At the end of her career, Margaret Mead was the chief curator of the Natural History Museum in New York. In that role, she used to be a regular visitor at the Menninger Clinic (she came to give talks - not as a patient). It was long before I worked there, but people still talked about her visits. It was said that she stated that she liked Freud because his theory of sexuality, one that is based in a belief in our essentially bisexual nature, was consistent with her experience of her own sexuality. After reading Lily King's novel Euphoria, a highly fictionalized account of Mead's groundbreaking work in Papua New Guinea in the 1930's, it is likely that Dr. Mead was also referring to Freud as explaining something about the sexuality of the tribal people she had observed.
I find it ironic that Mead found Freud to be a sort of scientific soul mate. On the surface, their methods couldn't be more different. Freud waited in his consulting room for a very narrow and rarified slice of highly cultivated Europeans, most of them female, to consult with him about unusual symptoms they were experiencing. Margaret Mead travelled to the ends of the earth to observe people who had never had an interaction with a Westerner and tried to discover how people in their "natural" state might function. While Freud talked to people in their native language, Mead was observing them, in part, as objects. While she worked to learn their language, she never became fluent in it, and lived with people for a limited amount of time, observing them. At one point Mead is picked up by Europeans in a boat on the river in the jungle. "In her mind Nell [the name given to the Mead figure] was writing:
- ornamentation of neck, wrists, fingers
- paint on face only
- emphasis on lips (dark red) and eyes (black)
- hips emphasized by cinching of waist
- conversation competitive
- the valued thing is the man, not having one, necessarily, but the ability to attract one.
She couldn't stop herself."
And this anthropological mindset was infectious. Suddenly things that had looked so familiar around me became strange and unusual. Our customs became just that: customs. And there was an oddness to them. A dance - a ritual became something that felt constructed and artificial instead of natural and organic. And that can be part of the clinical experience, too. This thing that feels so natural to this person - and to me when I am empathizing with it - can also feel strange, odd and foreign. It can be a symptom - something that puts us out of step with ourselves and/or with others, while also feeling as familiar and natural as the smell of our sheets when we lay down to sleep.
The conclusions that Freud and Mead reached were also, again on the surface, very different. Freud concluded - based on his very narrow sample and his talking with his friends and analyzing his own dreams - that the Oedipal conflict is a universal human experience. Mead reported that the customs of tribes of people separated by relatively little geographic distance displayed huge differences in the kinds of cultural traditions they had, including sexual traditions. Further, these tribal people raised their children in ways that were radically different from the ways that we Westerners did, something that rattled our safe worlds where we, like Freud, believed that what we did was simply the way that things are done when done properly by humans.
On the other hand, Mead's methods, as portrayed by King, were remarkably like Freud's - right down to building the house that her subjects came to. Oh, sure, she travelled to other's homes and Freud made housecalls, but they both believed that individuals could be studied on the home turf of the one studying using that person's methods. One of the fascinating things about this novel is that the three anthropologists, who end up in a love triangle, and their differing cultures are portrayed just as different tribes and their various cultures are portrayed. The English anthropologist, who came timidly and had most of his stuff stolen by the tribe he was observing, focused on getting access to various tribal ceremonies so that he could observe, record, and, hopefully, piece them together and "understand" them. While he sounds a bit wimpy, in fact he is sympathetic to Mead's view, and he is privileged by the author, along with the Mead character, to have his subjectivity portrayed. Mead's husband, a lunkhead American who takes no notes, goes native, joining the men in hollowing out canoes, and who treats Mead badly, does not get this treatment. He is an oddity - a person who is unstudiable - someone whose culture seemingly can't be understood - even by the author who created him and perhaps by he himself.
The Mead character is, of course, at the center of the triangle, at the center of the village she and her husband are studying, at the center of the novel, and at the center of the home she and her husband have built and furnished with gingham curtains and hundreds of books that are shipped in by porters along with the Rorschach cards that she shows to the villagers in the hope of getting access to their subjective experience. She wants to know how these people think, what their experience is like. She studies them, as Freud did his patients, not as curiosities - see the picture below of Freud's mentor Charcot demonstrating the curiosity of hysteric symptoms to his neurological colleagues - but as people, as human beings with living breathing internal worlds worth connecting with and trying to understand - at least in his best moments - sympathetically. Of course, both of them were pioneering an entirely new way of engaging with people and they look - objectively to us, much more like the culture that they came from - imposing their views on those around them - than like bold and new observers of the human condition.
