Growing Up in New Guinea: A Comparative Study of Primitive Education

Dedication

To Reo Fortune

Contents

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Words for a New Century by Mary Catherine Bateson

Introduction to the Perennial Classics Edition

Preface for the 1975 Edition

PART ONE

GROWING UP IN MANUS SOCIETY

     I    Introduction

    II    Scenes from Manus Life

   III    Early Education

   IV    The Family Life

    V    The Child and the Adult Social Life

   VI    The Child and the Supernatural

  VII    The Child’s World

 VIII    The Development of Personality

    IX    Manus Attitudes Towards Sex

     X    The Adolescent Girl

    XI    The Adolescent Boy

  XII    The Triumph of the Adults

PART TWO

REFLECTIONS ON THE EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS OF TO-DAY IN THE LIGHT OF MANUS EXPERIENCE

XIII    Bequeathing Our Tradition Graciously

XIV    Education and Personality

 XV    Giving Scope to the Imagination

XVI    The Child’s Dependence upon Tradition

APPENDICES

     I    The Ethnological Approach to Social Psychology

    II    Ethnographic Notes on the Manus Peoples

  III    Culture Contact in Manus

  IV    Observances Connected with Pregnancy, Birth, and Care of Infants

    V    Diagram of the Village Showing House Ownership, Clan Membership, Residence

  VI    Views of the Village as Seen by Two Children, Aged Five and Eleven, and Explanatory Comments

 VII    A Sample Legend

VIII    Analysis of the Composition of the Peri Population

   IX    Record Sheets Used in Gathering Material

    X    Map Showing Position of the Admiralty Islands

   XI    Map Showing Position of the Manus Villages

Index and Glossary

About the Author

Also by Margaret Mead

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

Acknowledgements

I made this study as a fellow of the Social Science Research Council and I wish to acknowledge my great indebtedness to the generosity of the Board of Fellowships of that body. For the training which prepared me to undertake this inquiry I have to thank Professor Franz Boas and Dr. Ruth F. Benedict. I owe a debt of gratitude to Professor A. R. Radcliffe-Brown of the University of Sydney who most kindly sponsored my field trip with the Australian research and governmental interests and also gave me much advice and help.

I have to thank my husband, Reo Fortune, for assistance in the formulation of my problem, for long months of co-operative effort in the field, for much of the ethnographic and textual material which underlies this study and for patient criticism of my results.

I am indebted to the Department of Home and Territories of the Commonwealth of Australia and to the Administration of the Mandated Territory of New Guinea for furthering my research whenever possible; most particularly I have to thank His Honour Judge J. M. Phillips and Mr. E. P. W. Chinnery, Government Anthropologist. For hospitality and courteous assistance I would also thank Mr. J. Kramer and Mr. and Mrs. Burrows of Lorengau; Mr. F. W. Mantle and Mr. and Mrs. Frank MacDonnel, Mrs. C. P. Parkinson of Sumsum and Mr. and Mrs. James Twycross of Rabaul.

For the opportunity to work up my material I am indebted to the American Museum of Natural History, and for assistance in the long and laborious task of manuscript preparation and revision I have to thank Dr. Benedict, Miss Eichelberger, Mrs. Stapelfeldt and Miss Josephson.

Words for a New Century

by Mary Catherine Bateson

When my mother, Margaret Mead, was ready to seek a publisher for her first book, Coming of Age in Samoa, she found her way to William Morrow, the head of a new publishing company, and he gave her a key suggestion for the rest of her career, that she add more about what all this means to Americans. This set a course she followed throughout her life, establishing not only the appeal of anthropology as a depiction of the exotic but as a source of self-knowledge for Western civilization. The last chapter of Coming of Age laid out a theme for the years ahead: Education for Choice.

Even before World War II, still using the terminology of her time that now seems so outmoded and speaking of primitives or even of savages, she believed that Americans should learn not only about the peoples of the Pacific, but from them. And after almost every field trip she went back to William Morrow, now HarperCollins, where many of her books have remained in print ever since, offering new meanings to new generations of Americans. A century after her birth, they are offered once again, now for a new millennium, and today they still have much to offer on how individuals mature in their social settings and how human communities can adapt to change.

