Letters from the Field, 1925-1975

Margaret Mead

• Editorial: Harper Perennial
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780062566188
• Categoría: Social Sciences
• Categoría: Cultural & Social Anthropology

Beginning in 1925, when at twenty-three she embarked on her first field work in Samoa, Mead sent family and friends these letters from the field "to make a little more real for them" the exotic worlds that absorbed her.

In this complement to her bestselling memoir Blackberry Winter, Mead has assembled selected letters she wrote from Samoa in 1925-26; from Peré Village, Manus, in the Admiralty Islands, in 1928-29; from the Arapesh, Mundugumor, and Tchambuli, New Guinea, in 1932-33; from Bali and the Iatmul, New Guinea, in 1936-39; from Manus again in 1953; and during brief visits in the sixties and seventies to Manus, several new Guinea sites, and Montserrat in the West Indies.

Enhanced by more than 100 photographs, these intelligent, vivid, frequently funny and sometimes poetic letters help us share with Mead "the unique, but also cumulative, experience of immersing oneself in the on-going life of another people, ...attempting to understand mentally and physically this other version of reality."

part one

Samoa, 1925–1926

In the summer of 1925, when I said goodbye to my family and my student husband, Luther Cressman, at the B and O railroad station in Philadelphia and boarded a train that would take five days to reach San Francisco, I had all the courage of almost complete ignorance. I had read everything that had been written about the Pacific island peoples who had become known to the Western world through Captain Cook’s voyages, and I was deeply interested in the processes of change. But I myself had never been abroad or on a ship, had never spoken a foreign language or stayed in a hotel by myself. In fact, I had never spent a day in my life alone. The Social Science Research Council had declined to give me a grant because I was too young. The National Research Council, which had awarded me a fellowship in the biological sciences, trusted me with no more than one month’s stipend—$ 150—at a time.

Luther’s traveling fellowship was taking him to Europe. Mine was taking me to Samoa to carry out the task given to me by my professor, Franz Boas—to investigate to what extent the storm and stress of adolescence in our kind of culture is biologically determined and to what extent it is modified by the culture within which adolescents are reared. I imagine that my age and physique—at 23 years old I was 5 feet 2½ inches tall and weighed 98 pounds—had something to do with his choice. I had wanted to do my initial field work in some much more remote and “untouched” place in the South Seas. But Samoa proved to be a most felicitous choice. From no other Polynesian culture would I have returned with results that challenged so completely the prevailing belief that adolescent turmoil is wholly biologically determined and therefore inevitable.

In Samoa I had the full cooperation of the medical branch of the United States Navy. My father-in-law, a physician, had been a medical school classmate of the Surgeon General of the United States; this made possible tutoring in the language, my residence in the household of Edward Holt, a pharmacist’s mate, and the right to purchase supplies, which I needed as gifts, from the commissary.

The Samoans appreciated my seriousness and scholarship in such matters as learning about oratory and dancing, and during the few weeks in which I worked on formal ethnography we developed a productive interchange, in the course of which I learned a great deal about the intricacies of Samoan etiquette and my mentors profited by the many gifts courtesy required me to give. For the rest of the time, living as I did, I could work freely with children without any bother about status.

On my way home, in 1926, the ship on which I traveled from Pago Pago to Australia encountered one of the worst storms of the century, in which many ships were lost. From Sydney, I sailed for Marseilles on the maiden voyage of the S.S. Chitral. Reo Fortune, a young New Zealand psychologist, was a fellow passenger. His work on Freud’s and Rivers’ theories of dreams had won him a fellowship to study in England. We talked nonstop for six weeks, fitting all that each of us had learned into a new approach to the study of primitive peoples.

At the end of a summer in Europe I met Ruth Benedict at the meeting of the Congress of Americanists in Rome and came home to take up my new life at the American Museum of Natural History.

S.S. Matsonia

Last day at sea

August 10, 1925

The trip has been unfestive and uneventful, even the phosphorescence was chary of its company and only a few red-winged flying fish have danced for us. The ship’s company is motley and disconnected—a few working people touring for a three weeks’ vacation and anxious about volcanoes, wives and children joining husbands and fathers, island people returning for the winter, large numbers of native children shouting over the deck, three Roman Catholic priests and one dissenting minister, a Salvation Army family which was seen off by all the Salvationists in San Francisco, a rather hefty Sadie Thompson seen off by all the U.S. Navy and other such unrelated voyagers. . . .

My table has been fun. At first I sat with the three priests and a pious and gay Catholic lady. The conversation turned mainly upon various minor ecclesiastical dispensations and her 21 Catholic first cousins in Washington, D.C., where one of the priests is professor of moral theology at Catholic University. I play bridge with them in the mornings and once I made a grand slam. Although far from proficient and finding it a great labor to keep my mind continually on the game, still I shall now face bridge without undue qualms.

