Review: March 2009

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Margaret Mead, who remains America’s best-known anthropologist thirty years after her death, belonged to a new breed of public intellectual that blossomed in the twentieth century—the celebrity scientist. Like Carl Sagan and Benjamin Spock, Click book covers for ordering information. she was as recognizable as this month’s Hollywood sensation, an icon whose appeal went far beyond her immediate professional community. Millions listened to her on radio talk shows and watched her TV documentaries; in her regular column in Redbook magazine, she voiced opinions on issues ranging from feminism to nuclear energy. The image of Mead, gray-haired, caped, and carrying a forked staff, became an archetype: she was a real-life Yoda, dispensing wisdom with the feisty assurance of a cultural critic whose keen eye and long experience could be counted on.

Nancy C. Lutkehaus, a professor of anthropology at the University of Southern California, worked for several years while in college and graduate school as an assistant to Mead. She’s written an illuminating book—more a sociohistorical portrait than a birth-to-death biography—that examines how Margaret Mead became an American icon.

Part of it, of course, was being in the right place at the right time. Born in 1901, Mead came of age in the mid-1920s, the decade when women, newly enfranchised, were celebrating new freedoms. Mead’s pioneering study of adolescence in Samoa understandably struck a responsive chord. Even before she had published anything on the subject, newspapers were reporting on the brave and brilliant young woman who was going native on a remote tropical island to find out whether young girls far from “civilization” grew up with the same problems and longings as the flappers of New York and Paris.

Chance, however, was only part of the story. Mead possessed boundless energy, a sharp mind, and a talent for evocative writing. Though she published many solid monographs in professional journals as an academic anthropologist, it was her popular writing, eloquent and accessible, that propelled her to superstardom. Her first book, Coming of Age in Samoa, published in 1928, was an immediate best seller. Coming as it did at a time when America’s social mores were changing, its account of sexual freedom was received with delight by many who agreed with the notion that societal taboos and habits were conditioned by culture, not dictated by nature. Over the next half century, Mead became a leading voice for progressive cultural reform.

She never shunned controversy, and even after her death, Mead’s Samoan study came under question. But by focusing on what made her a celebrity, Lutkehaus shows that Mead’s work endures and that she was more than an empty tabloid phenomenon. The Mead of this book—by no means a puff piece—is thoughtful, enormously talented, and accomplished as both a writer and a scientist, if also opinionated, at times overbearing, and like most prodigious achievers, driven. Her genius lay not so much in revolutionizing academic anthropology as in making her science come alive as a transformative power in society. The American Museum of Natural History, where she worked for most of her career, lists Mead among its fifty greatest treasures, and rightly so—she was as remarkable as any mammoth bone, gemstone, or feather cloak the museum has on display.