Several of Mead’s field trips focused on childhood. Writers have been telling parents how to raise their children for centuries; however, the systematic observation of child development was then just beginning, and she was among the first to study it cross-culturally. She was one of those feminists who have combined an assertion of the need to make women full and equal participants in society with a continuing fascination with children and a concern for meeting their needs. A culture that repudiated children could not be a good culture, she believed. [Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years, New York: William Morrow and Company, 1972, p. 206]

After studying adolescents in Samoa, she studied earlier childhood in Manus (Growing Up in New Guinea) and the care of infants and toddlers in Bali; everywhere she went, she included women and children, who had been largely invisible to earlier researchers. Her work continues to affect the way parents, teachers, and policy makers look at children. I, for one, am grateful that what she learned from the sophisticated and sensitive patterns of childcare she observed in other cultures resonated in my own childhood. Similarly, I have been liberated by the way her interest in women as mothers expanded into her work on gender (Sex and Temperament and Male and Female).

In addition to this growing understanding of the choices in gender roles and childrearing, the other theme that emerged from her fieldwork was change. The first postwar account of fieldwork that she brought to her longtime publisher described her 1953 return to the Manus people of New Guinea, New Lives for Old. This was not a book about how traditional cultures are eroded and damaged by change but about the possibility of a society choosing change and giving a direction to their own futures. Mead is sometimes labeled a cultural determinist (so obsessed are we with reducing every thinker to a single label). The term does reflect her belief that the differences in expected behavior and character between societies (for instance, between the Samoans and the Manus) are largely learned in childhood, shaped by cultural patterns passed on through the generations that channel the biological potentials of every child, rather than by genetics. Because culture is a human artifact that can be reshaped, rather than an inborn destiny, she was not a simple determinist, and her convictions about social policy always included a faith in the human capacity to learn. After the 1950s, Mead wrote constantly about change, how it occurs, and how human communities can maintain the necessary threads of connection across the generations and still make choices. In that sense, hers was an anthropology of human freedom.

Eventually, Mead wrote for Morrow the story of her own earlier years, Blackberry Winter, out of the conviction that her upbringing by two highly progressive and intellectual parents had made her ahead of her time, so that looking at her experience would serve those born generations later. She never wrote in full of her later years, but she did publish a series of letters, written to friends, family, and colleagues over the course of fifty years of fieldwork, that bring the encounter with unfamiliar cultures closer to our own musings. Although Letters from the Field was published elsewhere, by Harper & Row, corporate metamorphoses have for once been serendipitous and made it possible to include Letters from the Field in this HarperCollins series, where it belongs. Mead often wrote for other publishers, but this particular set of books was linked by that early desire to spell out what her personal and professional experience could and should mean to Americans. That desire led her to write for Redbook and to appear repeatedly on television, speaking optimistically and urgently about our ability to make the right choices. Unlike many intellectuals, she was convinced of the intelligence of general readers, just as she was convinced of the essential goodness of democratic institutions. Addressing the public with respect and affection, she became a household name.

Margaret Mead’s work has gone through many editions, and the details of her observations and interpretations have been repeatedly critiqued and amended, as all pioneering scientific work must be. In spite of occasional opportunistic attacks, her colleagues continue to value her visionary and groundbreaking work. But in preparing this series, we felt it was important to seek introductions outside of ethnography that would focus on the themes of the books as seen from the point of view of Americans today, who are concerned about how we educate our children, how we provide for the full participation of all members of society, and how we plan for the future. Times change, but comparison is always illuminating and always suggests the possibility of choice. Teenage girls in Samoa in the 1920s provided an illuminating comparison with American teenagers of that era, who were still living in the shadow of the Victorian age, and an equally illuminating comparison with girls today, under early pressure from demands on their sexuality and their gender. Preteen boys in Manus allow us to examine alternative emphases on physical skills and on imagination in childhood—and do so across fifty years of debate about how to offer our children both. Gender roles that were being challenged when Mead was growing up reverted during the post-war resurgence of domesticity and have once again opened up—but the most important fact to remember about gender is that it is culturally constructed and that human beings can play with the biology of sex in many different ways. So we read these books with their echoes not only of distant climes but also of different moments in American history, in order to learn from the many ways of being how to make better choices for the future.

