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Return from the Natives: How Margaret Mead Won the Second World War and Lost the Cold War. By Peter Mandler

It is hard to imagine an author and subject more suited to each other: two American scholars both with personal and professional ties to the UK and an interest in national character, the subject of Peter Mandler’s previous book and the terrain where Margaret Mead and her circle ended up, not always comfortably, during and after the Second World War. But it was Mead’s work on the more classically anthropological territory of the South Seas which first made her famous, because it was about sex, and because she thought it carried lessons for more ‘advanced’ societies. For Mead, her friends and colleagues Ruth Benedict, Gregory Bateson (whom she married) and Geoffrey Gorer (whom she didn’t), the central task was to unearth the ways in which culture shaped personality. If you could do this for the South Seas, maybe you could do it for larger, more complex societies too: ‘culture cracking’, as they came to call it. And so the Second World War, and the urgent need to understand the Germans and the Japanese (or indeed the British and the Americans), drew the anthropologists into government and military circles, convinced that their ‘culture and personality’ work could not only help to win the war, but also ensure peace afterwards by promoting mutual understanding between national cultures. Underlying this project was a profound belief in cultural relativism as the guiding principle of their discipline and the only basis for such understanding. After the war, Mead ran into two serious problems which derailed these good intentions. The first was the sheer difficulty of ‘culture cracking’ large and complex societies. The search for ways of doing this led her and particularly Gorer into the wilder reaches of post-Freudianism, so that potty training was everything, and for Gorer, who knew little about Russia, the swaddling of babies was the key to the Russian soul. Not surprisingly, this ‘diaperology’, and the impressionistic nature of some of their speculations, alienated supporters who were looking for a more rigorous and scientific understanding, and undermined what was intellectually valuable in Mead’s method. The second, and larger, problem was that ‘the Cold War had simply squeezed out what enthusiasm had remained in America for cultural relativism’ (p. 283). The new orthodoxy of ‘democratic universalism’ (also implicit in the earlier war effort) saw the US as the embodiment of democratic virtues, and Americanism as what all peoples really wanted, once they had been freed from their tyrannical leaders and their ‘traditional’ ways. To argue, for example, that authoritarianism had deep roots in Russian culture seemed to deny this possibility. Notoriously, ‘modernization theory’ became the prevailing social science of the Cold War era, rejecting Mead’s call to respect each other’s different routes through history, and postulating instead a single developmental pathway for all societies to which all, in the end, would conform. There B O O K R EV IE W S