Letters from the Field, 1925-1975

By Margaret Mead

Book Overview

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."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0060958049
• ISBN13: 9780060958046
• Release Date: October 2001
• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Length: 416 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Interesting

This book is a collection of letters written by Margaret Mead to friends and family while she was working in the field. The letters span her entire career, from 1925 until 1975, and are accompanied in every chapter by photos by and of Mead. I found the letters quite intriguing, both for what they said as well as for what they didn't say. Some of the letters provide travelogue-like details of what conditions were like at her research sites. Some tell us a little more of what she was really thinking about the people and cultures that she later wrote formal descriptions of. Some of the later letters are quite formal, more journal entries than personal letters. I found some of the most interesting materials actually to be the short introductions that Mead wrote at the beginning of each chapter, where she glosses quickly over the enormous upheavals in her personal life. In chapter 1, she says goodbye to her "student husband, Luther Cressman." In the next chapter, she notes that she stopped in Auckland on her way to the Admiralty Islands to marry Reo Fortune before starting her 1928-29 research project in Manus. Then in chapter 5, she stops in Singapore to marry Gregory Bateson in preparation for their 1936-1939 project in Bali. Since I had only read Mead's professional writings before, the book's casual mentions of frequent successive marriages aroused some curiosity about her personal life. A quick Web search revealed quite a bit more, including a long-standing connection with Ruth Benedict (see for example "Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict: The Kinship of Women" by Hilary Lapsley). If you are interested in the life and work of Margaret Mead, this book will give you some insight into Mead's own opinions of what she was observing that go beyond the objective descriptions found in her formal works.