Introduction to the Perennial Classics Edition

In the autumn of 1928, shortly before she was to become well-known, anthropologist Margaret Mead set forth on her second trip to the South Pacific, this time to the Manus village of Peri, in the Admiralty Islands to the north of New Guinea. Mead had a clear research agenda—she wanted to determine whether children in this remote part of the world varied in revealing ways from children in Western industrialized nations. Mead also brought along a cluster of targeted empirical questions. She wondered whether young Manus children were susceptible to animistic thinking (in which one attributes living, often magical, features to inanimate objects like a chair or the moon), whether they had vivid imaginations, and whether their drawings resembled those of Western youngsters. This book chronicles the unexpected answers that she secured on her voyage.

Three years earlier, Mead had visited the island of Samoa. Such trips were not common at the time; and for a twenty-three-year-old female American graduate student in anthropology to make a solo voyage to a remote corner of the world was nearly as daring as Charles Lindbergh’s solo flight to Paris in 1927. In the course of her six months in Samoa, Mead had surveyed many features of Samoan life but she had also pursued a definite mission. Prodded by her professor of anthropology at Columbia University, the formidable Franz Boas, Mead was investigating the contours of adolescent life. And since both Boas and Mead believed in the critical importance of cultural forces in human development, Mead was primed to attend to distinctive features of youth in Samoa.

Adolescent life in Samoa emerged as strikingly different from that reported in the West. Far from encountering a Western-style Sturm und Drang, Mead had observed a carefree adolescence, where casual social and sexual relations between the sexes were the rule. Mead wrote up these findings in an appealing nontechnical trade book, Coming of Age in Samoa. Mead’s first book was to achieve such success during Mead’s sojourn in New Guinea that she had become a celebrity of sorts by the time of her return to the United States, in the autumn of 1929.

Following the positive response to Growing Up in New Guinea, originally published in 1930, Mead’s meteoric rise continued. During the 1930s, she conducted additional fieldwork in the Pacific and authored or co-authored a series of innovative, well-received books. Complementing her prominent place in her chosen discipline of anthropology, Mead became an increasingly well-known and venerated American intellectual: read on innumerable campuses, audible across the airwaves, frequently portrayed in magazines. Her focus on diverse forms of human development and family life in the remote corners of the planet proved very appealing in a world that was repelled by biologically skewed accounts of human nature (associated, at mid-century, with the Nazi’s hideous eugenics program); and her comparisons of diverse child-rearing practices and cultural institutions across the globe resonated with the hopeful view that human agents can make a difference. At the height of her career, in the 1960s and 1970s, she was arguably America’s best-known scholar, uniquely treasured as a spokesperson about human mores and values.

If Boas’s ideas about cultural determinism were the intellectual baggage that Mead took on her trip to Samoa, contemporary ideas about child development accompanied Mead on her trip to New Guinea. The early anthropologists had proposed striking parallels between Western children and the adults of preliterate cultures; Mead certainly had some of these controversial comparisons in mind when she asked what were primitive children like? (1975, iv). The psychoanalytic ideas of Freud were well-known to Mead; she was attuned to potential conflict among family members as well as the operation of unconscious motivational factors. As a young intellectual living near Columbia University, Mead was attracted to the progressive educational ideas of the university’s eminent philosopher John Dewey. Indeed, much of Mead’s work entailed a comparison of educational norms and values in the Pacific and the West, with an explicit Deweyan tilt toward a more relaxed, more cooperative child-centered mode of educating children.

Finally, and of greatest importance to the Manus expedition, Margaret Mead was an early reader of the great Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget. An intellectual prodigy like Mead, Piaget had focussed his keen clinical eyes on children’s cognitive development. He saw children as possessing their own characteristic ways of making sense of the world, ways which did not copy adult models but rather involved the youngsters’ own groping (if sometimes charming) efforts to make sense of their surrounds. In a series of powerful books chronicling his ingenious interviews of children, Piaget detailed the child’s conception of the world. Central to that conception was the child’s tendency to offer ready explanations of all matter of phenomena—Why does it rain? What is a dream? or What makes a clock tick? Rather than drawing on scientific terminology or frameworks, the child would, instead, invoke magical causes (The water monster makes it rain.) or artificial devices (I dream because there is a mechanical eye inside my head.) or animistic explanations (The clock ticks because it wants—or because WE want to know what time it is.). Applying a Boasian perspective to cognition, Mead was eager to determine whether these forms of thinking and expression showed up among Manus’s youngsters as well.

