New Lives for Old

Cultural Transformation--Manus, 1928-1953

Margaret Mead

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780060958060
• eBook ISBN: 9780062566164
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Women in History
• Index: History

This edition of New Lives for Old, prepared for the centennial of Mead's birth, features introductions by Stewart Brand and Mead's daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson.

When Margaret Mead first studied the Manus Islanders of New Guinea in 1928, they were living with a Stone Age technology and economically vulnerable; they seemed ill-equipped to handle the massive impact that World War II had on their secluded world. But a unique set of circumstances allowed the Manus to adapt swiftly to the twentieth century, and their experience led Mead to develop a revolutionary theory of cultural transformation, one that favors rapid, over piecemeal, change. As relevant today as it was a half-century ago, New Lives for Old is an optimistic examination of a society that chose to change.

1

introduction

In each age there is a series of pressing questions which must be asked and answered. On the correctness of the questions depends the survival of those who ask; on the quality of the answers depends the quality of the life those survivors will lead. But first of all it is necessary to identify carefully what questions must be asked. What are some of the crucial questions today? Are they: How soon will the population of the earth outrun the food supply? How soon will all human beings break down under the strain of modern life? How complete will the destruction of civilization be in World War III? But such questions presuppose doom. In the very asking they plunge us into an abyss of hopelessness, or apathy, or the quick snatching violence of despair.

Yet the blandly certain questions provide as little solace: How soon will it take for men to come to their senses, realize that the old ways were best, return to nature and to God, learn to borrow rakes and hoes over the backyard fence, learn to spell as our forebears did, and learn to live a proper life by always deferring consuming until tomorrow anything that we can possibly save today? One has only to listen to this diluted utopia, which is all that it is possible to build out of the ghost of former ways of life, to know that it is a ghost as fleshless and inadequate as the way of life was once full-bodied. Those who rear their children on the nostalgic memories of long-dead lilacs in the dooryard give their children’s imagination thinner fare than tiny plastic jet-plane toys which crunch on the new scratch-proof floors with a sound out of which no one has yet written any music.

We are squarely up against the dilemma of whether out of fear and desperation we will seek to prop up a crumbling old pattern or too hastily run up a new one, intent only that the new shall be a bulwark against the destruction of the old—new scaffolding against an old, too-weathered wall—or whether we can believe that we can build a new world suited to men’s needs, twentieth-century housing for twentieth-century people. But if we choose the new buildings and yet realize that no blueprint of an unknown is ever satisfactory—that there are always a thousand small adjustments to make until doors and windows and passages from room to room become harmonious and livable—what estimate can we make about how long it will take and what the price will be?

What will have to happen before we have constructed a world which takes into account that instead of near-starvation we can hope for food for all, that instead of the picture, grown unbearable as it has become real to us, of nine-tenths of the world living in poverty and near despair, there is now a possibility for all people to have food and health for their children?^*1 What will have to happen before those who teach learn a new tone of voice so that those who are taught can hear what they say? Or before men learn that machines can be as homely, as fit for human uses, as tables and chairs, loaves of bread, and bottles of wine—all as artificial, as man-made, as a calculator or a carburettor—on the basis of which we now hymn the simple life or even see visions of the essential itness of a chair, as if a chair were of the same order as a wild rose rather than a roadster?² How can we circumvent the depressing and damaging effects of both those who so lament the old that the new cannot be welcomed and those who so hail the new—claiming that the revolver has forever replaced the rose³—that men deprived of traditional imagery have no free imagination left to work with loving hands upon the necessary present?

For what we need today is imagination, imagination free from sickly nostalgia, free from a terror of machines bred of mediaeval fantasies or from the blind and weather-bound dependence of the peasant or the fisherman. And yet that imagination must not be empty, for an empty imagination and a free imagination are not the same thing. From a room out of which all the devils have been swept come only meditations about other devils or counter-devils. Then the mind is free only to take horns on or off the frightening face of the future. To be really free one must have good fare to eat, adequate for flesh and bone, one must have tools that one can trust, a horse or a ship or a car or a plane with which to travel swift and far as need be; one must have companions for the task in hand, elders whom one can trust and youngsters for whom the effort is worth the making.

There are a host of voices raised today to say that one or another or all of these conditions cannot be met, that there are no good fare, no tools that can be trusted, no steed to be safely mounted, no companions for the task, that we are hopelessly alienated from the old and only fearful of the fate of the young, and so without faith.

This book is set firmly against such pessimism. It is based on the belief that American civilization is not simply the last flower to bloom on the outmoded tree of European history, doomed to perish in a common totalitarian holocaust, but something new and different. American civilization is new because it has come to rest on a philosophy of production and plenty instead of saving and scarcity, and new because the men who built it have themselves incorporated the ability to change and change swiftly as need arises. This book is based on the belief that Americans have something to contribute to a changing world which is precious, which can be used with responsibility, with dedication. But, like all precious things, this essence of American culture is rare and therefore vulnerable; not rare like some precious stone appropriate to an age of kings and rajahs, but rather rare like some one of the rare elements necessary for the expansion of atomic energy, rare in proportion to the needs of the whole world, our twentieth-century measure of value.

