Once upon a time I was an anthropology student. As an undergraduate I took several courses in anthropology including Introduction to Anthropology, an Economic Anthropology class, and a graduate level anthropology course on "Names and Labels" for which I wrote an essay on Punk symbology and names. I also took, during my undergraduate years, a graduate level course in the related discipline of folklore, specifically a course on Folklore and Religion. I, with my social science bent, liked them all, particularly the Folklore course which was one of the best classes I ever took during my long sojourn as a college student. I also came to like and admire the idea and practise of ethnology with its cross-cultural and inductive emphasis, things I came to see as essential if we are to fully understand humanity, that I applied for and was admitted into a doctoral programme in anthropology.
Like most anthropology students in the United States my postgraduate programme in anthropology mandated that all students, regardless of their emphasis in the discipline, take proseminar courses in all of the four subdisciplines of anthropology: cultural anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, and biological anthropology. Like many of my colleagues at the time, I wasn't completely taken with the four subdiscipline mandate though I appreciate it much more now in retrospect. Nor was I taken with what I saw as anthropology's limited emphasis on broad social theory. I found anthropological theory too anthropological and too little sociological. Additionally, I was concerned with what I saw as anthropology's far too limited emphasis on history. I thought at the time, and I still think this today, that all of the social sciences and humanities needed to make use of the method of historical analysis. In fact, I would argue today that history should be less of an academic discipline than a necessary social sciences and humanities methodology.
Two of the people we talked about in ethnographic theory in the 1980s were, of course, Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, both students of who some would call the totemic father of American cultural anthropology, Franz Boas. Lois Banner's Intertwined Lives: Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and their Circle (New York: Knopf, 2003) explores the intertwined lives of Benedict, Mead, and those around them, including Reo Fortune, Gregory Bateson, and Ruth Landes, to name a few. Banner, who made use of recently opened archival material on Benedict and Mead, takes us into Benedict's and Mead's friendship and friendships, loves, competitions, social and cultural influences including Victorianism, romanticism, and modernism, descriptive and normative cultural relativism that critiqued a variety of fetishisms, the anti-racism movement that critiqued the hierarchy of races ideologies that emerged in the wake of Darwin, and professional lives, including their fieldwork experiences, theoretical legacies, and activisms.
At the time and still today, as Banner notes, Boas and his students Benedict and Mead were important because they shifted the empirical and theoretical terrain of cultural anthropology from unilinear evolutionism and biological determinism to the role culture played in human evolution, human societies, and in human personalities. One of Benedict's most famous and influential works then and now, Patterns of Culture, argued that different cultural forms gave rise to different personalities and behaviours. Mead argued in her equally influential and impactful writings on South Pacific cultures that different cultures gave rise to different sexual cultures, different sexual personalities, and different sexual behaviours and that these different sexual cultures, sexual personalities, and sexual behaviours varied across space. And while Benedict's and Mead's emphasis on nurture has not ended the debate over the relative impact nature and nurture have on human personalities and behaviours--it will likely go on until the end of time--they did provide a template for the debate that remains prominent even today in anthropology, sociology, and pyschology.
I enjoyed Banner's book even though I would like to have seen a greater and tighter focus on Benedict's and Mead's theoretical and ethnographic legacies and a more critical exploration of Benedict's and Mead's work for the American government during and after WWII. Recommended for those interested in American Studies, the history of gender, the history of bisexuality, intellectual history, the history of the social sciences and anthropology, and the history of academe.
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