Anthropology Among the Sciences *

MARGARET MEAD
American Museum of Natural History
1960-um novo momento p/ a Antropologia.

COUNT myself fortunate to be able to speak in 1960, a t the beginning of a new administration and, hopefully, a t the beginning of a period when anlthropology will be livelier, theoretically, and more useful to the country and to the world than has been the case in the last decade. The loss this year of Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn has brought acutely to my consciousness, and I believe to the consciousness of many anthropologists, the special need that we have for those who never let their active allegiance to their own discipline swallow them up and isolate them from the community of scientists and scholars. Anthropologists are better fitted than members of many other disciplines to contribute actively to the growth of ordered knowledge, but we are also subject to special forms of occupational temptations which isolate us. It seems appropriate in this year, in which we have lost the last of those who must always appear as giants because they embodied-by growing up within it-more of anthropology than those younger than they, for us to reconsider these special conditions which bind us in and sometimes isolate us from the wider intellectual community. I n 1932 I sat on a hilltop in New Guinea, in a village which I did not leave for seven long months, reading a letter which described the possibility that a great foundation might give $2,000,000 as a grant for a five-year field project to investigate the surviving, unstudied primitive cultures of the world. Here, from one standpoint, was a dream coming true; Franz Boas and RadcliffeBrown had each made plan after plan for institutes which would undertake to explore whole regions systematically, each field workers research dovetailed into each others. The central responsibility of anthropologists to rescue and record and publish the information on these vanishing cultures and peoples would be discharged. But, as I sat there, the tiny village hemmed in by the mists which would not rise for another hour so that only an occasional papaya leaf stood out against the walls of impenetrable white, I realized sharply and acutely that there were not enough of us. There were not enough trained anthropologists in the world to spend that money quickly, wisely, and well. Either we would have to send young, untrained students into the field with commissions enormously heavy for such young shoulders-as Radcliffe-Brown sent Hogbin to Rennel Island because the chance came and there was no one else to go-or the few of us there were would have to set to work with a frantic disregard of when and how anything would ever be publishcd, filling up our

* Delivered as the Presidential address a t the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, November 18, 1960, in Minneapolis. 475

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notebooks with undecipherable notes for other workers to pore over unprofitably years after we had died. There were field deaths that were very close in those days-Deacon died in the New Hebrides (and Camilla Wedgewood was just then giving years trying to piece together his uncompleted work) ; Sullivan died in 1925 of tuberculosis; Haeberlin died of diabetes before his work was well begun. We were not enough, not enough, I kept repeating; and, under the sharp sting of worry, I wondered what other ways there were. Would it be possible to ask each of the disciplines (that word discipline had not then been invented in its present usage) dealing with human behavior-sociology, economics, psychology, political science, law-to choose one or two of their best-trained and most promising students, give them extra special training in anthropology, and then send them out, each free to follow his own special research interest but obligated also to bring back a respectable account of the whole culture. Their accounts would have been somewhat incommensurable and one-sided, of course; but we would have recorded a great number of vanishing cultures and we would have had in every discipline someone who understood what a culture is and who would have been able to use the findings of anthropology from first-hand experience. As you know, that dream was never realized. Intra-professional disagreements ended in our being judged an unsuitable scientific repository for such great resources. But today, almost thirty years later, as we are again approaching a chance of adequate financing for the same task, it has to be said as truly as it could be said then: there are not enough of us. Our numbers have tripled, but the growth of new methods and the possibilities for field work today have far outstripped our growth. So, again, it seems appropriate to consider our place among the sciences, the special vanishing materials which are our responsibility, and those special conditions which may hinder or facilitate our ability to use this new opportunity. I t is important also to realize that funds available for research-especially research in any particular field-do not continue to increase exponentially. I n our rapidly changing world, the next few years may well be a high point in the availability of funds for the human sciences. I think it is still fair to treat anthropology as a field science, whose members work with fresh field material, studying living speakers of living languages, excavating the earth where archeological remains are still in situ, observing the behavior of real mothers brothers to real sisters sons, taking down folklore from the lips of those who heard the tale from other mens lips, measuring the bodies and sampling the blood of men who live in their own lands-lands to which we have to travel in order to study the people. We still have no way to make an anthropologist except by sending him into the field; this contact with living material is our distinguishing mark. Where the sociologist deals, characteristically, with marks on paper made by the census taker or the respondent to a questionnaire, and the psychologist deals with artificially contrived laboratory situations, we make our own marks on the

