The Books of My Life: Return From the Natives

Peter Mandler's Return from the Natives: How Margaret Mead Won the Second World War and Lost the Cold War (London: Yale University Press, 2013) is a superb archive driven and theoretically aware exploration of the role Social Scientists played in World War Two and the Cold War. At the heart of Mandler's book are Cultural Anthropologists Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, Social Anthropologist, linguist, Semiologist, and cyberneticist Gregory Bateson, and neo-Freudian Geoffrey Gorer. Though Mead, Benedict, Bateson, and Gorer are centre stage in Mandler's book other famous and not so celebrated Social Scientists, like Claire Hold, Elizabeth Hoyt, Métraux, Clyde Kluckhohn, Nathan Leites, John Dollard, Samuel Stouffer, Edward Hall,  Robert and Helen Lynd, Erich Fromm, David Reisman, and Ralph Linton--who comes off as a misogynist macho jerk--make important cameo appearances as well.

Mandler's Return from the Natives, which is part biography, part history of the Social Sciences, part social and cultural theory critique, part biography, particularly of Mead, Benedict, Bateson, and Gorer, is an important and nuanced corrective to much contemporary history of Social Science analysis that sees the Social Scientists who served their countries in World War Two and the Cold War as top down social engineers. Mandler argues, rightly I think, that there was more than one type of social engineering during World War Two and the Cold War, top down social engineering and social engineering for a respect of global diversity and a respect for other cultures. Mead"s and Benedict's engineering for cultural diversity with its Boasian anti-racism and cultural relativism, falls into the latter category.

On the theoretical level, Mandler's book is an exploration and critique of neo-Freudianism, the attempt to contextualise Freud more broadly in sociological, ethnological, and ethnographic terms. In Mead's, Benedict's, and Gorer's case this neo-Freudianism led to the development of the culture and personality school of 1930s to 1960s Cultural Anthropology, and particularly in Gorer's case, gave rise to the notion that national character was the product of swaddling and toilet training processes that took place during infancy. As Mandler notes such and approach saw culture in holistic and ultimately static and I would argue functionalist terms, and had little place in it for the role economic, political, and cultural factors played in national character, or perhaps better national identity, and social and cultural change.

On occasion, Mead, Mandler notes, did contextualise her work more broadly. Mandler notes that the Mead edited collection Cultural Patterns and Technical Change, which was written for UNESCO, prefigures the critiques of international development as imperialism (economic, political, cultural) one finds in post-Vietnam era Social Science.

Finally, Mandler notes that Mead, particularly during the Cold War, often had one foot in the engineering in the name of American nationalism camp and the be wary of nationalist social engineering relativist camps as a result of her attempt to gain government funding for Cultural Anthropology in the wake of World War II and in her effort to promote cultural relativist sensitivities in the American government and its intelligence apparatuses.

Mandler's book is one of those books, like Keith Thomas's Religion and the Decline of Magic--a book which had an immense impact on my intellectual life--that I would put in the pantheon of published works that I have read. It is a book that, in my opinion, should be read by every Social Scientist and Historian. I would also recommend that it be read by everyone in government service as a cautionary tale. I can't recommend Return From the Natives more highly.