Margaret Mead, who caused consternation with her report of easy-going sex lives of adolescent women in Samoa.
Culture
Margaret Mead, who caused consternation with her report of easy-going sex lives of adolescent women in Samoa.
Practices and beliefs of different societies profoundly affect who we are and how we feel about others. In Samoa, Margaret Mead found that adolescent women had many lovers, and enjoyed a life that was largely free of anxiety. On the Pacific Island of Ifaluk, Catherine Lutz found that happiness was not valued as it is in America, because it can make people too pleased with themselves. Although on Ifaluk people are generally cheerful, their most valued emotion is anxiety about whether everyone in the social group is alright. In the precarious life of Inuit people, in the Arctic, Jean Briggs found the main principle in adult life was to accept others, and never to be angry.
A society is a group of people who live in a particular place and time. A culture is the set of customs and beliefs of a society that its members take in for themselves, that brings them together … holds them together. Cultures are ways of life of specific social worlds, ways of collective intentions. The social science of understanding them is cultural anthropology.
Margaret Mead (see a photo from 1948, at the head of this chapter) became the world’s most famous cultural anthropologist. She went to live in Samoa to study the experience of adolescent women and, in 1928, she wrote Coming of Age in Samoa. She brought back a perspective that challenged the ideas of her own middle-class America. During her life, Mead made a number of field trips to other societies. Rather than confining herself to the academy, she engaged in public debates about different cultures and what we could learn about them that would be of relevance to life in the West.1
Mead was born in 1901 to a mother who was a sociologist and a father who was a professor of finance.2 Although her father urged her to go into nursing, she didn’t want to do that and in 1923 she earned her bachelor’s degree in psychology at Barnard College, in New York. It was in New York that she met Franz Boas, a professor at Columbia University, a leading anthropologist of his day. (It was one of Boas’s collected stories that Frederic Bartlett used in his study of remembering, discussed in chapter 7.) With Boas as her advisor, Mead went on to earn her PhD at Columbia in 1929.
In the foreword to Coming of Age in Samoa, Boas wrote:
Courtesy, modesty, good manners, conformity to definite ethical standards are universal, but what constitutes courtesy, modesty, very good manners, and definite ethical standards is not universal. It is instructive to know that standards differ in the most unexpected ways … We feel, therefore, grateful to Miss Mead for having undertaken to identify herself so completely with Samoan youth that she gives us a lucid and clear picture of the joys and difficulties encountered by the individual in a culture so entirely different from our own.3
Mead learned the language of the people she went to visit. They lived in three contiguous villages along a shore of the island of Taū, in Samoa. The villages had a combined population of about 600. Mead wrote that she spent “six months accumulating an intimate and detailed knowledge of all the adolescent girls in this community, 68 in number.”4 As well as living with them, conversing with them, taking part in their activities, she administered intelligence tests, and took meticulous field notes.
Mead described childcare as more distributed than that of the Western nuclear family, with relatives and other village members joining in so that children had close relationships with several adults. The world of childhood and adolescence was kept fairly separate from the world of adulthood. Mead characterized the lives of the young women when they entered adolescence as not only stress-free and unproblematic, but enlivened by sexual relationships that tended not to last very long. The relationships were usually either with boys of their own age, or with young men in the village.
Although people’s sexual relationships were topics of conversation in Samoan society, for the most part adolescent young women had sex with whomever they chose, without adverse criticism. Their way of life continued until they became adults and entered into marriage arrangements on largely economic grounds, at which time they began to bring up children of their own. Mead said that with the exception of a few cases (that she discussed in detail),
adolescence represented no period of crisis or stress, but was instead an orderly developing of a set of slowly maturing interests and activities. The girls’ minds were perplexed by no conflicts, troubled by no philosophical queries, beset by no remote ambitions. To live as a girl with many lovers as long as possible and then to marry in one’s own village, near one’s own relatives and to have many children, these were uniform and satisfying ambitions.5
Mead’s book was both popular and controversial. Her finding that adolescent girls had pleasant and casual sexual relationships before they married and that later they might have sex outside marriage, would have been challenge enough to the social norms and moral beliefs of those who read her book in the late 1920s and early 1930s. But to combine this, as Mead did, with blunt criticism of the intense turmoil about identity, about sexual prohibitions, about aspiration, and about disappointment, that she described as characteristic of young women’s adolescence in America, multiplied the shock.
