Sex and Sensibility: Margaret Mead's Descriptive ... - Trent University

Reviews in Anthropology, Vol. 33, pp. 111–130
Copyright # 2004 Taylor & Francis Inc.
ISSN: 0093-8157 print
DOI: 10.1080=00938150490447439
Sex and Sensibility: Margaret Mead’s
Descriptive and Rhetorical Ethnography
Roger Ivar Lohmann
Mead, Margaret. The Mountain Arapesh, with a new introduction by
Paul B. Roscoe. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2002 [1938,
1940]. Volume I: xxxi þ 339 pp., and Volume II: xiii þ 358 pp.
$69.95, paper.
Mead, Margaret. Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, with
new introductions by Helen Fisher and Mary Catherine Bateson. New York:
Perennial, 2001 [1935]. xxiv þ 311 pp. including index. $15.00, paper.
Mead, Margaret. Male and Female, with new introductions by Helen Fisher
and Mary Catherine Bateson. New York: Perennial, 2001 [1949]. xi þ
448 pp. including index. $15.00, paper.
As always one can find that Margaret Mead had done it.
Theodore Schwartz (1981, p. 10)
If Franz Boas is the father of American anthropology, it is tempting to designate
Margaret Mead as the mother. While a generational equivalence
between the two is belied by the fact that Mead was Boas’s student
and therefore his cultural and intellectual ‘‘child,’’ to us, their scholarly
descendants, they stand as godlike parents in all their brilliance and
ROGER IVAR LOHMANN is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Trent University, Oshawa,
Ontario, Canada. A Melanesianist, his interests include cultural change, religion, and dreaming.
He is the editor of Dream Travelers: Sleep Experiences and Culture in the Western Pacific
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) and ‘‘Perspectives on the Category ‘Supernatural,’’’ a special issue
of Anthropological Forum, 13(2), 2003.
I offer my sincere thanks to Lise Dobrin, Lourdes Giordani, Gerald Sullivan, and the anonymous
reviewers for reading drafts of this article and offering helpful suggestions.
Address correspondence to Roger I. Lohmann, Department of Anthropology, Trent
University, 2000 Simcoe Street North, Oshawa, Ontario L1H 7L7, Canada. E-mail: rogerlohmann@
trentu.ca
111

112 R. I. Lohmann
imperfection, to be both embraced and rejected. The vehemence of Mead’s
defense by a wide swath of American cultural anthropologists following
Derek Freeman’s (1983) critique of her Samoan work (e.g., Ember 1985),
liberal values, and the powerful role she attributed to culture in
determining human action and potentials, points to a deep but ambivalent
affection and identification with her that is evocative of children’s relationships
with their mother. Moreover, the relative lack of direct engagement
with her work or citations of her (and Boas’s) writings in current anthropology
could be interpreted as revealing adult children’s implicit and
ashamed movement from under their parents’ thumb. Adding to this
Mead’s emphasis on exploring gender and sexuality in both her personal
and scholarly life, Freud could have had a field day analyzing the image of
Margaret Mead in the anthropological subconscious. In returning to a
respected ancestor’s legacy for us, one must, therefore, be vigilant lest
either identity with or rebellious wish for independence from the predecessor
impede balanced openness in critical reappraisal. With so much
at stake, rereading Mead for what she has to contribute to current anthropology
is a rewarding challenge.
The centennial of Margaret Mead’s birth in 2001 provided the impetus
to reissue many of her books. I give four volumes a fresh look as
statements on her methods, theories, and rhetorical depictions of culture,
and particularly gender. The Mountain Arapesh is a two-volume, detailed
ethnography and analysis of a single group in what is now Papua New
Guinea. It was written for anthropologists, with the goal of providing as
full a description as possible from several perspectives. Sex and Temperament
and Male and Female represent Mead’s fullest statements on gender,
written for mixed audiences. In them, Mead presents her vision of how
various cultures make sense of sex and how Americans should act sensibly
with regard to it. These books show the range of Mead’s career as scholar,
popular writer, social commentator, and advisor, who held the ears of two
generations while producing rich ethnography and theory for anthropology.
I critique elements of Mead’s work, including her rhetorical tendency
to use idealized individuals and situations to illustrate the cultural configurations
that Mead abstracted, making these ‘‘patterns of culture’’ (Benedict,
1953 [1934]) appear to be data rather than interpretations of
data. This practice contributes to Mead’s well-known penchant for excessive
generalization. From the perspective of early twenty first century
anthropology, a striking characteristic of all of the books reviewed here
is their paucity of citations and references. In spite of these shortcomings,
I praise Mead’s exhaustive description in words and images of local ideas
and artifacts—a practice that has suffered in more recent ethnography—

