Rereading Sex and Temperament : Margaret Mead's Sepik Triptych and its Ethnographic Critics

Abstract

In her autobiography, Blackberry Winter, Margaret Mead (1972) recalled goal of her well-known project in Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935/1963). She wrote there that she had wanted to show the different ways in which cultures patterned expected behavior of males and females (1972:102). A few pages later, however, she admitted that the subject on which...[she] had particularly wanted to had been rather more definite (1972:205). She was not then just interested in assessing contribution of to defining gender stereotypes, as temperaments are now known, but she really wanted to encounter and study a in which emotions ordinarily associated with men and women contrasted with one another as well as with those in West. Sex and Temperament has been read and reread countless times since it was published in 1935. It has been viewed as a theoretical relic, a passing moment in history of American concept. Indeed, imprint of Benedict's configurationalism is strong. This was ideal that as a whole might be conceived as personality writ large, personalities to which actors also might find themselves in more or less conformity. The coherence and integration of was seen in terms of prototypical psychological patterns that were acquired or learned during childhood (Benedict 1934). Configurationalism has been displaced by an emphasis upon agency, actor and person. Perhaps more lasting theoretical contribution of Sex and Temperament might be to history of modern feminism (Lutkehaus 1995:8). The book has both been praised for its patently constructivist view of gender roles and stereotypes (Rosaldo 1974) while it has also been lambasted for its rigid cultural determinism (Wrangham and Peterson 1966). The publication of Sex and Temperament remains an important event in history of both concept and feminist theory. But it also stands out as a unique event in history of Sepik ethnology. It remains an unmatched ethnographic comparison of three Sepik groups: Mt. Arapesh, Mundugumor and Tchambuli. This latter project, fieldwork for which was done with her husband, Reo Fortune, certainly makes up bulk of book. While specific claims about each of three groups have been subject of critical attention, no one has bothered to reread these debates by way of putting together an overall evaluation of their claims as a whole. I want to return, as a Sepik ethnographer, to this dimension of Sex and Temperament. I shall therefore resume major claims Mead made about each group and specific criticisms to which they have given rise. I shall then argue that Nancy McDowell's conclusion about Mead's work on Mundugumor is not quite right. That is, McDowell argues that although Mead was hampered by theoretical paradigm she espoused, (1991:303) her ethnography remained far more complicated than her interpretations. I would say that because of Mead's theoretical interest in cultural construction of both genders, and her interest in women in particular, ethnography in Sex and Temperament turned out to be far more instructive, inclusive and interesting than Mead's configurationalist model of permitted her to theorize. Her commitment to understanding divergent cultural patterns of personality of both women and men, and of deviant men and women, sharpened her ear for plural voices in Sepik cultures. The Mt. Arapesh When Mead and Fortune spent eight months in Arapesh-speaking village of Alitoa in Prince Alexander mountains in 1931-32, people lived in patrilineal clans which were localized in small hamlets. In both material and symbolic senses, they were poor. They lived with chronic food shortages. Their gardens and foraging did not yield abundance. Elsewhere, Mead called them an importing culture (1938). They conducted trade relations with their Plains neighbors and with maritime peoples of Sepik Coast (Lipset 1985). …