After Mead died in 1978, an anthropologist named Derek Freeman published a book in which he maintained that Mead had had her leg pulled by her chief informant in Samoa. He said this person had invented the material Mead later published as a kind of joke. Mead, however, kept meticulous field notes, and from these it is clear that she reached her main conclusions before she met this informant who, by the time Freeman met her, had converted to Christianity. The American Anthropological Association dismissed Freeman’s book as unscientific and misleading. The incident shows that becoming a popular figure can make a researcher a target for unwarranted attacks, perhaps based on envy. At the same time, the need has arisen in psychology to know, more clearly, what findings are reliable, and this has led to a new movement in which findings that are controversial can be replicated.6
Vygotsky and Internalization of the Social World
Whereas Jean Piaget concentrated on innate stages of development, Lev Vygotsky emphasized the cultural. When a child acquires language, the resources of an individual child are augmented by the resources of family and society. The mind becomes, according to Vygotsky, an internalization of the social world. But it’s not a container into which objects are put, so that they become mental objects. The mind becomes a means of imagining, conceptualizing, planning, a means of talking with oneself, and of talking with others within oneself. It becomes an internal social world of its own, able to inform interactions in the outside social world.
Here is an example from Vygotsky’s colleague, Roza Levina, who studied how a four-and-a-half-year-old girl would retrieve some candy from a cupboard when given a stool and a stick. The child talks to herself in the way that she has been talked to by parents. She keeps up a running commentary, then makes suggestions to herself in the form of plans:
“No, that doesn’t get it,” the girl says. “I could use the stick.” She takes the stick and knocks at the candy. “It will move now,” she says, then reflects on the situation and analyzes what she has done. “It moved. I couldn’t get it with the stool, but the stick worked.”7
Here is the mind at work: a physical and social world within which is a model of the world outside, which makes plans so that the world outside comes to mirror the world within.
Vygotsky considered the importance of private speech: a transition from talking to others in the world into being able to think in verbal terms, which become terms of meaning. A revolution occurs when the kinds of thought of Piaget’s sensory-motor stage come together with language to create a new kind of mental functioning, which we can experience for ourselves as adults when we reflect on what we are thinking or what we are planning.
Michael Tomasello and his colleagues showed that children know that they and others are able to act in the world. He has gone on to show that, as children develop language, actions become symbolized as verbs, and verb islands, which were discussed in chapter 6, become the mental means by which symbolic actions are connected to people, to their desires, and to things in the world. This kind of view, based on studies of how children begin to speak, is coming to replace the idea of specific languages being assimilated into a universal grammar of the kind proposed by Chomsky.8
Verb-symbols are used in communications to make what John Searle has called “speech acts”: to call attention to something, to make a request, agree to do something, and so on. So an infant might say “Get more juice” as a request to a mother, knowing that she can act, by getting (verb) the juice, to fulfill the request. Such utterances are among the beginnings of explicit cooperation with others. They are based on knowledge translated into words, knowledge that can be used to call attention, to request, to agree, and so on.
At the end of chapter 6, we looked at an example of the language of a twenty-one-month-old child called Emily, whose parents Katherine Nelson asked to put a tape recorder by her bed, to record what she said to herself before she went to sleep. Here is Emily, continuing to talk before she goes to sleep, at the age of two years and eight months.
Tomorrow when we wake up from bed, first me and Daddy and Mommy, you, eat breakfast like we usually do, and then we’re going to p-l-a-y, and then soon as Daddy comes, Carl’s going to come over, and then we’re going to play a little while. And then Carl and Emily are both going down the car with somebody, and we’re going to ride to nursery school, and then we when we get there, we’re all going to get out of the car, go into nursery school, and Daddy’s going to give us kisses, then go, and then say and then we will say goodbye, then he’s going to work and we’re going to play at nursery school.9
Here we see the beginnings of narrative structure, the making of meaningful sense of the world in terms of agents who persist through time, and encounter incidents. Nelson proposes that here we see the kind of thinking that functions to comprehend and construct a whole world. Emily is rather precocious but, based on her mental models of the world, she affords us a privileged glimpse: an externalized version of thought as it takes place online.