and her innovative field and writing methods, some of which anticipated
later developments in anthropology, and some of which have been
largely forgotten, to the poverty of anthropology. I discuss each work
in turn.
THE MOUNTAIN ARAPESH
Sex and Sensibility 113
Several lengthy papers originally published by the American Museum of
Natural History appear in this two-volume presentation, with a new introduction
by Paul Roscoe. They are the result of Mead’s fieldwork with Reo
Fortune in 1931–1932 among the Mountain Arapesh of New Guinea. From
the perspective of 2004, both are marvels to behold in that they present
so much ethnographic detail and illustrations of material as well as ideational
culture. Reading them is evocative of fieldwork—Mead lays out the
complexity and detail of a people’s life, conveying the immensity of even
a small society, and the impossibility of recording ‘‘everything’’ in an
ethnography.
Paul (‘‘Jim’’) Roscoe’s valuable introduction fills in some details of political
structure, which Mead does not emphasize and tells what has happened
to the people of Alitoa village since Mead and Fortune’s departure, including
the Japanese occupation and Allied bombardment during World War II,
followed by dispersal to other areas. When Roscoe visited in 1997, some
people had begun reoccupying the site. This new edition’s usefulness could
have been greatly enhanced had the publisher allowed the addition of an
index, making Mead’s rich descriptive materials, buried in a text with a
sometimes-unclear stratigraphy, accessible for comparative and theoretical
work.
Volume I includes two parts, the first entitled ‘‘An Importing Culture’’
and the second ‘‘Supernaturalism.’’ In the first, Mead documents the movement
of ideas and materials among the Mountain Arapesh and their neighbors.
Mead describes the Mountain Arapesh as attracted to importation
rather than invention out of insecurity in their creative abilities. Techniques
and rights for performance, as well as material objects, are imported.
Foreign technologies, dances, and spells have greater value when they
are exotic imports and less as they become familiar (p. 22).
Mead’s sophisticated attention to indigenous diffusion is valuable for
those who study religious conversion, language shift, and other forms of
cultural contact and change, since it shows the fundamental similarity between
the importation of material objects and ideas, whose ‘‘reception or
rejection may depend upon structural, functional, eth[n]ological, or ideological
similarity or non-similarity’’ (p. 21). Moreover, it serves as a reminder

114 R. I. Lohmann
that competing hegemonies and counter-hegemonies complicated human
life long before the world system extended its discursive tentacles to all corners
of the postcolonial world. Perhaps still recovering from the excesses of
extreme diffusionists (summarized in Barnard, 2000, pp. 49–54), whose proponents
emphasized the uninventiveness of people and attributed even
very widespread ideas to diffusion, cultural anthropology still regards the
term ‘‘diffusion’’ with an unreasonable distaste. It remains relevant, however,
to current interest in various peoples’ attraction for and pursuit of
styles and technologies that they associate with an abstracted notion of
‘‘modernity,’’ an idea that has become cultural anthropology’s current darling.
Older work on diffusion, including Mead’s, deserves renewed critical
but open-minded attention to put our understanding of modernity into a
broader context of the transmission and reception of culture, which have
been going on since before the genus Homo evolved.
Like much of Mead’s writing, ‘‘An Importing Culture’’ is written in a
rather flow-of-consciousness style, with too few headings. However, it
exemplifies the best detail from the Boasian tradition, covering cooking,
drugs, sleeping habits, graphical communication systems, recipes, house
building, and types of art. Anthropologists interested in material culture will
marvel at this book’s detail on how things are made and used, with plentiful
drawings and photographs—something that experimental archaeologists
and ethnoarchaeologists do well but that has unfortunately become rare
in ethnographies (for an excellent descriptive ethnography focused
on New Guinea net bags, including how to make them, see Mackenzie,
1991).
While Mead emphasizes cultures as configurations or patterns, she
recognizes that ideas can move between cultures and change configurations.
An applied anthropologist seeking to change American culture, she
clearly did not consider cultures to be discrete and timeless as past anthropologists
have sometimes been accused of doing. Nor did Mead consider
‘‘primitive’’ Arapesh culture to be bounded and unchanging, but rather
she saw it as continually borrowing from others (pp. 9–11). Maria Lepowsky
(2000, p. 135) makes a similar observation regarding the Sicilian peasant
ethnography of Mead’s forgotten contemporary, Charlotte Gower. As
Herbert Lewis (1998) argues, such stereotypes of early anthropology must
be recognized as inaccurate and no longer perpetuated.
In the second portion of Volume One, titled ‘‘Supernaturalism,’’ Mead
discusses the more purely ideational elements of culture, presented as long
lists of myths and food taboos. ‘‘The fundamental premises of Arapesh culture,’’
she holds, ‘‘are organized on an affective, rather than upon a cognitive
basis’’ (p. 227). Therefore, Mead interprets Arapesh mythology as expressing
emotional conundrums in the culture, such as mutual fear of the sexes,

Sex and Sensibility 115
rather than as explaining phenomena (p. 234). While it can be argued that
E. B. Tylor (1877 [1871]) overemphasized the rationality of religion in his effort
to show that even primitives are capable of intellectual thought, Mead
may err on the other side in blanketing the whole of Mountain Arapesh religiosity
as cognitively unengaged. Mead provides several myth texts that
she collected from a single informant and describes the informant’s personality,
but provides no analysis of the myths (p. 247). They are nevertheless
extremely valuable, particularly when combined with the large collection of
texts published by Fortune (1942) in his Arapesh grammar. Mead’s versions
of the cassowary wife tale (p. 264) are particularly interesting, given Donald
Tuzin’s (1997) vivid analysis of how this myth subsequently changed following
Christianization, reflecting threats to Ilahita Arapesh masculinity (see
also Stephen Leavitt’s (1998) discussion of adolescent masculinity among
Bumbita Arapesh).
Volume Two also provides a mass of data, but its sections are a
series of ethnographic experiments. In many ways Mead here anticipates
debates that occurred in the anthropology of the 1980 s and 1990 s on experimental
ethnography, representing others, and reflexivity (e.g., Clifford &
Marcus, 1986; see Lutkehaus, 1995). As Mead says in the first paragraph,
These papers represent an experiment in method of presentation, an attempt to solve a number
of presentation problems: how to present the material so that students wishing to use it at different
levels of abstraction and generalization may do so without impediment; how to satisfy
this first demand and yet keep the illustrative detail close enough to the discussion so that its
particular relevance to any point is not lost; what orders of materials should be presented
together; what type of presentation best represents the peculiar form and emphases of Arapesh
culture. (p. 5)
This sentence (just one in a very lengthy paragraph) also gives a sense
of what it is like to be curled up with these two volumes. While I admire
Mead’s detail and thoughtfulness, it unfortunately comes across as very
long-winded and tends, like rice noodles forgotten on the stove, to become
a glutinous mass in one’s mind. This is unfortunate, for there is much of use
here if one has the patience to separate the noodles.
Volume Two has three sections: one on Arapesh socioeconomic life, a
diary of events in Alitoa village, and a focus on a key informant. In the
first section of Volume Two, Mead deftly shows the emotional and cognitive
peculiarities of Arapesh economic relationships, including people’s
anxiety over balancing obligations to others with the need to complete
their own tasks (p. 47). People see themselves as temporary stewards of
possessions, to be passed on to succeeding generations, giving a definite
sense of descent group possession rather than individual ownership per se
(p. 51).