This precious quality which Americans have developed, through three and a half centuries of beginning life, over and over, in a virgin land, is a belief that men can learn and change—quickly, happily, without violence, without madness, without coercion, and of their own free will. For three centuries, men of vastly different ways of life have come to America, left behind their old language, their old attachments to land and river, their betters and their subordinates, their kin and their icons, and have learned to speak and walk, to eat and trust, in a new fashion. As we have learned to change ourselves, so we believe that others can change also, and we believe that they will want to change, that men have only to see a better way of life to reach out for it spontaneously. Our faith includes no forebodings about the effect of destroying old customs and calls for no concentration camps or liquidation centres such as have been used in totalitarian states by those with the desire and the power to change others. We do not conceive of people being forcibly changed by other human beings. We conceive of them as seeing a light and following it freely.

There have always been many who have doubted this faith of ours. They have pointed to the loss in America of all the accumulated civilization of Europe, ignoring the fact that most of the Europeans who came to America had not shared that civilization but instead had eaten the black bread of poverty outside the gates of the palaces and opera houses where that civilization was housed. They have pointed to conformity in the United States, to sensitivity of individuals to the opinion of their present peers, and somehow made the willingness to change one’s mentors as one changed one’s job into something hideous, while contrasting it with the dignity of living all one’s life in a distinctive setting, even though in mortal terror of the gibes and jeers of one set of neighbours, gibes and jeers which kept one firmly fixed and so secure in the position in which one was born. People accustomed to lands where men have nourished a sense of difference—and traditionally a sense of the absolute incompatibility among those with different political ideals—where differences in the architecture of the main streets of small cities and little villages were a matter of pride, find the sameness of American towns soul-destroying, and never see that this is also a form of liberation—to be able to move so far and yet find the familiar and the trusted just at hand.

Today this doubt is very deep indeed. It has been fostered by the presence in America of refugees who did not come freely, but who were driven out from countries which they still prefer. It has been fostered by the moves and countermoves inspired by Communism, which has incorporated the standard Russian myths about European civilization. It has been manipulated by the leaders of non-European countries who confuse the retention of various outmoded forms of feudal power with a defence of ancient civilizations against the “vulgarities” of the American way of life, a vulgarization which makes it possible for a simple labourer to buy articles of good design in Woolworth’s. So today there is a great doubt in the land, a doubt of our own distinctive heritage, a doubt as to whether we have anything to give to the rest of the world, even a fear that we may be—as our ready critics, especially the ready critics within our doors, are so quick to tell us—offering nothing to the world except the cheap and the destructive, or soft drinks seen not against a poverty which could afford neither bottled drinks nor shoes for their children, but only as beverages lacking in genuine intoxication, fit only for children, and containing sugar which will destroy the teeth.

In accepting this negative image of America, we often feel we are getting closer to, reaching a better understanding with, our sophisticated and cultivated European and Asian friends. Actually we are depriving them of finding something here to value, something that they, who are searching rather more busily than we for ways of change, could use. And we deprive them either way, whether we slavishly agree that America is a dreadful country in which drugstores and conformity contrast in sorry fashion with the ubiquitous culture of the Old World, or whether, still reacting to their negative image, we insist that everything in the United States is better, brighter, and nearer perfect than anywhere else. American complacency and bumptiousness was born of just such doubts two centuries ago. It is the voice of the immigrant assuring the relatives he left behind, and himself, that America is better than Europe. So, in every foreign capital today, the emissaries of American diplomacy, the Point Four men, the journalists, jostle one another in their laments and counter-laments, seeing America through this smoke screen of the feared judgement of other, older countries, in turn denying and truculently defending our institutions.

Meanwhile, our genuine heritage, our personal knowledge of change, is denied and forgotten, as false prophets seek to change our priceless inheritance of political innovation and flexibility into some untouchable fetish of unchangeableness.

This book—the record of a people who have moved faster than any people of whom we have records, a people who have moved in fifty years from darkest savagery to the twentieth century, men who have skipped over thousands of years of history in just the last twenty-five years—is offered as food for the imagination of Americans, whom the people of Manus so deeply admire. It is no accident that a people who represent a civilization built on change should catch the imagination of a primitive people intent on changing. Every mile of both my voyages to Manus is relevant to the whole problem of what American civilization—a civilization dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, created with a right of equal access to all that men have learned and made and won, a civilization made of men who changed after they were grown—has to give, to Americans and to the peoples of the world with whom we work.