Mead's writing, as described by King, sounds like Freud's writing, especially about his early cases. This is the writing of the novelist. In Freud's case, the writing of a man using his free associative process as the driver of his material, and this writing does not feel properly scientific and it appeals to a broader audience, one that is broad enough, in Mead's case, to pay for the porters to carry the books and buy the building of the house - something that, we are led to infer from his actions because we don't have access to his internal world - threatens the masculinity of her husband. This gender role reversal just happens to be mirrored in the tribe they are studying - a tribe where the women make the living and, in their ritual dances, thrust at the men (who are dressed in female clothing) with carved phalluses that they wear.
And this, it seems to me, symbolizes the revolution that Mead is continuing, one that was started by Freud before her (or maybe Shakespeare - the poet for a female ruler), one that privileges subjectivity over action, one that allows for the ascendancy of what has previously been the province of women and that now becomes the stuff of study and the stuff of interest to communicate. And this revolution, one that will eventuate in shifting role expectations, shifting concepts of what mature sexuality looks like, and shifting notions of what shape gender identities can take, will also anticipate female voters and then elected rulers. Who knows, maybe even a president of the United States.
And somehow this novel, despite showing the clueless Victorian ways of Mead imposing herself on those she would observe, also demonstrates her humanity - with the natives and with the anglo men and women in her life whom she comes to love. She touchingly refers to two kinds of love - the heady love of wine and the maternal comfortable love of bread. She talks about she herself being able to stay in the wine love space with those she loves even as their love for her turns to bread. And the book evoked in me an odd eroticism - the heady wine like eros of mystery - of what might lurk out there and what it might feel like to engage with that. Yes, there is an overtly erotic scene - but it was less arousing, frankly, than the broader sense of these three people engaged with each other and with the people around them - from a distance and up close trying to puzzle out what it means to be human - as a Western civilized person and as a primitive tribal member. And this quest, this engagement with the unknown, feels deeply and powerfully erotic. The desire to know - about people in general - about this person in particular - is arousing.
Now I have to admit that when I am in museums like the Natural History Museum or The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Pacific Island Wing is one that I steer clear of. I am more interested, as was the case when we were recently in the Smithsonian's Natural History Museum, of following the kids to the Dinosaurs, the Whales and the Diamonds. I find Wesern Art to be more interesting than primitive art. Lily King's novel has caused me to rethink my prejudice against the Pacific Islands. That said, I'm not sure that I will find the artifacts that much more interesting. In fact, in a central plot piece, the collection of an artifact seems to me to point out the inhumanity of creating museums as warehouses of dead artifacts. I don't know that I will head towards the dioramas in them, but I am interested in the books that Mead and her cohort wrote (see also the bibliography and sources at the end of Euphoria) - books about the culture - including the sexuality - of the tribes that she encountered. The description of the interaction between a westerner and these people seems fascinating and lively - perhaps the written word is the best way - or at least a very important way (pictures are good too) to preserve what we have been able to ascertain about those whom we study - what we have learned about the variety of human experience that is possible.
In an endnote, I would like to point out that this novel literally does violence to the life of Margaret Mead. I'm not sure of the reason for this and don't want to go into it in part because it would be a spoiler, but I do think it curious that the author seems to me to be so uncomfortable with what Mead has unleashed that she wants, in her novel, to show just how threatening it can be. Is this a cautionary tale?
Also, you may be interested in my own perambulations through a foreign culture, that of Nicaragua - the chronicle of which starts here.
I think it important to acknowledge the central feeling state in this book - Euphoria. This is the feeling state that, according to Nell, occurs about eight weeks into the study of culture - when there is a sense of "Aha - I think I've got it." This is inevitably followed by a feeling of hopelessness about understanding anything about a foreign culture. I think it is interesting that the average number of psychotherapy sessions is about seven. This corresponds with the time frame the author attributes to Mead. Maybe we quit treatment when we believe we understand the other in the flush of that first brief Euphoria - and before we realize just what a monumental task it really is to bridge a gulf that promises Euphoria, but only to those with the guts to hang in there through the difficult times when we realize just how foreign the task of connecting can be.
Post script: Last night, after writing this post, I found that there are complete versions of Mead's book, Coming of Age in Samoa - the link goes to a mediocre pdf, you may be able to find a better one. Though I only started the text, it feels very modern, very readable and, though I was tired, I was drawn into it.
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