116 R. I. Lohmann
Anthropologists who associate the emergence of political complexity
with the control of a surplus will be interested in the fact that while the
Arapesh were malnourished, and from that perspective had no surplus at
all, they nevertheless perceived that they did have a surplus. They scraped
together food to host feasts that gave prestige in spite of the fact that
everyone went home hungry (pp. 55–56). This shows that the surpluses
redistributed by big men can be imagined as well as real (cf. Bloch, 1989
[1979], who shows how exchange of real goods for imaginary blessings
supported leaders in Madagascar, even though those goods derived from
the people rather than the leaders).
The second section in Volume Two comprises the diary’s introduction,
which is much more readable than the rest of the volume. Here Mead clarifies
her own and Fortune’s relationship with the people. Following this,
Mead usefully provides a cast of characters, which unfortunately is dense
and unevenly detailed. In this section, Mead’s awareness of personality variation
is crystal clear, yet she nevertheless abstracts an ideal personality,
exemplifying the primary contradiction in the old culture-and-personality
school (p. 75). The value of the diary is that it gives a glimpse into the daily
flow of events in the village, as noticed by the ethnographer. It has a raw
data feel to it, giving extraordinary detail, but by being labeled only according
to major events and dates one cannot quickly access other points of
interest in relation to times of occurrence. Mead concludes the diary with
an entire census of people, hamlets, spirit-places, owners of coconut palms,
gens (clan) ownership of omens and individual ownership of charms, a list
and description of all marriages, and various other data lists.
The final section of the second volume, which consists of everything
from her fieldnotes on one informant, might be considered a prototype of
person-centered ethnography. She seeks to document how a culture is seen
from the perspective of one of its participants, a man named Unabelin. A
second goal is to document the value of furthering interaction between psychologists
and anthropologists by presenting the full data of a Rorschach
(inkblot) projective test administered to this informant along with the interpretations
of various scholars. Unabelin identifies the inkblots as being like
dreams, ghosts, rotten things, and what one sees when one is insane
(p. 343). In other words, he sees the blots for what they are—unclear
images. By contrast, the comments on Unabelin’s test results by several psychologists
seemed to me impressionistic and idiosyncratic, but Mead considers
them helpful.
In order to avoid anthropologists’ biases, Mead suggests having ‘‘routine
field-workers’’ collect and publish ‘‘unanalyzed materials to use as controls’’
upon which more highly trained fieldworkers can build (p. 262). ‘‘Let
... the subsequent investigator have full access to this material, uncolored

Sex and Sensibility 117
as it is by any speculative hypotheses, and then let him go in and make a
systematic attempt to understand the culture’’ (p. 262). Yet Mead recognizes
that ‘‘There is no such thing as an unbiased report’’ (p. 265), so this
suggestion appears unrealistic even in her own account of it. She
declares, before this became anthropological common sense, that the
best way to reduce bias is to make it explicit through reflexivity, allowing
readers to correct for tendencies on the part of the researcher. ‘‘This
type of self-conscious allowance for bias may be, although I almost
doubt it, somewhat better than a complete lack of self-consciousness
about one’s own temperament and character. It may, on the other hand,
only serve to fill the pages of the account with a series of ‘buts’ and ‘ifs’’’
(p. 266).
Far less problematic, she asserts, is finding someone in the culture
whose temperament is like one’s own to interview intensively, seeing the
culture through his or her eyes in a maximally congruent way (p. 266).
She chooses Unabelin, whom she admires and considers, like herself, to
be an intellectual who values intensity. Generalizing from this, she remarks
that her depiction of the Arapesh as a group is more faithful than her depiction
of the Munduggumor, because she can relate to and admire the former
more than the latter (p. 269).
Acknowledging the role of personal congruence between ethnographer
and informants in allowing greater empathetic communication is a useful
methodological insight. However, both sympathy and dislike of the
anthropologist for a particular informant—or for an entire culture—also
introduce biases that hinder understanding, as I discuss below. Liking
allows one to empathize, which is a primary means of relating to others,
but it can also harm one’s ability to see from other perspectives as much
as disliking can.
As Ira Bashkow and Lise Dobrin (forthcoming) note, however,
Mead’s field correspondence reveals that she was in fact ambivalent about
the Mountain Arapesh because of their ostensible lack of lavish display.
Moreover, they argue that Mead’s generalizations about the Mountain
Arapesh and the peoples that she subsequently studied in developing her
thesis for Sex and Temperament reflect the flip-flopping gender and power
relations Mead was experiencing in her developing love triangle with
Fortune and her future husband, Gregory Bateson. Indeed, psychohistorical
studies of anthropologists like Bashkow and Dobrin’s affirm Mead’s point
that anthropologists’ affections influence and even provide a kind of
undocumented field data for their intellectual quests.
The remainder of the final section is the full text of her interviews with
Unabelin and recounted events from the diary that refer to him. She reiterates
some materials in different contexts as a way of experimenting with

