An Anthropologist’s Reflections on Margaret Mead

Dr. Constance Sutton reflects on the lasting impact imparted on her by pioneering female anthropologist Margaret Mead.

Published October 1, 2001

By Constance Sutton, PhD
Academy Contributor

Margaret Mead had a profound influence, personally as well as professionally, on the lives of many people. Dr. Constance Sutton, professor of Anthropology at New York University and a fellow of The New York Academy of Sciences, knew Mead for 24 years. Following are some recollections of Mead and her work by Sutton.

A few weeks after my arrival in New York in late 1954 I began working as Mead’s editorial assistant in her turret office in the American Museum of Natural History. (We were working on the manuscripts of New Lives for Old: Cultural Transformations- Manus, 1928–1953 [1956] and Childhood in Contemporary Cultures [1955], co-edited with Martha Wolfenstein.)

I had come with an MA in anthropology from the University of Chicago and uncertainty about how to chart my future. At that time it was thought that women who were married to non-anthropologists and who wanted to have children would not be able to manage the fieldwork necessary for a PhD in cultural anthropology.

It took only a week for Margaret Mead to banish all that! Having said her characteristic “fiddlesticks” to the reasons I offered when she asked why I wasn’t working for my doctorate degree, she arranged a two-year fellowship for me in anthropology at Columbia University, where she was an adjunct professor and where I was to work as her teaching and research assistant. (She was the only woman professor I was to have in my entire undergraduate and graduate education!)

Make the Way

Peppered with advice on how to handle this and that, she had said in effect that it was possible to “have it all.” I did my doctoral research on sugar workers in Barbados and she chaired my dissertation committee. Indeed, she gave me support and encouragement throughout the rest of her life.

Mead helped “make the way” for many of us, male and female. She early erased the line between the personal and the professional, integrating an interest in our lives with an interest in our ideas and the work we were doing. It was for her both a mode of interaction and a method of scientific work and theorizing. Moreover, she was remarkably open to new ideas whatever their source.

Bridging the personal/professional divide was also present in her teaching and writing about “participant observation”— the code word for field-based research methodology. She was concerned with giving it a scientific grounding. In so doing, she prefigured much that has become current in contemporary writing on research methodology in the human sciences. Writing against the narrow, logical, positivist concept of objectivity prevalent in the social sciences of the ’50s and ’60s, she emphasized not a distancing of oneself from the subjects of one’s research, but an active engagement that included observing oneself and one’s reactions as an explicit part of the data.

Research in New Guinea

About her early research in New Guinea in 1932 with Reo Fortune and Gregory Bateson, she wrote: “Our sense of discovery was completely combined with our own personal sense of discovering ourselves.” I referred to this aspect of the research process in my university teaching as recognizing that you are an important datum in your own research.

Today this is called “positioning yourself” in relation to the people you are researching. Those of us who took Margaret Mead’s course in “Field Methods” at Columbia University in the 50s remember it as the only “hands on” information we received about how to do field research in a systematic way. Most of our training was about what to research, not how to do it.

Margaret Mead has been particularly well known for her belief in the relevance of anthropological knowledge (and social science more generally) to issues of public policy and everyday life. She drew upon the broad sweep of her research and knowledge in addressing both micro-cultural issues, such as nutrition or breastfeeding, and global issues, such as nuclear disarmament—and everything in between.

Mead strongly believed that if we knew how to ask the right questions we could find solutions. Asking the right question meant understanding that the way a question is asked shapes its answer. Given this awareness, she felt that a great deal could be achieved by putting social science knowledge to work on behalf of human welfare and justice. As this involved making social science knowledge widely available, she committed herself to writing in a way that would make what she said accessible to a wide public.

Public Engagement

Mead’s public engagement and what this kind of public engagement means today are important aspects of her contributions to science and one focal point in the series of events at the Academy this Fall celebrating Mead’s centennial. The Academy is an appropriate site for re-examining Mead’s legacy. She had been active at the Academy as vice president in 1966–72, as an honorary life governor of the Board, as a member of its Committee on Science and Public Policy in 1974–75, and as a participant in a number of its conferences.

I want to underscore an important point about this celebration. It emphasizes one of Mead’s chief interests, namely the changing nature of the cross-generational transmission of knowledge and culture (see her Continuities in Cultural Evolution, 1964). In examining the ways Mead prefigured the kinds of knowledge and the approaches to knowledge that remain of concern to us today, we will be addressing the key issues of how knowledge is communicated across generations.

Also read: Celebrating Girls and Women in Science