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On Creating a Usable Culture: Margaret Mead and the Emergence of American Cosmopolitanism
Margaret Mead’s career took off in 1928 with the publication of Coming of Age in Samoa. Within ten years, she was the best-known academic in the United States, a role she enjoyed all of her life. In On Creating a Usable Culture, Maureen Molloy explores how Mead was influenced by, and influenced, the meanings of American culture and secured for herself a unique and enduring place in the American popular imagination. She considers this in relation to Mead’s four popular ethnographies written between the wars ( Coming of Age in Samoa, Growing Up in New Guinea, The Changing Culture of an Indian Tribe, and Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies ) and the academic, middle-brow, and popular responses to them.
Molloy argues that Mead was heavily influenced by the debates concerning the forging of a distinctive American culture that began around 1911 with the publication of George Santayana’s "The Genteel Tradition." The creation of a national culture would solve the problems of alienation and provincialism and establish a place for both native-born and immigrant communities. Mead drew on this vision of an "integrated culture" and used her "primitive societies" as exemplars of how cultures attained or failed to attain this ideal. Her ethnographies are really about "America," the peoples she studied serving as the personifications of what were widely understood to be the dilemmas of American selfhood in a materialistic, individualistic society.
Two themes subtend Molloy’s analysis. The first is Mead’s articulation of the individual’s relation to his or her culture via the trope of sex. Each of her early ethnographies focuses on a "character" and his or her problems as expressed through sexuality. This thematic ties her work closely to the popularization of psychoanalysis at the time with its understanding of sex as the key to the self. The second theme involves the change in Mead’s attitude toward and definition of "culture"―from the cultural determinism in Coming of Age to culture as the enemy of the individual in Sex and Temperament. This trend parallels the consolidation and objectification of popular and professional notions about culture in the 1920s and 1930s.
On Creating a Usable Culture will be eagerly welcomed by those with an interest in American studies and history, cultural studies, and the social sciences, and most especially by readers of American intellectual history, the history of anthropology, gender studies, and studies of modernism.
Molloy argues that Mead was heavily influenced by the debates concerning the forging of a distinctive American culture that began around 1911 with the publication of George Santayana’s "The Genteel Tradition." The creation of a national culture would solve the problems of alienation and provincialism and establish a place for both native-born and immigrant communities. Mead drew on this vision of an "integrated culture" and used her "primitive societies" as exemplars of how cultures attained or failed to attain this ideal. Her ethnographies are really about "America," the peoples she studied serving as the personifications of what were widely understood to be the dilemmas of American selfhood in a materialistic, individualistic society.
Two themes subtend Molloy’s analysis. The first is Mead’s articulation of the individual’s relation to his or her culture via the trope of sex. Each of her early ethnographies focuses on a "character" and his or her problems as expressed through sexuality. This thematic ties her work closely to the popularization of psychoanalysis at the time with its understanding of sex as the key to the self. The second theme involves the change in Mead’s attitude toward and definition of "culture"―from the cultural determinism in Coming of Age to culture as the enemy of the individual in Sex and Temperament. This trend parallels the consolidation and objectification of popular and professional notions about culture in the 1920s and 1930s.
On Creating a Usable Culture will be eagerly welcomed by those with an interest in American studies and history, cultural studies, and the social sciences, and most especially by readers of American intellectual history, the history of anthropology, gender studies, and studies of modernism.
216 pages, Hardcover
First published March 1, 2008
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July 20, 2019
A fascinating, rigorous, well argued and subtle book. The result of remarkable research, this book explores the development of American Cosmopolitanism through the gauze of Margaret Mead. More than a biography or a provocation of a moment in the history of ideas, considered arguments are presented about Mead's expertise as an anthropologist and how her fieldwork was bent through the imperatives of 1920s and 1930s American culture.
There are some fighting words about cultural studies throughout this book. The old scrag fight between anthropology and cultural studies always reveals the mock heroics and dastardly villains more in tune with Wrestlemania than academic life.
Where Molloy was wrong, but productively wrong, is her false dichotomy between 'the social sciences' and 'cultural studies': “The social sciences remain as cultural studies’ necessary but repressed Other: necessary because cultural studies depends utterly on the detailed empirical work of historians and social sciences for ‘context,’ and repressed because that dependence is seldom acknowledge theoretically.”
In these 'Theoretical Times' - the empirical (that spills into empiricism and positivism) is cut away. The political economy requires more of us "detailed empirical work." And maybe - just maybe - the social sciences benefit for the deep, tough, gnarly theoretical poking of (and from) cultural studies scholars ...
That debate is for another day. But there is no doubt that this is a fascinating intellectual insight into American intellectual culture in the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s. Great scholarship. Well delivered.
There are some fighting words about cultural studies throughout this book. The old scrag fight between anthropology and cultural studies always reveals the mock heroics and dastardly villains more in tune with Wrestlemania than academic life.
Where Molloy was wrong, but productively wrong, is her false dichotomy between 'the social sciences' and 'cultural studies': “The social sciences remain as cultural studies’ necessary but repressed Other: necessary because cultural studies depends utterly on the detailed empirical work of historians and social sciences for ‘context,’ and repressed because that dependence is seldom acknowledge theoretically.”
In these 'Theoretical Times' - the empirical (that spills into empiricism and positivism) is cut away. The political economy requires more of us "detailed empirical work." And maybe - just maybe - the social sciences benefit for the deep, tough, gnarly theoretical poking of (and from) cultural studies scholars ...
That debate is for another day. But there is no doubt that this is a fascinating intellectual insight into American intellectual culture in the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s. Great scholarship. Well delivered.
Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review