118 R. I. Lohmann
ways of presenting (cf. Wolf, 1992, who presents accounts of a single event
from three different perspectives, altering the event’s impression).
The Mountain Arapesh consists of many flowing observations and lacks
a conclusion. One does, however, get a sense of how messy lived reality is.
Mead admits, ‘‘I realize that it is tedious and difficult to follow such a mass of
remote detail...but so unformalized, so unsystematic, is Arapesh behavior
that in any attempt to state the rules which govern their economic behavior
one is immediately driven to concrete cases’’ (vol. II, p. 48). I think Mead lets
herself off too easily here. Perhaps it was her very desire to find an abstract
ideal system, what she meant by ‘‘culture,’’ thwarted by her own intense
engagement with her field notes, that led her to throw up her hands in this
way. A second weakness is that when making cross-cultural comparisons
she only does so with societies that she herself has studied. There is remarkably
little direct engagement with other ethnographic literature (e.g., see
vol. II, p. 43). Even where she refers directly to points in the literature,
she rarely cites these, as when she mentions a controversy about primitive
economics without saying what it is or who its proponents are (vol. II, p. 57).
Finally, while Mead’s tendency to exaggerate is found less in The Mountain
Arapesh than in her popular works, even here we read ‘‘Theft was
unknown,’’ with the footnote to this very sentence mentioning that there
were thefts, though she sees these as ‘‘secondary to the expression of some
form of emotion’’ (vol. II, p. 50). Indeed, Fortune (1939) shows that theft of
others’ wives was a major cause of interlocality warfare. But then, Mead also
virtually denies that the Mountain Arapesh had war.
SEX AND TEMPERAMENT IN THREE PRIMITIVE SOCIETIES
In this famous work, originally published in 1935, Mead compares ideals of
masculinity and femininity among three groups she and Fortune studied in
New Guinea, and she finds that they vary to the point of opposition.
Arapesh ideals hold that both women and men should be nurturant, nonviolent,
and caring; Mundugumor ideals hold that both women and men
should be independent, selfish, and aggressive; and Tchambuli ideals hold
that men should be artistic and vain while women should be pragmatic and
plain. Mead spends 146 pages of the book describing the Arapesh, 66 pages
of it on the Mundugumor, and 37 pages of it on the Tchambuli, with the
remainder devoted to a theoretical discussion. This imbalance does not
serve to demonstrate the thesis of the book.
Mead provides ethnographic evidence that cultural traditions may or
may not link particular elements of temperament to sex, and when they
do, it is arbitrary which are considered masculine or feminine. Mead’s

Sex and Sensibility 119
general thesis stands, as subsequent work documenting the malleability of
gender roles and ideals shows (e.g., Lepowsky, 1993, who describes Vanatinai
society, in which men and women are engaged in many of the same
tasks and are virtually egalitarian). It is now anthropological common
sense that personality traits may or may not be linked to gender, and
when a trait is linked with gender, there are consequences for the psychological
adaptation of individuals depending on whether they match the
ideal.
However, the configurations with which Mead sometimes stereotypes
these particular groups are open to greater dispute. As noted above, for
example, in her effort to emphasize the generalization that Mountain
Arapesh men and women are gentle and maternal, she describes their
society as unwarlike. Reo Fortune (1939), following his divorce from Mead,
responded in print with evidence to the contrary. Ethnographers remain
impressed with this evidence, and explain the difference between Mead’s
and Fortune’s interpretations in terms of different ethnographic values and
experiences (Dobrin & Bashkow, forthcoming), and that configurationist
theory shaped Mead’s generalizations even when she provided contradicting
data (Roscoe, 2003). Sullivan (2004) points out, however, that Mead’s
configurationism differs from Benedict’s in that Mead sought causal mechanisms
for personality development, such as childrearing practices and inherited
temperaments. While Mead is widely known to have generalized to a fault,
that same boldness is what allowed her to pursue and tackle big questions.
Mead’s question in this book is a vast and tangled one: what is the relationship
among physical sex, cultural surroundings, and personality? This
question was an obvious next step following her first work, Coming of Age
in Samoa, on the relationship between physical adolescence and emotional
tenor (Mead, 2001 [1928]). Mead was grappling with the problem of gender,
though without benefit of the term.
Mead begins by observing that ‘‘man has taken a few hints and woven
them into the beautiful imaginative social fabrics that we call civilisations’’ (p.
xxxi). For Mead, then, culture is like connective threads woven into cloth by
the imagination. Temperament, in her usage, is more or less innate personality
that culture can only caress, not chisel. In discussing the psychological
consequences for individuals who are born with characteristics considered
typical of the opposite sex, Mead brilliantly illustrates Ruth Benedict’s thesis
(1953 [1934]) that the same personality will excel in one cultural environment
but be a misfit in another. To the eyes of an anthropologist reading in 2004,
however, Mead’s willingness to occasionally characterize people she knew
using such globally condemnatory language as ‘‘stupid’’ and ‘‘dull-witted’’
is remarkable: ‘‘Now Menala was stupid—easy-going, good-natured, but
stupid’’ (pp. 118–119). This reflects both a greater confidence in her ability

