Margaret mead repercussion

Margaret Mead repercussion
ABSTRACT In Sex and Temperament (1935), Margaret Mead depicted the Mountain Arapesh as a nurturing, peace-loving people. But Mead's second husband and fieldwork partner, Reo Fortune, disagreed with this in a 1939 article, “Arapesh Warfare,” which presented evidence that before pacification Arapesh society countenanced warfare. Here we show that “Arapesh Warfare” also contains a submerged argument against Mead's personal integrity and ethnographic authority. Sex and Temperament had its own personal subtext, and Fortune responded to it by mobilizing rhetorical strategies drawn from an Arapesh framework of speaking. Our analysis provides insight into Fortune's position in an anthropological disagreement that has been seen primarily from Mead's perspective—when it has been seen at all. Fortune's peculiar approach also speaks to a limitation on reflexivity in anthropology: the illegitimacy of criticizing personal motives in cases of ethnographic dispute, although we know scholarly works are always suffused with their authors’ personal histories and perspectives.
"There are my former husbands, all anthropologists and all as deeply involved as I am in the ways in which their lives and their work are interrelated."
—Margaret Mead, 1972
Anthropologists have come to take it for granted that works of ethnography cannot be fully understood without reference to the human circumstances in which they were produced. Ethnographic knowledge develops not from dispassionate observation of a given cultural reality but through the concrete activities and interpretations of particular individuals who are always embedded in personal relationships, social hierarchies, and prevailing ways of thinking and who are driven (and limited) by their own intellectual and emotional predispositions. Awareness of this has been heightened in recent decades as anthropologists have sought to eschew the authoritative voice of scientific objectivity and reflexively