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Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years

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This autobiography is especially interesting for its insight into the professional life of a woman scholar in the 1920's and 1930's in a then new field of inquiry, although Mead did not encounter the extreme levels of resistance that make heroes and role models. Greek societies at her first college seem to have been far more repressive and damaging than were her graduate programs or employers. The professional rivalries are interesting. The book is especially strong in its depiction of Mead's parents, whose contrasting traits we can easily see influencing the daughter's ideas and character. Mead seems to be a keen observer of them, frank about their strengths and weaknesses, as dispassionate as she was in describing people in New Guinea. Mead is far less interested in or detailed about her three husbands. In fact, the autobiography seems oddly reticent, considering that its author was open minded, professionally interested in the sexual habits of other peoples, and unintimidated. She was able to ask Pacific Islanders what positions they preferred for intercourse, but unable in the autobiography to give a sense of the life of her marriages. We learn in detail what she packed for a trip, but only discover in passing that a divorce occurred. This book rewards readers more with cultural history than with a sense of the author's emotional life.

This book provides Mead's accounts of the people and events that most affected her thought and research. About half the book is devoted to her life before she began her career as an anthropologist. We meet her parents, Edward Mead and Emily Fogg Mead. Edward was an economics professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Emily divided her time between managing the household and pursuing her doctoral studies in the social sciences. Edward's mother, Martha Ramsay Mead, a former schoolteacher and principal, also lived with the family and was the primary director of their home schooling. Margaret describes her relationship with each of her parents and with her grandmother and siblings in turn. We learn how the family moved every season from one domicile to another, and how this shaped Margaret's concept of "home". Margaret also discusses how Edward related to his academic work and colleagues (such as when he organized a group to guarantee Scott Nearing's salary for a year after his dismissal). Margaret describes her schooling in detail, from the approach to learning that her grandmother and mother instilled with their home schooling efforts, to the various traditional schools that she attended and the social lessons she learned from them. She also discusses her college years and friends.

The second part of the book describes Mead's adult and professional life. She explains her relationships with all three of her husbands, and how in the case of Reo Fortune and Gregory Bateson, they collaborated together in their fieldwork. She also relates how she came to work with Franz Boas, and how he directed her research early in her career. She tells us about how she came to know Ruth Benedict, and how she considered Benedict one of her closest colleagues and friends. The last part of the book, covering Margaret's experiences as a mother and grandmother, is not as detailed, but does provide some personal observations.

For me, the most interesting aspects of this book were Mead's own interpretation of her motivations and accomplishments. She was a firm believer in both the value and necessity of studying cultures very different from her own. On the first page of the text, she tells us "I have spent most of my life studying the lives of other peoples, faraway peoples, so that Americans might better understand themselves." Later she notes, "to clear one's mind of presuppositions is a very hard thing to do and, without years of practice, all but impossible when one is working in one's own culture or in another that is very close to it." In summing up her work, she states, "I went to Samoa-as, later, I went to the other societies on which I have worked-to find out more about human beings, human beings like ourselves in everything except their culture. Through the accidents of history, these cultures had developed so differently from ours that knowledge of them could shed a kind of light upon us, upon our potentialities and our limitations, that was unique." Some anthropologists today have a different approach, believing that since one cannot understand a foreign culture completely, it is better to stick to observing one's own culture. There is still much validity, however, in Mead's point that you can't know what is natural or unnatural, innate or learned behaviors, unless you are aware of the wide range of possibilities exhibited by the myriad cultures of the world.

This book is a must read for a future Anthroplogists.
It clearly brings together all her theories and it is a
heartfelt view on a extremly successful and inspiring
person in this field. I truly enjoyed her book and her
views on culture and the future of Anthropology. I became a big
fan of hers and will continue reading the rest of her books.
If you are only slightly interested in Cultural Anthropolgy
then I suggest you read her books. They are easy to read and
very insightful about culture.
It is worth every penny spend.

This is a wonderful book to read for those interested in Mead's personality. I was surprised to read how innocent, delicate, loving, stubborn, and calculated this woman was. As she goes back through her life, she realizes how perfectly it all seemed to fit. She also seemed to realize, as she wrote this book, how much she always knew exactly what she wanted to do at each crossroad in her life. Margaret Mead tells us her story, from her perspective and it is a breath of fresh air.

Yes, this book is a must for future anthropologists. She walks us through the many struggles in the field (I found her insights on language learning of great value) and sets the picture for an age where American anthropology was teeming with its most famous characters even today. Mead paints a unique picture of the personalities of Boaz, Benedict and her three husbands.

Mead became something only the slightest fraction of us wannabe anthropologists could ever become. For those wanting fame and respect (come on admit it we all do at least a bit). There are few clues in this book to how Mead managed this. The book is nothing more than a beautiful account of being human. However, with her timing at a particular point in American history, her confidence and perhaps a splash of luck Mead became and remains an icon.