120 R. I. Lohmann
to objectively assess other people’s intelligence than current cultural anthropologists
possess, and a greater willingness to honestly express in print
negative feelings about her subjects than we are now at liberty to exercise.
Her extremely confident attitude seems to betray an egocentrism, ironically
in the midst of her compassionate relating to others, that also appears in the
way she interacted with her friends and colleagues. It is tempting to regard
the very few citations in the text as yet another symptom of this attitude;
however, Mead was writing in a time—a cultural situation—in which she
was free to present her ideas without the laborious effort of tying them into
the work of others, as anthropologists are expected to do today.
A feature of Mead’s ethnographic writing, already present in Coming of
Age in Samoa in the form of her description of a ‘‘typical day,’’ is her use of
evocative, idealized scenarios. In these she describes what she has taken to
be routine as though it were a single event, but in idealized form, rather than
in the form of an example of a particular occurrence that she observed. For
example, she writes ‘‘A party of visitors from another locality first asks for
fire, which their hosts immediately give them; then a low-voiced excited
conversation begins’’ (p. 6). This tendency is also reflected in her descriptions
of idealized people in certain positions or situations in their societies.
This suite of ethnographic writing methods has value in turning generalized,
passively constructed descriptions of the sociocultural system into stories
about individuals, which, one must confess, are much easier to follow with
sustained interest. However, one must doubt just how typical these situations
are. Moreover, when Mead describes the feelings of her hypothetical
individuals, psychological anthropologists must wonder how she thinks
she knows what people feel, and what field experiences with real events
and people led her to reach these generalizations (e.g., p. 232). The Mountain
Arapesh, of course, provides some answers to these questions.
A related device is using exceptional cases to prove the rule. For
example, in support of Mead’s depiction of Arapesh culture as valuing
cooperation and sharing of resources, she mentions the case of an individual
who in a séance determined that the sorcerer was motivated by desire to
prevent his victim’s children from sharing land (p. 17). Ironically, it is these
‘‘deviants’’ that seem to interest Mead the most as individuals. Whereas
traditional norms and successful psychological adaptations are illustrated
with hypothetical people and situations, conflicts that arise between certain
personalities and the sociocultural order in which they find themselves are
described with loving care and actual data. Certainly this tendency to make
sweeping statements is behind much of the criticism Mead has endured.
Nevertheless, Mead is cognizant of some dangers of generalizing conventions;
for example, she notes the potential misunderstandings that might
arise from her use of the ethnographic present tense (pp. 5, 157).

Sex and Sensibility 121
As Martin Orans (1999) observes, Freeman exaggerated the cultural
determinism of both Mead and Franz Boas in his attacks on Mead’s Samoan
work. However, among Freeman’s (1983, p. 255) legitimate critiques is his
point that while Mead claims that Samoan adolescence was free of stress,
she contradicts her own point by citing many examples of girls who did
not adjust well, but hides this by rhetorically depicting them as atypical
and relegating them to a separate section of the ethnography. This same
tendency can be seen in defining certain people as deviants in Sex and Temperament—it
is as if she is bringing ‘‘normal’’ Arapesh, Mudugumor, and
Tchambuli values into existence by contrasting them with people who do
not fit her ideal characterizations of ‘‘the culture.’’
In Mead’s writing, culture appears to be an external force that people
react to; yet the culture is internally borne by the people themselves.
Where is the locus of culture for Mead? The pattern ultimately derives
from individuals. ‘‘This spectrum [of culture] is the range of individual
differences which lie back of the so much more conspicuous cultural
emphases, and it is to this that we must turn to find the explanation of
cultural inspiration’’ (p. 265). Yet the relationship between individual
and culture remains unclear, not only in this work but also in much of
current anthropology (for a useful approach to this issue, see Strauss &
Quinn, 1998).
In Nancy McDowell’s (1991) ethnography of the Mundugumor—whose
descendants call themselves the Biwat—based on Mead’s and Fortune’s
fieldnotes, she expresses a similar impression of Mead’s notion of culture:
‘‘She seemed to operate with a concept of culture as something that existed
outside individuals, separate and apart from them. In doing this, she saw
culture as a concrete body of abstractions that existed in one relatively simple
and coherent form, something that individuals learned more or less of,
that they learned well or not so well’’ (McDowell, 1991, p. 17).
Mead relied heavily on one or a few informants to obtain a description
of the culture but did not see this as a worry. As McDowell (1991, p. 18) puts
it,
Working with one ‘‘good’’ informant posed no significant problem for Mead because if that
informant knew the culture well, there was no problem of sampling or perspective. ...The
more sophisticated notion of a distributive model of culture [see Keesing 1981, pp. 71–72]
did not exist at this time, and Mead never explicitly recognized the theoretical and methodological
problems resulting when individuals and segments of a population differ.
Nevertheless, McDowell also observes that Mead noted differences
between men and women in the cultures she studied and was an astounding
fieldworker whose accomplishments far outstripped the theoretical
limitations of her time.