The Manus people know this is so. They know that I would never have come back again if they had not changed. They know that when they beat the death drums for my departure a quarter of a century ago, I had recorded all that they could give, all that the modern world could learn from them. They know that I came back because I had heard that they had changed more remarkably and more drastically than any other of the peoples of the Pacific, that after twenty-five years of no contact between them and myself it was their act and our need that took me back. They understand that we need to know how fast a people can change and they know they have contributed to the answer. “Remember,” said Samol to his village council, “that for these months everything you do will be recorded, filmed, put on tape . . . and all America will know whether we are succeeding in our new way of life.” During the war, as a million of our troops poured through the Admiralty Islands, a mere thirteen thousand people were the audience, weighing the behaviour of one American to another, building what they learned into the background for a new way of life. Now, we in turn—or so they understand from what I told them—become an audience, many to their few, weighing their behaviour, one to another, as they attempt the fastest change in modern history, and learning from them something about the nature of change itself.

Twenty-five years ago, we had learned, just learned, that we could gain much from the disciplined study of primitive people, that here was a priceless laboratory in which we could investigate the possibilities inherent in human nature. Exploration of the ways of life of savages, as materials for art, for philosophy, for history, was not new. But the calculated use of a primitive culture to throw light on contemporary problems was new. Institutions which made it possible for an American anthropologist to travel the nine thousand miles to Manus, to remain there seven months, to learn the language and record the life of the people, were also brand-new. Anthropology was just beginning to be taught in universities. The Social Science Research Council which gave me a fellowship to go to study the Manus had recently been set up to channel foundation funds into research relevant to an understanding of society. In faraway Australia, three weeks by boat in those days, a Department of Anthropology had been set up in an Australian university, chaired by an English professor, who in his theoretical approach represented the best of English and French social science thinking, just as my own Professor Boas represented the best of American and German thinking. It was a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation which had helped establish the Australian National Research Council, through which anthropological work in that part of the world could be administered.

The choice of the Admiralty Islands was made because no modern ethnographic work had been done there. From a district officer attending the course for New Guinea administrators at Sydney University, we learned a little about conditions in the Admiralties. He recommended the South Coast Manus because it was possible to go everywhere by canoe. The problem I went to study was whether children in other societies, in contrast to adults, were as animistic and magical in their thinking as they were said to be in Europe. This problem came from the combined theories of Freud, a Viennese, Lévy-Bruhl, a Frenchman, and Piaget, a Swiss. The use of primitive cultures to test psychological theory was a very new approach, prefigured once before in the psychological explorations of Rivers in the Cambridge Torres Straits Expedition of 1898 to the same part of the world.⁴

For the first time since the development of science, the scientific world of the West was ready to use constructively and imaginatively the priceless and so-soon-to-vanish living behaviour of those people who had not yet come to share in any one of the great streams of civilization. Instead of armchair ruminations on the records of travellers and missionaries and colonial officials, problems could now be set up which could be answered—not by turning human beings into experimental animals, but by scientifically controlled observation of the living stuff of history. We realized that if we could go and study carefully the diverse ways of different groups of human beings, like us in body and brain, strangely unlike us in all of their learned behaviour, we could add enormously to our knowledge of human potentialities.

The research that I did in Manus twenty-five years ago depended upon this new climate of opinion, the compounded theoretical work of Europe and America, and the beginning of organized financing for work in the social sciences. Without the record of twenty-five years ago, this present study would be a shallow record of a people who appeared to be interested in modernization or, less charitably interpreted, of a people who had been upset by contact with World War II armies or, romantically seen, of a people whose beautiful primitive civilization with its own style and dignity had been ruined by contact with the modern industrialized world. Without a knowledge of what life had been like before, we would be unable to estimate whether, when the people say that life is better today, they mean that there is less quarrelling and more co-operation, less fear and more friendship, whether they are describing a reality or speaking from an ideological platform.

In 1951, I decided it was time for those of us who had given up our major task—studying primitive peoples as a way of throwing light on the processes of human society—for wartime work on problems of morale, communication among allies, and psychological warfare against totalitarian forces,⁵ to go back to our laboratories in the jungles, on the small islands, around the arctic fringes of the world. Our practice had outrun its theoretical base; we were over-drawn, just as Rabi⁶ described the physicists who returned after the war from their atomic ventures to their laboratories.

But where to go first? What was the most pressing problem? Here the discipline of the war years, when there were so few of us that allocating anthropologists to problems had to be conducted like a major deployment in which an army of a hundred confronts a thousand-mile front, came to my aid. It was no longer possible to live comfortably inside a developing ...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Contents
• Plates
• Words for a New Century by Mary Catherine Bateson
• Introduction to the Perennial Edition
• Preface to the 1975 Edition
• Manus Revisited—Preface 1965
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Geographical and Linguistic Note
• 1. Introduction
• part one
• part two
• Notes to Chapters
• Notes to Plates
• Appendixes
• References
• Index
• About the Author
• Also by Margaret Mead
• Credits
• Copyright
• About the Publisher