Thus, language opens up not only a world of cooperation with others, but a world of self-reflective consciousness. As development proceeds, this will enable people to share with others their accounts of emotions they have experienced.
At the same time, in Emily’s pre-sleep reflections, we see a person taking in a culture: with a nuclear family that has a mommy and a daddy, one that values play for children, one that involves cars and nursery schools, one in which parents kiss their children, and the father goes off to a place called “work.” Here, too, are distinctive elements of a middle-class life. In other societies such as those of Samoa, and the one discussed in the next section, families are extended, play is not emphasized, and there are no cars.
The Island of Ifaluk
For nine months Catherine Lutz lived on the Micronesian island of Ifaluk, which had a population of about 430 people. On the basis of previous research, Lutz knew that on Ifaluk, “gender relations were more egalitarian than in American society.”10 She wanted to see how it might be possible for people to organize their lives in such a way as “to avoid problems that seemed to diminish American culture, in particular its pervasive inequality, of both gender and class, and its violence.”
Lutz’s research focused on emotions. As well as being close in spirit to Mead’s, it enables us to continue to think about human universals such as those of cooperation and shared intentions. The title of Lutz’s book, Unnatural Emotions—the cover of which appears in figure 22—gives a hint of her findings. The emotions she discovered on Ifaluk were not those proposed by Darwin as biologically based. When Lutz says that emotions on Ifaluk are “unnatural,” she doesn’t mean they are weird—she makes them very comprehensible—but that they are created and sustained by culture rather than nature.
Anthropologists know that from visits of six months or a year they cannot become full member of societies different from their own. If one emigrates, it may take five years, or ten, or more, to become fully part of one’s new society. So anthropologists’ intentions are not to attain this kind of experience. Instead, they bring us news of two kinds. One kind is of a world of cousins in faraway societies. The other kind is about ourselves, dwellers in industrialized societies. Lutz does this by juxtaposing Ifaluk’s ideas and practices with Western ideas and practices. Her role was to offer herself as someone with whom we could identify as she took part in life on a Pacific atoll.
Here is an example of the kind of juxtaposition she makes. In the United States, people are brought up to believe that it is a self-evident truth that they have a “right to the pursuit of happiness.” Indeed, happiness is very important in American society. Do people think in the same way on Ifaluk? There is a word that translates as “happiness”: ker. But though Ifalukians often smile in a way that has been found to be recognizable worldwide, they don’t think they have a right to ker. They are rather suspicious of it, because it can lead to over-excitement, or to showing off, or even to being rowdy, all types of behavior that are thoroughly disapproved of. The proper way to behave on Ifaluk is to be maluwelu, meaning “gentle, calm, and quiet.”11 This state is important because you need to be what the Ifalukians think of as socially intelligent, to see that everyone in your group is alright.
Figure 22. Cover of Catherine Lutz’s book about the culture of the atoll of Ifaluk. Source: Front cover of Lutz, C. A. (1988). Unnatural emotions: Everyday sentiments on a Micronesian atoll and their challenge to Western theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, paperback edition. © 1988 University of Chicago Press.
At its highest, the atoll of Ifaluk is only five meters above sea level. Typhoons can wipe out the taro gardens that the women cultivate, and deplete the lagoons of fish that the men catch. Women and men live fairly separate lives and it was one of Lutz’s regrets that she was not able to gain much insight into Ifaluk’s world of men. Women tended the infants and kept their brothers supplied with vegetables. Men supervised the toddlers while they were making rope or mending nets, and kept their sisters supplied with fish. Lutz proposes that the Ifalukians value interdependence because of the precariousness of their existence. By contrast, Westerners tend to value independence, and we like to feel secure in our powers.
