"Chief among our gains must be reckoned this possibility of choice, the recognition of many possible ways of life, where other civilizations have recognized only one."
"Nothing was ever done just because it was the conventionally done thing." — Stephen Toulmin, on the Mead-Bateson household
"It would be an insult to both me and my husband to expect marital fidelity on the part of either of us."
"Human nature is almost unbelievably malleable, responding accurately and contrastingly to contrasting cultural conditions."
For roughly half a century, Margaret Mead (1901-1978) was the most famous social scientist on earth — and, more remarkably, the most energetic human being most of her acquaintances had ever met, which is already typologically telling. Eight expeditions to the Pacific, seven cultures studied (in general, Ne as a function likes travelling to new places and receive new impressions from the outside world), a museum curatorship held for five decades, a monthly column in Redbook on whatever the American family was worrying about that month, and a mentoring operation that raised a whole generation of anthropologists. She was a fairly typical IEE in her possibility-hunting, human-network creating intelligence.
If you strip five decades of Mead's anthropology down to its single recurring argument, you get one thesis: human nature could be otherwise. Coming of Age in Samoa argued that adolescence need not be a storm — here was a culture where it wasn't. Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies argued that gender is not destiny — she vividly described gentle, nurturing men of the Arapesh, the fierce women of the Mundugumor, the neat role-reversal of the Tchambuli — social convention, not biology, determines how people behave. Against every determinism of her era — racial, biological, sexual — she deployed another arrangement as a proof that the human material is plastic and the possibilities are open. Mead clearly liked to collect counterexamples to fatalism. A scientific career built as one long demonstration of latent human possibility is Ne operating as a research program. "In contrast to Sigmund Freud's dictum, "anatomy is destiny," Mead found gender roles to be culturally determined rather than innate, noting that behavior regarded as masculine in one culture could be considered feminine in another."
Socionist Danidin describes the IEE evolutionary strategy as "promiscuous friendliness strategy (the expansion of ideas about the social norms leading to interpopulation communication and the emergence of a linguistic & cultural settings over the genotype)". It fits Mead's entire philosophical trust well — the variety of linguistic and cultural settings is exactly what she explored in her studies. Culture over biology, nurture over nature, plasticity over determinism in education, sexuality, even semiotics itself — Mead spent five decades defending this as the central proposition of her science. Quite an interesting case of a type whose lifework is the scientific defense of its own "evolutionary strategy"!
Mead's method, which she herself clearly enjoyed on a base level, was qualitative and anecdotal, built on conversations with her informants rather than counting variables. Her warm, open personality helped her earn trust in the communities she studied, she never remained detached and learned by entering relationships (as we will see, this would leave her open to criticism that she may have described specific people who may have been different from their general societies). The same faculty organized her entire existence at home. Mead's life was a web: Ruth Benedict, mentor, collaborator, and intimate; Reo Fortune, husband and co-fieldworker; Gregory Bateson, husband, co-inventor of visual anthropology, and lifelong intellectual partner long after the divorce; Rhoda Métraux, collaborator and companion — the romances, the friendships, and the science braided into a single continuous network. She could be bossy, but her bossiness was advisory: she did not command obedience (her circle lacked a single orthodoxy, and had people who strongly disagreed with her, while remaining inside, as opposed to circles some EIE's tend to build), she prescribed possibilities.
Her critics spent fifty years aiming at her telling weakness. From the earliest reviews to Derek Freeman's famous posthumous assault, the charge against Mead was constant: anecdotal data, excessive reliance on informal interviews, personal impressions, too-quick generalization, statistical incompetence (lack of attention to more impersonal statistical data was one of the more credible points against her; in particular, Freeman accused her of ignoring Samoan quantitative police and court records which pointed to a more socially conservative picture than her informal-relationship based potrayal), psychological concepts applied without logical rigor and consistent definitions. Nobody ever accused Mead of lacking insight or human penetration, but they credibly criticized their formal-systematic apparatus. Indeed, IEE lacks the attraction to long statistical tables so beloved by Ti leads, and tellingly, she never built a complete theory.
Her last major theoretical notion, the "prefigurative culture," in her 1970 book Culture and Commitment, was about a world where the young must teach the old, the direction of transmission itself made new. It was a fitting final idea for a woman whose whole science had been the systematic discovery that nothing human is fixed.
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