Behavior: Margaret Mead: 1901-1978

She was fond grandmother to the global village

A reporter turning up at one of her lectures at Manhattan’s American Museum of Natural History noted that the speaker somehow managed to discuss museums, stones, stuffed birds, cave paintings, Cro-Magnon man, children, parents, grandparents, dinosaurs, whales, the possibility of life in outer space, education, the youth revolution of the 1960s, the oneness of the human species, pollution, evolution, growing up in New Guinea, relations between the sexes, communes and the fragmentation of communities.

The list was typical. Margaret Mead was a small woman, but she got around. She spoke volubly and carried a forked stick. Her studies—and the two dozen books that resulted from them—revolutionized her chosen field of anthropology. Long before her colleagues recognized the validity of her approach, she studied the biological, psychological and sociological forces that shaped personality in primitive cultures, then used her findings to explain how individuals learn adult roles in modern societies. Her application of this approach to other areas and her willingness to speak out on almost any subject made her ideas—and her dumpy but ‘somehow imposing figure topped by its . Buster Brown hairdo—famous around the world. By the time she died of cancer last week at the age of 76, Margaret Mead had become the grandmother of the global village, an all-wise matriarch whose often provocatively put, common-sense opinions were sought by millions. Her colleagues feel that no single individual will be able to fill her shoes. Says Paul Bohannan, president of the American Anthropological Association: “Margaret Mead was, in fact, a centipede; she had that many shoes.”

Both observation and involvement came naturally to Margaret Mead, who was born in 1901 in Philadelphia to parents who quite literally raised her to be a social scientist. She was only eight when she was assigned to observe and record her younger sisters’ speech patterns. Mead’s university training—she studied at New York’s Barnard College and Columbia University under such anthropology giants as Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict—only refined her talents.

But it was Margaret Mead’s prodigious energy that launched her on a career that spanned more than half a century. In 1925 she sailed for Samoa with Boas’ blessing and $1,000 from her father, and spent nine months observing the adolescent girls of three small coastal villages in the Manua Islands. The result of her study was published three years later as Coming of Age in Samoa.

The book, which described the easygoing, neurosis-free island way of life and suggested that the Western attitude toward sex could be relaxed without endorsing promiscuity, was an instant success. Many of the young researcher’s colleagues condemned her way of reaching conclusions from observed evidence, which Mead called “disciplined subjectivity,” and the quasi-novelistic style in which the book was written. But students snapped it up, partly because its ideas interested them, often because, as the author briskly explained, “I wrote it in English.”

Mead wrote her other books in the same easily understood idiom. Coming of Age was quickly followed by Growing Up in New Guinea, which she wrote in collaboration with her second husband, New Zealand Psychologist Reo Fortune. But anthropology alone could not satisfy her. A fluent speaker who rarely needed notes, she also carried a heavy teaching schedule, lecturing before enthusiastic classes at both Columbia and Fordham universities. She established a hall of the Peoples of the Pacific at the American Museum of Natural History, where she was curator of ethnology. She brought a keen, insatiably curious mind and anthropological insights to bear on the problems of her own society and, with a confidence that made it clear she would brook no arguments, spoke out frequently on social and political problems that many of her colleagues preferred to avoid.

Her ideas were not always popular. Though South Sea tribesmen affectionately remembered her as “Miss Mark-it Mit,” former Florida Governor Claude Kirk called her a “dirty old lady” after she appeared before a Senate committee hearing and urged decriminalization of marijuana smoking. Envious colleagues griped that Mead, who appeared on television talk shows to endorse everything from greater international cooperation to women’s liberation, was “overexposed”; conservative academicians called Mead, who chaired or served on more committees than anyone could remember, an “international busybody.” But young people loved her, partly, as Bohannan recalls, because “she never talked down to anybody,” partly because she clearly loved young people. Of the Mundugumor tribespeople, she wrote: “It seemed clear to me that a culture that so repudiated children could not be a good culture.” Remembering her own youth, she regularly defended the behavior and ideals of youth and decried the efforts of their elders to “keep them in their places.” As she once said in defense of TV, “For the first time the young are seeing history being made before it is censored by their elders.”

Despite the diversity of her interests, Mead remained a working anthropologist to the end. One of the world’s spryest septuagenarians, she had long kept a schedule that would have left most younger people exhausted. But in recent years Mead, who had survived malaria, three marriages, several miscarriages and years of native foods, found her health failing. “I know I can’t live forever,” she often said. “I’m just not ready to go yet.”

When the time to go did come, though, Margaret Mead was ready. When she learned last year that she had a generally fatal form of cancer, she refused to let it slow her down. Instead, the scientist who had spent a lifetime observing others turned her still keen powers of observation on herself, and continued to keep her thorough records on her own process of aging. Her attention was appropriate. Of all the people she studied, few were as interesting as Margaret Mead herself.