122 R. I. Lohmann
Mead refers to Mundugumor culture as ‘‘malfunctioning’’ (p. 167). By
this she means that the system produces frequent conflicts (p. 168). The
impracticality of their cultural rules, such as the one against intergenerational
marriage, means that people have to break them constantly (p.
170). Because Mundugumor ideals are unreachable, people always feel they
are doing wrong. Yet the Arapesh, with their equally unrealistic ideals of
niceness, must also feel guilt when their anger boils over; however, Mead
does not treat this as a systematic weakness of the culture (pp. 172–173).
This is one symptom of Turnbull’s (1972, 1987 [1962]) ‘‘mountain people
versus forest people’’ syndrome—depicting a culture of which one disapproves
in a disparaging tone, while cooingly describing the one that one
admires. To give another example, Mead describes a husband’s many
taboos during his wife’s pregnancy benignly for the Arapesh, but as disturbing
for the Mundugumor (pp. 178–179). This appears again in her discussion
of Tchambuli: both Mundugumor and Tchambuli held that each boy
should have the opportunity to kill a captive. Yet in describing this same custom,
Mead uses decidedly calm terms in describing the Tchambuli practice,
and menacing, disapproving terms when describing the Mundugumor one
(p. 226). This is in part due to her wish to depict the different ethos surrounding
the same act in each society, and of course to fulfill her rhetorical
purpose. Ethnographers convey many subtle messages by our choice of
terms, a fact of which both authors and readers are wise to remain cognizant
(Lohmann, 2003a).
How accurate are these shorthand characterizations of cultures? In
Deborah Gewertz’s (1983, p. 11) study of the Tchambuli, now spelled
Chambri, she found that the female dominance Mead reported was not
some essential quality of Chambri culture, but was rather ‘‘the temporary result
...of certain specific historical circumstances.’’ All anthropologists must
walk the line between describing the functioning of systems, abstracted as
models of social structure, and the historical particulars of individuals
through time. Mead faced these problems sometimes squarely, sometimes
obliquely.
‘‘To the extent that a culture is integrated and...uncompromising in
its moral and spiritual preferences,’’ Mead writes, ‘‘it condemns some of
its members ...to live alien to it’’ (p. 272). Living in a fantasy world
can, she writes, help deviants escape enough from their cultural environments
to live effectively within them (p. 274). However, when one’s personality
is not only unsuited to one’s culture, but is also linked to the
opposite sex, this adds another blow at healthy identity (p. 274). Mead
does not suggest that an androgynous society is any better than a gender-differentiated
one; in fact, the former inhibits the building of a rich
and colorful culture. Rather, she calls for what would now be called a

multicultural society, in which movement between available subcultures
makes it possible for more people to find a satisfying home (p. 296;
see Banner, 2003, p. 359).
Mead held E. B. Tylor’s view that anthropology is a reformer’s science.
In this regard her work is refreshing for early twenty first century anthropology,
as it recovers from the negativity of postmodernism, because it is
not only critical, but also positive, hopeful, and thought-provokingly
practical. These are traits too often missing from some recent critical work,
particularly in subaltern studies, as Alan Beals (2002, p. 214) observes.
MALE AND FEMALE
Sex and Sensibility 123
In Male and Female, originally published in 1949, Mead expands on the
conclusions she reached about gender, though she still does not use this
term. It would acquire its present meaning—the cultural elaboration of biological
sex—and enter anthropology from sexology later (see Banner, 2003,
pp. 351, 512 n9). She draws on her Pacific fieldwork and her knowledge of
American culture as a participant. Mead is speaking to the American public
(and indeed to the American pubic!), to educate them about the value of
cross-cultural comparison in understanding their own changing gender systems
(p. 12). Mead writes that we should focus on our potentials as gendered
beings rather than our limits, and identifies herself as an applied
anthropologist (p. 37).
While Mead tends to pontificate, she does explicitly acknowledge her
positionality and perspective before this became standard practice in
anthropology. ‘‘This book is being written from the standpoint of a woman
of middle age, of an American, and of an anthropologist’’ (p. 21). Mead again
presents and cites her own work almost exclusively. She compares the seven
Pacific societies in which she had worked (Arapesh, Mundugumor,
Tchambuli, Iatmül, Manus, Bali, and Samoa) with American society, describing
how child-rearing practices influence sex identity. And Mead here
extends her rhetorical practice of creating hypothetical, generalized individuals
to sometimes creating imaginary (or at least unnamed) societies. She
frequently uses imaginary scenes in place of data to support her conclusions
(e.g., p. 78).
In all seven of the Pacific societies Mead studied, girls are clothed earlier
than boys. She explains this as ‘‘an expression that they are waiting
women, while the boys have manhood still to achieve’’ (p. 97). In New
Guinea societies, she asserts, girls are understood to automatically become
women and produce children, while boys must actively be made through
cultural intervention (this generalization is borne out in many cases; see

