods after class sitting quietly and trying to work out how polygamy made sense. And now I find myself mystified by Margaret Mead, mother of anthropological field methods as we know them, but who never seemed to become entrenched in them. She continued to rethink fieldwork methods to the end of her life. Mead was in charge of editing and redacting her own letters for this volume, and she created a record of changing notions about fieldwork. Not really a record of herself. Though it is pretty amusing when she goes into the field with one husband, meets their mutual friend, and in the next field excursion she's married to that guy.

There is always this strange rhetorical dance in anthropology between proximity and distance: they are people, or they are "Margaret's people." They are like me, they are not like me. They are my friends, they are my informants. So I cringe at every "primitive," with its assumption that there is something incomplete or just proto-European about the way people live. Mead explicitly sought out villages with minimal global contact, and thought of it as time travel rather than accepting an alternate "modern." She preferred certain "aesthetics" in her research subjects and their ways of life. But she did not seem overly troubled when change came--when the Catholic missions inevitably arrived, or when people appropriated Western influence to create a New Fellow Fashion, or even during drastic changes in the field of anthropology. Mead only wished the best changes for people she cared about.

Because she did care, and more than that, she believed that people in New Guinea had something irreplaceable to offer the world. She believed anthropology was important work because it allowed the communication and globalization of insight. She wanted to know the real outer reaches of the spectrum of human nature. "This is how it should be everywhere in the world: a worldwide vocabulary within which ideas can spread rapidly and suggested solutions can be broadcast, but distinctive, detailed decision-making the responsibility of each locality. There has to be a weaving back and forth between the highly generalized and the highly concrete, with everything changing at once." She had a vision for globalization and diversity. She spanned the 20th century, so she would be the one to know.

The photos are wonderful, especially in the final section, when you can see how people grew and changed after forty years and a world war Pacific theater. And of course, Mead's everlasting, adorable Ked shoes that never seem to change as she ages.