Volume 31, Number 19 · December 6, 1984
The Evolution of Margaret Mead
By Stephen Toulmin
Margaret Mead: A Life
by Jane Howard
Simon and Schuster, 527 pp., $19.95
With a Daughter's Eye: A Memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson
by Mary Catherine Bateson
Morrow, 242 pp., $15.95
Is anthropology an art or a science? Eighteenth-century anthropologists studied the physical differences between all the races of man in the spirit of Linnaeus, so linking their subject with biology. A century later, the focus of anthropology shifted to society. It became the avocation of British colonial officers and Indian civil servants, and was valued by the English for explaining why other people acted in such irrationally un-English ways, so making them easier to live with, and rule. Only in the present century has the subject moved nearer to home and given a central place to 'culture': as participant-observers, anthropologists by now study the culture of a high-energy accelerator laboratory or a leather bar as readily as they will that of the Ndembu. As a result, the subject is now more humanistic. Lévi-Strauss, for instance, treats cultural forms as texts for structural analysis, and Clifford Geertz presents ethnographic description as a high form of investigative reporting.
Review, 5118 words
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