124 R. I. Lohmann
Herdt, 1987 [1981]). Male superiority relies on ritual secrets that in some
myths were stolen from women, the true creative force in the world.
‘‘Men owe their manhood to a theft and a theatrical mime, which would fall
to the ground in a moment as mere dust and ashes if its true constituents
were known’’ (p. 95). This very occurrence, predicted by Mead, is documented
among the Arapesh in Tuzin’s (1997) description of a Christian ‘‘revival’’
movement that swept away the men’s secrecy-derived religious power.
Mead identifies the physical differences between males and females
with which cultures must contend. Females appear to automatically become
parents. Males have no such obvious role in physical creation, and therefore
tend to strive for creative power in other arenas. Females have sharp divisions
in their life cycles, which ease identity formation: ‘‘menarche, defloration,
pregnancy, birth, lactation, and menopause’’ (pp. 151–152). Males, on
the other hand, have no discrete boundaries in their lifecycles to mark sexual
maturity, and fatherhood, because it occurs via the body of another, cannot
be experienced so directly as motherhood, and is highly subject to
cultural elaboration. Mead goes so far as to call fatherhood a ‘‘social invention’’
(p. 170). This too, encourages men to develop other forms of
manmade creativity to build a male identity, often with women being the
‘‘natural’’ objects upon which they build their ‘‘cultural’’ masculinity—this
is a precursor to Sherry Ortner’s (1974), ‘‘Is Female to Male as Nature Is to
Culture?’’:
Stage after stage in women’s life-histories thus stand, irrevocable, indisputable, accomplished.
This gives a natural basis for the little girl’s emphasis on being rather than on doing. The little
boy learns that he must act like a boy, do things, prove that he is a boy, and prove it over and
over again, while the little girl learns that she is a girl, and all she has to do is to refrain from
acting like a boy...There is no exact moment at which the boy can say, ‘‘Now I am a man,’’
unless society steps in and gives a definition (p. 162).
Two pages later, in making another point, she provides evidence to
contradict her own generalization. Among the Arapesh, a girl’s menarche
is marked by ‘‘Older women of her family [who] attend her and instruct
her in rolling stinging nettle-leaves and inserting them into her vulva to
make her breasts grow’’ (p. 164). So girls, too, can be at least enhanced if
not absolutely made by cultural means. Nevertheless, Mead links female
to nature and male to culture—the imagined ideal—which must be imposed
upon the pre-existing, natural world. And this natural femininity is a barrier
to the imaginative type of creativity in which men tend to specialize (p. 168).
In effect, Mead argues that female ties to nature limit their imaginative or
cultural development at which men excel because of being forced to do
rather than merely be. Women, it would seem, are awake in the physical
world, while men are dreaming in an imagined one, and projecting their

Sex and Sensibility 125
dreamscape onto the landscape. An interesting suggestion, but contradicted
by women’s often greater engagement with spirit possession (e.g., Boddy,
1988; Lohmann, 2003b, pp. 200–201) and dominance in some religions
(Sered, 1994; for a comparison of projected dreamscapes of female and
male initiates in a New Guinea society, see Kempf & Hermann, 2003). In
Male and Female we see ideas that would later be brought together in
ecofeminism, in which woman is identified with Earth and the natural
environment, which man’s culture shapes, dominates, and abuses (see,
e.g., Warren, 1987).
Mead puts contemporary American views of what is naturally female or
male to the test by comparing them to views found among the peoples she
has studied, revealing that much of what Americans assume to be natural is
in fact cultural. ‘‘Natural,’’ in this context, refers to reality as it really is, while
‘‘cultural’’ refers to peoples’ idealized models of reality, implying that these
models are more or less inaccurate, or at least stylized perceptions of physical
reality. This approach continues to be followed by those in the discipline
who question anthropological models of what is natural, though Mead is
seldom cited in such work (e.g., Yanagisako & Delaney, 1995). Mead dispatches,
for example, the view that the female orgasm is ‘‘natural’’: ‘‘Comparative
cultural material gives no grounds for assuming that an orgasm is
an integral and unlearned part of women’s sexual response, as it is of men’s
sexual response, and strongly suggests that a greater part of women’s copulatory
behaviour is learned’’ (p. 206).
According to Mead, social fatherhood and sexual partnership for males,
on the one hand, and orgasm and sexual focus for females, on the other, are
both potentials that must be learned. Unlearned, in women, is a desire for
children, and in men, is uncommitted promiscuity:
Male sexuality seems originally focused to no goal beyond immediate discharge; it is society
that provides the male with a desire for children, for patterned interpersonal relationships that
order, control, and elaborate his original impulses. (p. 212)
Girls can certainly learn not to want children, but such learning seems always to be
socially imposed. Every delicate detail of the female body may of course be reinterpreted by
the culture, and no longer be recognised as the doorway to new life. The breasts may be
labeled as erotic zones, to be trained and cherished only because they are valuable supplements
to love-making, not because they will one day feed children (p. 214; on this last
point, see Dettwyler, 1995, whose cross-cultural study indicates that breasts are not universally
eroticized).
Mead finds a commonality in all the diversity of American culture: that
ideals of personal happiness and fulfillment fill American consciousness.
They influence perception, causing Americans either to see what is not ideal
as though it were, or else to look upon the nonideal with extreme dissatisfaction
(pp. 238–242). In support of this assertion, she wryly points out that