Like others of her generation, who were determined to capture the broad lines of nonliterate cultures while they were still uncontaminated by modern industrialization, Mead was a confident anthropologist. Mead saw the Manus’s society as a simplified and primitive one (p. 6) that could be readily understood by a sophisticated ethnographer. She felt that in half a year of fieldwork, she would be able to answer these questions and, to boot, give a general picture of a society. She described the anthropologist’s trade as a special technique for the rapid analysis of primitive society (p. 281). Her works—at once clear, pointed, and evocative—proved influential within her chosen discipline and even more so with the public at large. With the hindsight of three-quarters of a century, it’s reasonable to review what Margaret Mead observed and concluded—and to sketch how child development and educational experts today might approach the same agenda.

In some respects, Mead was impressed by early childrearing among the Manus. She observed none of the caution or ambivalence that characterized the middle-class Western parents with whom she was familiar. Situated in a treacherous physical environment, the parents confidently and smoothly taught their offspring how to swim, climb into a canoe and paddle, and respect the property of others (though they were not allowed any possessions of their own). By the age of five or so, the youngsters had come to master four important understandings: house, fire, sea, and canoe. Manus children were secure, agile, physically fit, and remarkably self-sufficient. Mead pays tribute to the firm discipline combined with the unflagging solicitude; this blend of childrearing contradicts equally the theory that a child should be protected and sheltered and the theory that he should be thrown into the waters of experience to ‘sink or swim’ (p. 6).

Other aspects of Manus childhood emerged as less attractive. While indulged materially, the children received little intellectual stimulation, little formal teaching, little discipline, little respect for elders or tradition, little opportunity to participate in the larger society. And so, while the youngsters struck Mead as intelligent, alert, and accurate, these potentials were insufficiently nurtured. As Mead put it, they are given years of unhampered freedom by parents whom they often bully and despise for their munificence (p. 10). Nor, counter to romantic Rousseauian notions of childhood, were the children able to provide stimulation on their own. And so, Manus youngsters emerged as undisciplined as American children at that time, without the stimulation of play and imagination that permeates our diverse and energetic society.

Childhood in New Guinea was remarkably empty. Children were bored; they encountered no obstacles; they had few arguments; they rarely carried out experiments. Though free to do what they liked, the children lacked toys; rarely played games; engaged in little humor, role play, or artistic activity. They did not, in Mead’s view, have appreciable imagination; as she put it, they have developed no legends or haunted spots or dangerous water holes (p. 108). Because of powerful puritanical prohibitions in the broader society, there was little talk about or play with the body. Mead looked for evidence of animistic thinking or imaginary portrayals in over 30,000 drawings, in inkblots, and in responses to Piaget-style questions; in a word, she found none (p. 133n). Indeed, the attitudes of Manus’s children toward animistic explanations were negative: whenever possible, they invoked concrete and practical causes. And so, just as the Samoans disproved the European view of a stressful adolescence, the New Guinea youngsters undercut the view of the child’s mental life put forth by Piaget and his collaborators.

Nonetheless, if surprisingly, the tiny Manus end up as well-adapted members of their culture. As Mead put it, We have followed the Manus baby through its formative years to adulthood, seen its indifference toward adult life turn into attentive participation, its idle scoffing at the supernatural change into an anxious sounding of the wishes of the spirits, its easy-going generous communism turn into grasping individualistic acquisitiveness. The process of education is complete (pp. 259–260).

Mead’s ambivalence toward childhood among the Manus echoed her ambivalence toward the ambient adult society. She saw the Manus as a group that exhibited some of the worst characteristics of New Englanders: obsessively focussed on trade and the accumulation of wealth, working overly hard, insensitive to the feelings of others (especially spouses), oppressed by judgmental spirits. If the Samoans represented a relaxed harmonious life in an idyllic setting, the Manus exhibited a jarring, dissonant, often brief and brutish life which seemed to leave few adults happy.

Mead’s study of the Manus was important in her own work and important for our understanding of life in preliterate cultures. Within the space of a few years, she had viewed two radically different childhoods in two radically divergent societies. This comparison not only confirmed her own view of the importance of culture in childrearing but also stimulated her to think about patterns across cultures: for example, Was there an integral connection between the treatment of young children and the personalities that they came to exhibit as adults? Was a youngster’s tendency to include (or exclude) spirits in her drawings a reaction to the culture’s attitude toward noncorporeal beings? As Mead’s ideas became known in the United States and other countries, ordinary citizens as well as scholars acquired a new appreciation of the importance of childrearing practices and the diversity of coherent life patterns around the globe. We now take for granted what initially amazed Mead and dazzled her reading public.