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paper as we listen and accept the situations provided by history rather than those created in the laboratory. This approach has certain consequences. I t involves a willingness to suspend judgment-not until a hypothesis is verified, but before we make any hypothesis a t all. It involves a willingness to expect that which cannot even be formulated, to wait upon the material and to surrender to what it tells us as we encounter it. Rigid cross-cultural frames of reference, tight taxonomic systems, and incipient analogues of periodic tables all cramp and distort the necessary uncommitedness of our approach. Furthermore, the uniqueness of our materials lies not in some single clear set of measurements or a set of markings on the feather of a bird newly observed, but in the whole system of second- and third-order relationships within the phenomena with which we work. Because the nature of our method also involves months and years of concentrated work away from other scientists, while we work-involved twenty-four hours a day in details of an excavation, a language, the ongoing life of a village-the uniqueness of each system is brought home to us, not only a t the conceptual level but in our every muscle and nerve. So it is perhaps not surprising that anthropology is suffering from a lack of the orderly cumulative growth of liberating hypotheses, tests, verifications, consolidations, and breakthroughs which characterize the physical and biological sciences. I n the 1920s, American anthropology could be seen as a science among the sciences, with its own set of concepts, its own domain, its own taxonomic system, and an orderly relationship to the related sciences of physiology, psychology, botany, geology, paleontology, biology, etc. When anthropology was grouped with the biological sciences within the newly founded National Research Council, the work that was needed seemed to be placed in a clear scientific context. When the Social Science Research Council was founded, our inclusion only attested to the width of our interest in man, as our membership in the American Council of Learned Societies gave evidence of the depth of a humanism which did not yet feel science as alien to mans deeper values. I can remember Boas delight when Kroeber was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. We are in no such clear position today. There are many more of us and anthropologists are offered many more kinds of jobs. But, again, there are not enough qualified people to play the role that is peculiarly our own in technical assistance, international relations, the processes of racial integration and educational change, planning and the economic transformations that accompany the new technologies. These are practitioner activities; they multiply in demand if not in fulfillment. But the central body of theory within which we can communicate with other sciences, and so in an orderly way with each other, is-although far richer-far more poorly articulated than it was in the 1920s. The fear of the 1920s that, with the death of the senior generation, anthropology would fall apart into separate, isolated specialties was not realized. The 1952 Wenner Gren International Seminar of Anthropology as-

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sured that anthropology would not disintegrate, a t least here in the United States, and extended a possibility of closer articulation in other countries. But, in spite of the activities of some individual anthropologists, the great body of men and women called anthropologists communicate with the other sciences very poorly. As a consequence, eschewing our part in the general development of science, our own communications are becoming trivial and idiosyncratic. The need to handle our materials in an orderly and codified way has been expressed symbolically by an obsession with kinship. The break in the old acceptance of a central value placed on man has become an atomistic study of values. The field is filled with burgeoning systems of terminology which are used by no one but the originators, each system treated as the unique product of the particular anthropologists field experience. As we have become better known and better established, more students have chosen anthropology while they were undergraduates. Where their predecessors entered the field from marine biology, or optics, or English literature, they have entered with only a high school level of knowledge and experience of natural science and the humanities. Within anthropology itself, they find, in many, many instances, an unwillingness to cross disciplinary lines, and later-like young Christian Scientists discovering the glories of medicine-they are attracted away from the center of the field. I understand that some 13 percent of anthropologists are now working in the field of mental health-which often means that not only are they seeking contact with other sciences but, in doing so, they are leaving their own field t o those who feel no such need. We have also shown another sign of isolation from the main body of science in the development of schools, sects which depend upon an esoteric language, hostility to other schools, shibboleths, and idiosyncratic vocabulary and controversy, which effectively prevent contact with members of other sects within anthropology and with members of other sciences. I need only point to such activities as the continuous rediscovery of old ideas, on the one hand, and the reproaches against anyone who dares to climb on the evolutionary bandwagon--an approach which, if it is scientific, is not a bandwagon but part of what is probably the most significant ongoing activity of our time. It would sometimes seem, a t present, as if the first step in writing an article is to list those inside and outside the discipline who might have had something to say about ones subject, to exclude them from ones sources, and then to proceed. Science docs not grow in this way. One of the by-products of such an approach has been the development of three parallel disciplinesanthropology, sociology, and psychology-each hampered in its own peculiar way in its relation to the other sciences and each claiming as its subject matter much of the same material as the others. The originality and jurisdictional claims of each are, of course, mightily advanced by their persistent and intentional mutual ignorance of each others work and by the failure of all three to preserve articulate communication with the other life sciences and the conceptual schemes and instrumentation which those sciences use.