126 R. I. Lohmann
Americans consider love more genuine if one falls in love spontaneously,
without the benefit of caution or learning about the beloved first (p. 320).
Mead identifies Americans as less sensual than Europeans, and accounts
for this in terms of ‘‘the gap that all Americans face when the actual
sensuous experience must be adjusted to the visual ideal that is held up
before them. No sensuous actuality fits the dream, each must be to a degree
denied, blurred, or critically rejected, so that one may continue to live’’
(p. 242). To this lack of fit between ideal and real, Mead attributes the focus
on looks in American love culture. Dubious here is Mead’s assumption that
appearance can be ideal, but feel cannot. However, her indication of the
dissatisfied idealism as a driving force of American culture strikes me as
valuable.
Continuing the theme of sensuality, Mead criticizes 1940s American
bottle-feeding practices for its impact on people’s sensual sensibilities:
‘‘For the primary learning experience that is the physical prototype of the
sex relationship—a complimentary relation between the body of the mother
and the body of the child—is substituted a relationship between the child
and an object, an object that imitates the breast, but which is not handled
as either part of the mother or part of the baby’’ (p. 249).
There is an assumption here that the memory of suckling will influence
adult life profoundly. Will men and women who were bottle-fed as infants
treat their lovers as objects rather than people? This is an empirical question,
and one very difficult to answer, yet Mead treats it as demonstrated.
Moving from infancy to adolescence, Mead characterizes the rules of
dating in 1940s America: boys are to ask, dates should be in public for display
purposes, and dating is done for prestige, not out of sexual attraction
(pp. 264–267). Rather than being a people preoccupied with sex, appearance,
and love for itself, Mead asserts that ‘‘this continuous emphasis on
the sexually relevant physical appearance is an outcome of using a heterosexual
game [dating] as the prototype for success and popularity in adolescence’’
(p. 268). Mead points out the contradictions in this system that
the cultural participant must navigate. ‘‘We actually place our young people
in a virtually intolerable situation, giving them the entire setting for [sexual]
behaviour for which we then punish them whenever it occurs’’ (p. 268).
Mead emphasized the significance of cultural contradictions for individual
lives, but she also makes a point similar to Karl Marx’s, that is, that they
are causal of cultural change. ‘‘[T]o the degree that a style of beauty that [is]
unobtainable by most people [is in force], or a style of bravery or initiative[,]
... then both men and women suffer ...[T]his suffering, this discrepancy,
this sense of failure in an enjoined role, is the point of leverage for social
change’’ (p. 276). Finding and commenting on hypothetical consequences
of such contradictions make up a major, and interesting, portion of this

work. Mead describes the difficulties of boys being told not to ‘‘be
women’’—it gives them a fear of losing what is inalienable, their sex. American
women’s new freedom to take ‘‘male’’ jobs has ironically created ‘‘a
society that appears to throw its doors wide open to women, but translates
her every step towards success as having been damaging—to her own
chances of marriage, and to the men whom she passes on the road’’(p. 291).
Mead struggles with two incompatible positions of freedom versus tradition:
individuals should be free to create their own gender ideals, yet they
should also embrace the beauty of their traditional gender roles. That is, on
the one hand, people should not be limited by gender ideals (p. 346), but
on the other hand, male and female are marvelously different, and these differences
should be celebrated, as the cliché now has it, to allow satisfying
identity formation (p. 349; cf. Banner, 2003, pp. 358–359). Her ultimate
choice appears to be more freedom, and she calls in her 1962 introduction
for the ‘‘provision for many different styles of self-realization and sex behavior’’
(p. xxxv), and sees access to birth control pills as making this more
possible.
These editions of Sex and Temperament and Male and Female are
unfortunately printed on low-quality paper. They share the same two introductions,
written by Helen Fisher and Mary Catherine Bateson, rather than
each having its own. Fisher places these works in the historical nature–
nurture debate and adds that the brain-mind has come to be recognized
as a third influence that creates behavior patterns. Indeed, agency,
consciousness, cognition, and neurobiology are pressing concerns for
twenty first century anthropology. In Bateson’s introduction, she recounts
that Mead was asked by her first editor to write about the relevance of
her observations for ordinary Americans. This is certainly one of the reasons
why some of Mead’s work still makes interesting and useful reading for
beginning students.
CONCLUSION
Sex and Sensibility 127
A revival of interest in Margaret Mead is apparent in a number of
recent and forthcoming works addressing her life and work and their relevance
for current anthropology. Among these, two recent biographies by
Lois Banner (2003) and Hilary Lapsley (1999) provide enormous insight into
Mead’s intellectual history and drive, and how these were tied up with her
relationships, particularly with Ruth Benedict. Gerald Sullivan (2004) offers
a valuable descriptive analysis of Mead’s unpublished ‘‘squares’’ system of
human psychological types that developed in discussions between herself,
Reo Fortune, and Gregory Bateson in the Sepik, and that lies behind much

128 R. I. Lohmann
of her thinking. And David Lipset’s (2003, p. 712) rereading of Sex and
Temperament and the writings of its critics defends Mead’s basic findings
and declares her work prescient of subsequent developments in feminist
anthropology.
Reading older work critically, we are reminded of how far we have
come as a discipline, but we also come to appreciate the accomplishments
of our intellectual ancestors, including their insights that have been forgotten
or falsely stereotyped but which have relevance to current work. No
longer could some of Mead’s problematic rhetorical techniques pass muster
in twenty first century anthropology, but reading Mead’s work with an open
mind can allow us to rediscover some of her valuable goals, methods, and
insights that we have lost along the way. Like the writings of the best ethnographers
to follow her, Margaret Mead’s ethnography at its best describes
cultures—and the people who bear and participate in them—in minute
detail. Unlike most current work, however, it also encourages and shows
us as individuals how to reproduce and use unfamiliar cultural elements
in the same way that through learning a foreign language one learns how
to think and express oneself in a new and useful way. And learning about
alternative ways of thinking, feeling, and being so that we can actively
enrich our lives is surely one of the most important reasons for doing
anthropology. Margaret Mead, perhaps more than any other anthropologist,
wisely put anthropology in the service of this goal, and her writings remain
to urge the rest of us to do the same.
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