The third night I moved from that table to sit with Eleanor Dillingham and her father, who is professor of chemistry at the University of Hawaii and a perfect lamb. Eleanor is plump and fourteen and enthusiastic. I dressed her for the masquerade as my mother, in Mother’s white organdy which hasn’t yet been shortened, my black hat made into a poke, Mr. Banks’ flowing black tie and the Catholic lady’s pink rose. She had never been to a masquerade before and was most properly excited. I went as her child in the bridesmaid dress, which is too short, socks, a borrowed doll, and a most fetching hair ribbon made from a pink handkerchief. . . .

Honolulu

August 11, 1925

We woke up this morning at five with land in sight and everyone excited except me. I was blue and disgruntled because I was blue. It seemed a poor fashion to be greeting the Paradise of the Pacific.

Eleanor Dillingham and I watched the ship come into harbor, rounding point after point of rugged clay-colored mountains. There was no color in the landscape, occasional patches of green showed as pale gray. The city itself was hardly resting on the sea, and the wandering mists, which seemed extensions of the clouds which covered the tops of the mountains, hid all the signs of industrial civilization. Two huge straight smokestacks became silver towers with white highlights on one side.

Reception of guests is entirely a matter of flowers, leis, necklaces of flowers strung variously so as to fall halfway to the waist. Mrs. Frear met me, as did Professor Gregory, Director of the Museum, and Miss Jones, Secretary of the Museum. And I’m staying in Mrs. Frear’s house, in a great gracious room with a bookcase filled with my favorite books, and wide lawns and pleasant distances. Mrs. Frear is away most of the time, up in the mountains, a 20-minute drive from the city, and another girl and I and the Japanese servants have this great house pretty much to ourselves. It’s like being invited quite casually into heaven—for I’d expected first a hotel and then a furnished room, both unappetizing. So picture me for these next two weeks the most fortunate of mortals in charming surroundings with all my needs noiselessly supplied. . . .

I had lunch with Dr. Gregory and the Museum’s official reporter. Then Dr. Gregory took Miss Winnie, whose family have lived here for four generations and who has done a lot of work on Polynesian music, and Dr. Shafer, an Austrian geologist, and me for a 40-mile drive across the island. The principle of this country is endless folds, folds of rock and folds of red soil, and perpendicular mountains that look like stiffly folded green velvet. The roads wind so that each turn holds infinite possibilities of green transparent rice fields, banana groves, sugarcane plantations or pineapple plots. I had my first lessons in Hawaiian botany and now I can locate the breadfruit, koa, kukui, mango, live oak, alligator pear, poinciana, noni and ti trees, so I feel as if I’d made a start. The island people’s speech is full of native terms and so far I am holding my own, though I have to catch the word, keep it carefully and match pronunciation with rules and then remembered spellings. My head reels a little with the minutiae of Hawaiian botany, industry and geology which have been poured into my head. It is hard to give it significance without translating it into foreign terms or at least into analogies. It is like an elaborate jeweled costume standing quite alone waiting for the wearer to appear. . . .

S.S. Sonoma

5th day at sea

Nearing the Equator

It’s no use, dear friends, I just can’t write you a nice long descriptive letter on this ship, it rolls too much. To summarize: I had a lovely time in Honolulu, with a whole group of people to see me off and so many leis around my neck that I had to stagger up the gangplank. I got the structure of the language, met all the proper people and was loaded down with more letters of introduction and numerous presents ranging from the picture of a statue of Duke Kahanamoku, the Olympic Games hero, which I am taking as a gift to Tufele, the high chief of Manu’a, to a slip of a palm tree which I am taking to the captain of the Lady Roberts. . . .

Pago Pago, Tutuila, Samoa

August 31, 1925

We got in this morning at daybreak, a cloudy daybreak, with the sun appearing sullenly for only a moment and the surf showing white along the shores of the steep black cliffs as we entered the “only land-locked harbor in the South Seas.” The harbor is the one-time crater of a volcano and the sides are almost perpendicular. It is densely wooded down to the sea and ringed with palm trees along the narrow beach. The Navy have really done nobly in preserving the native tone; their houses are low green-roofed affairs which cluster under the trees much as the native houses do; only the radio stations and one smokestack really damage the scene.

The presence of the fleet today skews the whole picture badly. There are numerous battleships in the harbor and on all sides of the island, mostly not in the harbor because they make the water oily and spoil the governor’s bathing. Airplanes scream overhead; the band of some ship is constantly playing ragtime. All the natives on the island and many from Manu’a and Apia are here, laden with kava bowls, tapa, grass skirts, models of outrigger canoes, bead necklaces and baskets. They are spread out in the malae—market place—with whole families contentedly munching their lunches around them. I’ve already planned all my Christmas presents.

