Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years

Rating:
Summary: Delightful Read
Review: I cherished the experience of reading this book, my introduction to Margaret Mead. I'd recommend it for the account of a gifted girl's unorthodox education, for the arcane details of early 20th century life, the pageants and poetry writing, Phi Beta Kappa pins, all as impenetrable as Noh theatre to me. It's a book I wish I'd read in college. It's a book about self-actualization through work and "the kind of extra intensity in which a lifetime is condensed into a few short years." The most fascinating chapters are those about field work, and they have a kind of "burn" or intensity that is missing in later chapters, almost replaced by a gentle melancholy.

Sometimes there is a maddening opacity to her prose, something avoidant, for example, in the way she uses a poetic image when discussing her first "student" husband; "the damp dawn, which took all the curl out of [her] small ostrich feather fan" leaves one with the impression that her husband-to-be is a kind of drip, whether she intends that or not. Likewise,"On Having a Baby" and "On Being a Grandmother," the chapters I most looked forward to reading, disappointed in their lack of intimacy. I was riveted by her account of struggling for permission to give birth without medication in an American hospital, to breastfeed, to room with her infant. Yet the next we know, a renowned psychoanalyst has warned her against being an overprotective mother, and she's hired a nurse to essentially raise her daughter. And when she argues for the importance of intergenerational connection, she shows her own happy bias of growing up with a grandmother she adored. But what about those of us who struggle with difficult or neurotic relatives?

Above all, I agree with her profound understanding that a culture that does not hold children in the highest estimation is a dying culture, and I admire her embrace of the life force, even as she closes the epilogue with the words: "...knowledge about mankind, sought in reverence for life, can bring life."


Rating:
Summary: Interesting memoir of the early years
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: A Must For Future Anthropologists
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating Glimpses of Her Early Life
Review: 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.