Margaret Mead lived her whole life with a passion and intensity that never abandoned her. The sense of urgency in which she seized each day was linked to her choice of anthropology as an academic discipline. "When I was a graduate student I used to wake up saying to myself: "The last man on Raratonga who knows anything about the past will probably die today". I must hurry." "Even in remote parts of the world ways of life about which nothing was known were vanishing before the onslaught of civilization. The work of recording these unknown ways of life had to be done now--now--or they would be lost forever. Other things could wait, but not this most urgent task."

Anthropology presented her with "an opportunity to do work that matters". Her vocation consolidated when she attended an academic meeting in Toronto in 1924. "Everyone there had a field of his own, each had a "people" to whom he referred in his discussions (...) I, too, wanted to have a "people" on whom I could base my own intellectual life". But she soon discovered that many tribal people already "belonged" to practicing anthropologists: "this was a period when each "field" was rather possessively claimed by the particular fieldworker who had done the research on the culture, a situation that was complementary to the scarcity of fieldworkers and the necessity of spreading them very thin".

Franz Boas, then the don of anthropological studies in America, was in charge of allocating scarce human and financial resources to cover a vanishing number of primitive cultures. "He had to plan--much as if he were a general with only a handful of troops available to save a whole country--where to place each student most strategically, so that each piece of work would count and nothing would be wasted." Boas wanted Mead to work on adolescence among American Indians. She wanted to set sail to the Southern Seas. In the end, "Boas gave in. But he refused to let me go to the remote Tuamotu Islands; I must choose and island to which a ship came regularly--at least every three weeks. This was a restriction I could accept."

"When I agreed to study the adolescent girl and Professor Boas consented to my doing this field work in Samoa, I had a half-hour instruction in which Professor Boas told me that I must be willing to seem to waste time just sitting about and listening but that I must not waste my time doing ethnography, that is, studying the culture as a whole. Fortunately, many people--missionaries, jurists, government officials, and old-fashioned ethnographers--had been to Samoa and so the temptation to "waste time" on ethnography would be less." He also told her to be careful of her health and to "stick to individuals and pattern". That was all the training in field methods that she received.

She did not come unequipped to the field, however. "My training in psychology had given me ideas about the use of samples, tests, and systematic inventories of behavior." She was able to carry out her work on the life of the adolescent girl in nine months by observing subjects from various ages starting from pre-adolescence, thereby "inventing a cross-sectional method that can be used when one cannot stay many years in the field but wants to give a dynamic picture of how human beings develop." She experimented with various tests and data-gathering methods that she invented, using pictures from magazines or little colored squares.

Later on, in other fields, she pioneered other innovative research methods: the collection of large samples like the 35,000 children's drawings she gathered in Papua New Guinea when she "found, contrary to all expectations, that these "primitive children" showed no trace of the easy animism of our own children, who draw the man in the moon and houses with faces", or her experimentation with sequence photography ("Whereas we had planned to take 2,000 photographs, we took 25,000) and film recording in Bali. She was also constantly willing to raise bold theoretical questions, and to present her findings in comprehensible terms.

For a generation and more, Margaret Mead came to embody the anthropologist as hero, armed with the tools of social science to gather the lessons that people living in vastly different cultures had to teach us. Her maiden work, Coming of Age in Samoa, acquired best seller status almost by accident: having completed the manuscript, she added two chapters based on lectures she gave to a working girls' club. It was these concluding chapters, in which she drew broad lessons on the relevance of her observations to an American audience, that brought her fame and recognition.

One of the reason why Mead's work came to be valued outside of anthropology was her appropriation by the feminist movement in the 1960s and the 1970s. Her description of other cultures structured along different patterns of relations helped American feminist theorists think about then-pressing questions of the universalism or cross-cultural variation of male dominance or gender subordination. Patriarchy, to use a shorthand. But Margaret Mead's life story shows that a traditional if somewhat slightly unconventional household could nurture a strong, independent woman intended on leading a life on her own terms, and also that her ambition to contribute to the accumulation of knowledge was compatible with her strong desire to experience motherhood and pass on her wisdom to her offsprings.

Blackberry Winter is an autobiography written in a conventional mode, in which life and work are closely interwoven. Although it contains observations on fieldwork that will be of particular interest to anthropologists, it is destined to a general audience, and the chapters are rich in personal details and reflexions. As Mead writes in the Prologue, "I have spent most of my life studying the lives of other peoples, faraway peoples, so that Americans might better understand themselves (...) In much the same way, I bring my own life to throw what light it may on how children can be brought up so that parents and children, together, can weather the roughest seas."