I met Mr. Walters, the head of the bank and incidentally the Controller of Customs, when I got off the boat and he brought me out to the hotel (THE hotel where Rain was staged) where I left my baggage and went back to the boat for breakfast. Then Miss Hodgson, the head of the native nurses’ training school, who had come down to the boat to meet me, but missed me, had me up there for lunch, a large and festive lunch in honor of the nurses from the hospital ship. Surgeon General Stitt had the Superintendent of Nurses write Miss Hodgson asking her to help me. She’s going to let me put my evening dresses in her dry closet, which is the greatest help of all; otherwise they rot or get rust stains from cockroach bites. . . .

September 2, 1925

. . . The ceremonies in the malae—market square—were depressing. Tufele, governor of Manu’a, Mauga, governor of Tutuila, and a visiting chief from Apia presided at the talolo—formal gift giving. They were gorgeous, in full regalia, high grass headdresses, elaborate grass skirts and naked above the waist with their bodies oiled till the skin glowed. The malae was crowded with sailors from the fleet, all the visiting natives and the people from the Sierra, which got in at noon and stayed till five. With the exception of the three chiefs and the natives who were dressed for the siva dance and a visiting chieftess, the daughter of Maletoa, the last king of Upolu, the other natives were in the nondescript dress which they all wear, the women barefoot and in light shapeless dresses (some wore overblouses fitted in under the breasts in a most ungainly fashion), the men in white cotton shirts and lavalavas—cloth caught at the waist with a belt and falling a little below the knee—of various hideous striped American stuffs. And almost all carried black cotton umbrellas to make the scene finally ludicrous. I tried to get some pictures but I know they won’t be any good; the brightest costumes melt into a background of endless umbrellas, and even the children carry them, so they graduate from very near the ground.

Tufele, orator’s staff in hand, made a glorious speech, his retainers sitting behind him, under umbrellas, and presented a composite gift of coconuts, fine mats, strings of beads and pieces of tapa to the Admiral. The Admiral replied through an interpreter saying what a nice harbor this is, how nicely the Samoans were behaving, how much improved they were since his last visit, how he’d tell the President and the Secretary of the Navy what a good time he’d had and how, being specially fond of coconuts, he meant to eat all the coconuts himself. . . .

September 4, 1925

. . . Yesterday I began my lessons in Samoan. My teacher is one of the head native nurses. Her name is G. F. Pepe. She is of chiefly family and a cousin of Tufele’s. She dictates to me in Samoan and then I try to give it back to her with correct pronunciation, phrasing and cadence. Her English is perfect and though she has no grammatical knowledge, she gives me just about what I need. And what is most excellent, thanks to the Surgeon General’s letter that the nurses were to help me, her services are free. I have to pay $28 a week at this hotel so I haven’t much money to spend on interpreters and this way I can afford to stay in the port till I get a good hold on the language. I have already learned about 200 words and quite a few phrases and I can take dictation almost without errors. (That isn’t a great boast for the missionary orthography makes very few fine distinctions.)

I am now the sole occupant of this hotel and my meals are served in solitary state. I moved into a new room today; it’s one with practically a four-sided exposure, opening on two sides with screen doors onto porches and having windows on the other two sides. I have Samoan mats on the floor, a bureau, table, armchair, washstand and bed. Louise Bogan sent me an International Studio containing some excellent prints and with these on the wall, books on the table and my green steamer rug on the bed, I feel very civilized. Making a room look livable in this hotel is no mean feat either. My cook-boy, Falavi, takes great pride in my progress in Samoan and gloats over my ability to say thank you and please. . . .

Tutuila, Samoa

September 27, 1925

If modern wanderers are to repeat the thrills which early travelers experienced, they will have to cultivate the much neglected senses of taste and smell. The movies and the phonograph have effectually eliminated the other two senses and touch doesn’t seem to have much of a role here. But taste and smell are still untampered with by Asia and Pathé News. And here alone I get my real sense of being in a strange land. The morning I landed in Honolulu, I had papaya for breakfast and Honolulu will always taste like papaya with Chinese oranges. Samoa tastes like papaya without Chinese oranges. There is a great difference here. Papaya and coconut oil and taro, that tasteless yet individual carbohydrate, serve for taste and the frangipani blossoms with their heavy oppressive odor for smell, mixed on the warm breeze with the odor of slightly fermented overripe bananas, an odor which is like bee-stung grapes.

. . . Last Thursday I went on my first malaga—journey—to my first feast, given by the girls’ boarding school of the London Mission...