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I should like to select for brief mention five areas where our failure to make appropriate cross-disciplinary relationships has reacted unfavorably upon our own central communication among ourselves and upon our capacity for orderly growth. The first area is that of models, which permit rapid communication among sciences with very different contents, different-sized units, and needs for different mathematics. Cybernetics represents one such model, within which it is possible to discuss details of the central nervous system, or the behavior of a variety of life forms within an ecological setting, or a mother weaning her child. Anthropologists participated in the initial formulations and a few anthropologists have used the family of models that come from information and communication theory; but the use of such models has not penetrated the central core of the discipline. Second, there is the area of content. There is an adjacent science which has developed enormously during the last three decades and now can provide us with highly variegated and well-established information about the behavior of living creatures that could be of the greatest fruitfulness for our own studies. This is the discipline called ethology in Europe and the comparative study of animal behavior in the United States. Here, the anthropologist and the ethologist, each with his wealth of detail, can communicate in the concrete terms so dear to both and no conceptual model is needed beyond some basic familiarity with biology-though the anthropologist often lacks this, so that the recitation of identifying zoological names turns into a form of seductive or forbidding ritual, preventing instead of encouraging communication. Third is the area of instrumentation. It may be most plausibly argued that the growth of science has been a function of the growth of instruments-the telescope, the microscope, the computer and, for the study of living creatures, cinema film and sound recording. Yet, even when the use of film and tape is relevant to our historical responsibility for the preservation of vanishing cultures, anthropologists have taken little or no interest in them. We still send most of our students out into the field equipped with notebooks, pencils, and a still camera, with the expectation of bringing back perhaps two or three hundred illustrative photographs. This is unforgivable when we now have the technical equipment adequate to collect bodies of material-on film and tapewhich can be analyzed with finer and finer tools, both technically and conceptually, as in Birdwhistells present demonstration of an analysis of a twenty-year-old Balinese film with the perceptoscope, or with the Chapple Interaction Chronograph. Large collections of stills make it possible to have a permanent record of complexes which cannot be described in words or diagrams and which can furthermore be juxtaposed in presentations. This makes it possible for us to handle series of complex diachronic events simultaneously-a recurrent necessity in science. Together, these fine-detail records provide us with a new kind of experimental material; the events we record are too complex for repetition or replication, but the analytical situation, with new analytic tools, can be repeated as often as we wish, decade after decade,

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as our conceptual systems grow. If we stop to think where astronomy and biology would be if they had treated the telescope and microscope in as casual, unaware, and irresponsible a fashion as anthropologists have treated the camera and the tape recorder, the strange archaic palsy that has come over parts of our science is only too clear. Boas, at the age of seventy and then President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, went into the field to use the new tools on old problems and took with him also that precious and irreplaceable eager humility-the fear that this time the task would prove to be too difficult. But even as computers have become ever more perfected in the direction of being able to work with complex data, we, in our field work, have neglected to use the new instruments to collect material that will be capable of such treatment. A science that does not welcome new instruments which raise its capabilities by a factor of ten has somehow got out of step. Fourth, there is the use that we do make of other systems of thought without the fullest exploration of what these systems really are. Genetics is one science which is enormously relevant to problems absolutely central to our discipline, but we have-again with a few conspicuous exceptions-relegated it to the outer pcriphery as the special concern of physical anthropologists. And now, rather suddenly, we are faced with the terrible problems raised by the identification of kuru in the New Guinea Highlands and the plans for the quarantine of a whole population-a population of the sort for which we have traditionally assumed not only scientific but ethical responsibility. Where we have dealt with genetics mainly by ignoring it, our handling of the whole field of dynamic psychology initiated by Freud has been of another order. Psychoanalysis, more than most of the human sciences, has involved a system which has cloistered itself in order to survive-and that rather poorly-the distortions and vulgarizations that accompany the rapid diffusion of halfunderstood ideas about human behavior. Psychoanalysis is a n intricately interrelated system, based upon the most minute observation of single individuals that has ever been made, within a framework which has taken the operation of only one aspect of the human mind as both the instrument and the object of research. It cannot be used in a half-understood, analogical, or shorthand sense in which the super ego is equated with culture, aggression is seen as explanatory of human behavior, and projective tests--the basis of which is not understood-are substituted for observation in the field. Instead of making the laborious and often painful effort to understand psychoanalysis, we have been content to use some of the products, particularly projective tests. Ironically, these tests-which, for the most part, are only useful in a context of full cultural and full psychodynamic sophistication, as the clinic exhibit prepared by Rhoda MEtraux illustrates-are treated as instruments, in the way psychologists use the phrase, and are presented as a kind of scientific front. So we fail to use the instruments that are appropriate for our own problems and misuse half-understood instruments from a half-understood field.

