Margaret Mead: Human Nature and the Power of Culture
Papua New Guinea: Sex and Temperament

During the summer of 1930, Mead and Fortune did fieldwork among the Omaha Native American people. Mead realized from this first experience studying a non-Oceanic culture that there was a connection between the anthropological approach used to study a culture and the characteristics of the culture studied. She continued to think about the implications of this discovery as she returned to New Guinea for her second field trip there. In these notes, she is considering how to account for the perspective of the ethnographic observer when assessing the results of field studies.

Mead and Fortune arrived in Arapesh in December 1931. The people had no name for themselves, so Mead and Fortune called them "Arapesh," after the word for "person" in the local language. Mead's ankle was too weak for her to hike through the mountains, so she had to be carried to the mountaintop village of Alitoa, she wrote, "strapped like a pig to a carrying pole." The couple was stranded there when the people carrying their belongings would go no further.

Fortune went off to do research outside the village, while Mead was left behind. As she had in Samoa, she combatted depression by working constantly, accumulating a mass of notes. She published five technical volumes on the Arapesh. Here are note slips on which Mead recorded observations about Arapesh culture. She found her Arapesh investigation conducive to “slip recording.” She first took notes by hand, in a notebook, then typed specific observations about points of the culture onto slips, coding the slips by reference category and date.

From the time of her first field trip, Mead introduced various images and objects as a form of psychological testing. In Samoa she had used magazine photos of the film Moana of the South Seas for a picture naming test. Among the Arapesh, Mead recorded reactions of a group of women and children to HOME Magazine. She notes that “little children, laughed almost hysterically at large covers…Women imitated any overt gesture…Respond with shouts to any picture depicting movement.”

Here Mead is shown “conducting” Arapesh men playing secular flutes. In contrast to sacred flutes, from which women and children must hide, women are permitted to see these flutes. The Tamberan, guardian spirit of the adult males, is embodied through the sound of the sacred flutes and other instruments. The flutes shown in this photo may be the those Mead described in her writing on the Arapesh as “buan flutes, a series of triple flutes which have been secularized among the Arapesh.”

When Mead and Fortune left the Arapesh, they looked for a culture without much Western cultural contact and which was not the province of any other anthropologist. They settled on the Mundugumor (now Biwat), along the Yuat River in what is now Papua New Guinea. There they encountered an aggressive culture in a land plagued by ferocious mosquitoes. They stayed only three months. Mead's most prominent theory about the Mundugumor is the “rope” kinship system, which has been debated by later anthropologists. These paintings are among those Mead collected from the Mundugumor.

Mead reported that both Arapesh and Mundugumor mothers carried their babies suspended from their foreheads. While Arapesh generally women used net bags, which simulated the experience of the womb, Mead reported that the Mundugumor carried their babies in rough-plaited, rigid baskets. Older Mundugumor children would be carried on their mothers' backs with no support, holding on by grabbing the mother's hair. In this photograph a Mundugumor woman holds a baby over her arm.

Mead corresponded and shared ideas with numerous individuals who shared her interests, regardless of their fields. Here Karen Horney (1885–1952), the German-born feminist psychoanalyst wrote to Mead suggesting they meet to discuss issues such as “female 'qualities' and their being subject to cultural factors.” Horney suggested the possibility of including German-born psychoanalyst Erich Fromm (1900–1980) and Yale psychologist John Dollard (1900–1980) in their meeting. All four shared an interest in combining psychology with the study of socio-cultural factors.

This July 1933 photo shows [left to right] anthropologist Gregory Bateson with Margaret Mead and Reo Fortune, all of whom had just arrived in Sydney, Australia, from their New Guinea fieldwork. Mead and Fortune met up with Bateson just before Christmas of 1932. They did their next fieldwork near him in the Middle Sepik, resulting in an intense exchange of information and ideas.

While their collaboration in the field advanced their anthropological work, it also had personal repercussions. Mead and Fortune's marriage was effectively over at the time this photograph was taken. She filed for divorce from Fortune two years later and married Bateson in 1936.

While they were together in New Guinea, Mead, Fortune, and Bateson read a draft manuscript of Ruth Benedict's classic book Patterns of Culture (1934). In that book Benedict describes cultures as integrated wholes, embodiments of personality types. Reading the manuscript led Mead, Fortune, and Bateson to discuss ways of systematically classifying people and cultures in terms of temperament. This document is probably Mead's earliest written summary of her thoughts on this topic. Fortune's name was included on the original document, but he ultimately disclaimed any responsibility for the ideas, writing in the top right corner: “I have nothing to do with this.”

From the discussions she had with Bateson and Fortune along the Sepik, Mead attempted, ultimately unsuccessfully, to articulate a unified theory of culture and personality. She referred to this as the theory of “squares.” It was based on a fourfold system, with “compass points” labelled North (“caring possessive”), South (“careful responsive”) , East (“careful possessive”), and West (“caring responsive”).

This is an early attempt by Mead to diagram the squares. Note that she has included the names of some of her friends on the diagram, and the names of cultures. She has put herself at the southern point, along with sociologist Helen Lynd (1894–1982). At the North she has listed Franz Boas; to the northwest, Ruth Benedict; to the northeast, Karen Horney. Tchambuli men are to the southwest and women to the northeast. Mundugumor are northern and Arapesh southern.

Mead and Fortune settled among the lake-dwelling Tchambuli (now Chambri) in early 1933. They were led there by Gregory Bateson, who studied the nearby Middle Sepik culture of Iatmul. Mead wrote of the lake: “on its black polished surface, thousands of pink and white lotuses and blue water lilies are spread, and in the early morning white osprey and blue herons stand in the shallows.”

While Mead was not known for her linguistic abilities, her papers include notes she kept as she studied various languages in the field, as well as language notes made by others. This is a small notebook Mead used for recording vocabulary among the Tchambuli. Mead wrote to anthropologist Clark Wissler (1870–1947), her department chairman at the American Museum of Natural History: “The language is the most difficult one we have struck.” The Tchambuli at this time numbered about 500 people, and their language was not understood outside the group.

In contrast to her studies of the Arapesh and Mundugumor cultures, which standardized the same personality for males and females, Mead found expectations of contrasting personalities for male and female among the Tchambuli, with the woman being dominant and the man responsive. At the time Mead and Fortune studied the Tchambuli, however, many of the men were away, which may have distorted Mead's conclusions. Pictured here is a Tchambuli woman holding a baby.

Mead received a considerable amount of mail from members of the public who had read her work or heard her speak. She often responded to these letters personally, especially in earlier years. Here she answers a woman from Washington, D.C., who claimed that Mead attributes all differences between male and female personalities to environment. Mead replied that differences among people as individuals must be understood before understanding differences based on sex. She writes: “I nowhere say that there are no primary, i.e. biologically determined sex differences. I think there probably are.”