Had Lutz been a clan sister, visiting from another atoll, she would have slept in the main residence of her family, with a dozen other women and infants, so that everyone’s sleeping mat touched the mats of others. In that way nobody feels lonely. When Lutz arrived on the island, her adoptive father, who had some experience of American Peace Corps workers, knew that Americans were exotic beings who have strange ideas such as a preference for sleeping alone. Over two or three days a solution was reached, in which a cooking hut was converted and moved to just a few feet from a women’s residence so that Lutz could sleep in it. In this way, her peculiar predilection for aloneness could be satisfied without departing from the island’s good sense of being close to other people.
If any emotional state is valued on Ifaluk in the way happiness is in America, it is metagu (fear/anxiety). Here is an incident that illustrates it. Lutz found that on Ifaluk, as Margaret Mead had found on Samoa, sexual relationships were often relatively casual, and couples would go off into the interior for sexual meetings. But such encounters occurred only at night. Meetings in public, in the daytime, that had any sexual component did not occur.
One night, sleeping quietly, Lutz was woken by a man “entering [her] doorless house. The danger I saw in that instant led me to scream out, using unreflectively the sense I had brought from home that strange men entering your house at night intend violent harm of any number of kinds.”12
The man ran away quickly and Lutz’s adoptive mother and family, sleeping just a few feet away, were with her immediately. When they heard that Lutz had been afraid they found it hilarious. Although they knew that men could sometimes be frightening, particularly in public places if they were drunk or if they seemed to be about to fight, they knew that a man coming privately at night could only mean one thing. It was to suggest a sexual tryst: the very opposite of anything that, on Ifaluk, a woman would be frightened of.
Lutz said that afterward, although for the Ifalukians the reason for her display of metagu seemed wonderfully strange, she found that when her adoptive mother subsequently talked about the incident, she did so with some satisfaction because her adopted daughter, rather than being utterly peculiar, had shown herself sensible enough to be capable of feeling and showing this important emotion.
English is a language in which it seems people are rather passive in relation to emotions. Terms for emotions tend to be adjectives: he is sad, she was angry, and so on. This usage implies that emotions happen to a person. On Ifaluk, emotion is not distinguished from thought, so that the word nunuwan means “emotion/thought,” and it is not individual but social. It’s a connection that people make with each other. And on Ifaluk, emotions don’t just happen. People do them. Something similar happens in the Russian language, in which one doesn’t say and feel the equivalent of “I am angry,” but something closer to “I contend,” with the expectation that in an interaction with the other person the matter will be resolved.13 We do have the more active kind of emotion in English with the idea of love, an emotion we do, which forms a relation with someone else, but English speakers seem often to receive emotions rather than perform them.
We are left with puzzles. Happiness is a state to which Americans have a right. But the corresponding idea in Ifaluk, ker, is suspect because to do it is to start to walk about on one’s own, to become too self-centered and risk forgetting one’s responsibilities to others. By contrast, anxiety in America is to be avoided, and replaced with security. On Ifaluk, metagu (anxiety) expresses human vulnerability. It is about others, and it relates people with each other. There is something universal about emotions. We can understand Ifalukian emotions and they can understand Western emotions, at least to some extent. At the same time, the differences are striking.
Many books and articles have now been written about societies very different from those of the industrialized West. Members of one society visited by Nelson Chagnon, the Yanomamö, call themselves the fierce people. They exist in a state of continuous warfare with neighboring groups of the same society. Because of this, among the Yanomamö a large proportion of young men suffer violent deaths. Then there are the Ik, displaced from their traditional hunter-gatherer way of life, and suffering devastating famines. Colin Turnbull lived with them for three years and described them as having become extremely individualistic. In contrast are the Inuit, in the Arctic, with whom Jean Briggs lived for a year and a half. They are barely individualistic at all. She found that among them anger was simply not part of adult life. The !Kung, visited by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, continue a way of life as nomads in the Kalahari Desert which may be similar to that of nearly all of humankind over most of the last 200,000 years.
Katherine Nelson introduced us to the young Emily as she reflected on her life before falling asleep in a middle-class, two-parent, family in the United States. For an Ifalukian Emily, or an Inuit Emily, it would not just be that the people, things, and places that she brought to mind would be different. She would grow up to think and feel in a very different way.
A question for us humans is how to extend the love we have for a parent, for a sexual partner, or for a friend, beyond the immediate and particular society in which we live, to human society in general.