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Recently, LaBarre published the results of a questionnaire sent to those who were teaching personality and culture, a field in which a good knowledge of psychoanalysis is necessary, which showed how few of the anthropologists, who presumed to give a course for which there is great popular demand, had ever read Freud properly. Here I am making no plea for the incorporation of psychoanalytic theory; but if we intend to draw upon it we must know what we are doing. A related plea can be made for use of the Human Relations Area Files. Here a resource was fashioned by anthropologists, for anthropologists, which, within the limits set by the method within which it was constructed, is genuinely useful. Overuse of the Human Relations Area Files or an uninformed use of projective tests leads to revulsion, disproportionate over-reaction, and a tendency to throw the baby out with the bath water. Finally, there is the opportunity provided by the new upsurge of interest in the whole field of evolution, in which human evolution is just one part and cultural evolution a smaller one. The willingness of biologists like Waddington and Huxley, an ethologist like Lorenz, an ecologist like G. E. Hutchinson, a geneticist like Dobzhansky, a paleontologist like George Simpson to learn enough about anthropology to communicate with anthropologists has been only sketchily matched so far among ourselves. Recently a conference was called to discuss how we might apply the knowledge of the participating sciences to the problems of human survival. Anthropology was given the lions share of the seats and eight of those invited came. But we proved to be unable really to grapple with the problem or to deal simultaneously with our confreres from other fields, our own provincial sect-like battles, and the tremendous danger that confronts mankind. Although there were responsible contributions by individuals, these were overbalanced by suggestions that the topic of survival was outside our field, belonged to other sciences, was beyond our grasp. Yet it is precisely here that anthropology, as the science of man, has a responsibility which I believe we cannot evade. We have been bold and forthright enough when our scientific knowledge has been called upon to deal with problems of racism and genocide. During the difficult postwar years, no anthropologist of whom I have heard yielded t o the temptation to incorporate Communist practice into American practice and became an informer on his fellows. But our ethical responsibility is widening. As specialists in the study of cultural inventions made by biological creatures called men, in a n age in which we are beginning to control the direction of invention itself and are able to make almost any invention with appropriate specification, we have a peculiar task ahead of us. We must understand and command the direction in which the human sciences and the human race are moving well enough to be able to contribute what we know. We have not been sure enough of what we could do to parry the attacks that are made upon the human sciences on the ground that we are unable to make predictions. I t is important to stress that in the

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real world of events no science can predict with certainty; but responsible, scientifically based endeavor can outline possible alternatives, narrow the choice within each set of alternatives, and develop new and totally unforeseen alternatives. The history of mankind has been the history of the extension and complication of boundaries which can be crossed, to a limited degree, safely. Our subject matter stretches from the days when there were perhaps many species of earlier man on earth through the emergence of Homo sapiens, through the shifting histories of special civilizations, carriers of the cumulating inventions which have brought us to the present day. A knowledge of this process is what we, as a discipline, can bring to the conference tables of the world. It is not for us to say that there should be conferences of the people who know about these things-either the political scientists or the biologists alone. Our whole claim that we are a science rests upon the completeness with which we have taken the whole of man-earlier species and present species, primitive cultures and modern cultures-into our conceptual scheme. Our subject is mankind as it must have been, as it is, and as it may be-if man survives. Undoubtedly, it will be the political scientists, the statesmen, the international lawyers, and the strategists who must now spend their time planning for and against destruction and who will work out many of the details. But unless we can think right down the reaches of mankinds long past and into a future in which the earth is only one part of a known and explored solar system, and in which mankinds problems will become extraordinarily different, we shall not be what we want to be: anthropologists, whatever our area, whatever our specialty, whatever our subdivisions.