Charles King’s engaging The Reinvention Of Humanity reveals how the sex life of American Samoans helped shape modern society
The Reinvention Of Humanity
Charles King Bodley Head £25
In 1925, Margaret Mead, a 23-year-old American postgraduate anthropologist, stepped off a steamship on to the remote island of Tutuila, one of the Pacific Islands known as American Samoa, intent on researching whether moody adolescents caused as many headaches to their elders in ‘primitive’ cultures as in the ‘civilised’ West.
Mead was leaving behind a complex personal life – she had a husband in New York, a boyfriend in Chicago and had spent the train journey from the east coast to San Francisco, where she boarded ship, in the arms of a female lover, highly shocking for those times.
With such an unconventional nature, Mead’s findings in Samoa fitted perfectly with her suspicion that her society’s stuffy mores were not moral absolutes, but arbitrary.
Charles King’s engaging book charts the cultural importance of young anthropologist Margaret Mead’s (above) research in American Samoa in the Twenties
The book she published in 1928 on her findings, Coming Of Age In Samoa, was a bestseller, owing to its suggestion that rebellious teenagers simply didn’t exist in Samoa, because they had little to rebel against in a society where sexuality was fluid, virginity wasn’t prized and monogamy was unimportant.
Mead’s findings were key to the subsequent sexual revolution and the feminist movement. But other work by her colleagues, all part of the Boas group – a collection of intrepid female students taught by Franz Boas, professor of anthropology at New York’s Columbia University – was equally groundbreaking.
As told very engagingly by Charles King, their research turned upside down the then unshakeable assumption that certain people were innately superior to others, because of their skin colour, culture and gender.
Boas emphasised that ‘savage’ people weren’t inferior but simply living their lives according to different norms. He came to this realisation during a research journey to the Arctic, where he discovered that, for all his apparent sophistication, he was helpless in the cold and dark without the help of the ‘barbarous’ native Inuits.
Mead was the best known of Boas’s pupils, but several others made significant contributions to the field they named cultural anthropology, including Ella Cara Deloria, born on an Indian reservation, whose research transformed our understanding of Native American culture.
Zora Neale Hurston studied voodoo in Haiti, producing the first photograph of a ‘zombie’ or reanimated corpse. Mead’s lover Ruth Benedict, formerly a depressed and bored housewife, wrote a radical work on ‘cultural relativism’, in other words the idea that ‘deviants’ – be it homosexuals, the disabled or the simply eccentric – weren’t outcasts, but as valid as anyone else.
For suggesting the US might not be the greatest civilisation that ever existed, many were dismissed from jobs, ridiculed in the press and monitored by the FBI. Boas died in despair at the rise of Nazism in his native Germany.
His creed, as relevant today as then, was to respect other cultures and be sceptical about your own. We need to rid ourselves of our prejudices. As Deloria scribbled in her notes: ‘Cultures are many; man is one.’