We know that all voyagers bring along the baggage of their time. What are the principal perspectives that a modern-day student of human development might have brought to New Guinea in 1930, or to another unfamiliar society, today?

To begin with, the pendulum that Boas deflected in one direction has veered sharply in the opposite direction. Nowadays, social scientists as a group are much more likely to take into account biological and even genetic factors. Thanks to a Darwinian perspective that has been given new life by sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, scholars look for those patterns that are part of the human condition—whether it be the male’s greater tendency to search for multiple sexual partners, the tendency of individuals to situate themselves in a dominance hierarchy, or the constant drive of individuals of all stripes to make sure that one gets at least as much as one gives in any kind of exchange. Looking at children, these scholars would focus on the tensions at various ages between girls and boys, the struggle among siblings for parental attention, and the role of attractive older peers in the formation of a youngster’s attitudes. Should differences regularly emerge across groups, those of a biological persuasion are prone to entertain the possibility of genetic explanations, due, for example, to inbreeding over long periods of time.

Indeed, Margaret Mead has been criticized, most notably by the Australian anthropologist Derek Freeman, for minimizing the biological aspects of childrearing. According to Freeman, Mead was so eager to demonstrate the definitive role of culture in human society that she was insensitive to fundamental human drives and motives, while overly accepting of accounts that suggested the singularity of a culture. From today’s vantage point, we might conclude that Mead was attempting to demonstrate the importance of cultural factors to a biologically oriented social science community, while Freeman was reacting to a cultural consensus that Mead and her colleagues had succeeded in establishing at mid-century.

A second lens, one that has remained powerful since Piaget’s day, is that of the cognitivist. Nowadays, however, cognition does not merely reflect a Cartesian interest in how the mind works. Rather, the cognitivist comes equipped, courtesy of the computer, with information-processing models of the mind (how information is initially encoded; how it is processed and transformed; the various outputs and their fates). Courtesy of breakthroughs in technology (such as the video camera and monitors of heart rate) it is now possible to probe the understandings of infants, who cannot provide linguistic testimony; and courtesy of neuroscience, there are now electrical and radiological tools for examining the brain and the nervous system, in vivo.

Piaget earns enduring credit for posing the right questions, but the answers reached by succeeding generations of scholars differ from the ones that he put forth during the 1920s and 1930s. Infants possess far more knowledge than any empirically oriented philosopher would have anticipated. It is difficult to pinpoint any kind of understanding that is completely alien to the two- or three-year-old child. Indeed, by the age of four or five, most youngsters have developed quite powerful theories of the world: just as the Manus youngsters understand the four elements most crucial to their lives, Western preschoolers have identifiable theories of mind, matter, and living beings. It is true that if you travel to remote cultures, you may find that cognitive milestones occur less rapidly than in highly schooled communities of America, Europe, or Asia. Yet, most cognitivists now agree that the major milestones will eventually be reached by normal children everywhere. Moreover, what appears to be missing, to the superficial Western investigator, often emerges when more sensitive and culturally appropriate measures are used. Thus, in the hands of a skilled investigator, children from a preliterate culture emerge as far more intelligent, curious, and quick-witted than anticipated—able to make distinctions, recall experiences, and solve problems just like their peers elsewhere.

Like other scientists of her day, Margaret Mead assumed that one could transport questions and techniques that had been developed by Western scholars; she might have been better served had she worked with natives who could have helped her to fashion culturally appropriate techniques. And yet, she was right to doubt that animism is the way in which youngsters naturally think about the world. They can, to be sure, be pushed in that direction; however, they also have the capacity to invoke quite practical explanations.

There remain investigators who spurn these more scientific (they might dub them scientistic) perspectives and still attempt to capture the feeling, the subtexts, and the nuances of a culture. These individuals—nowadays they often call themselves cultural psychologists—are the most faithful heirs to Margaret Mead, and to her teacher and close friend Ruth Benedict. However, their aims are less grandiose than those of the founding generation. Cultural psychologists are reluctant to suggest that any society is essentially simpler than others, for they are more aware that even those who strive to be objective may be influenced by presuppositions, attitudes, and genres of portraiture of which they may well be ignorant. If such observers fail to detect an element—like imagination—among youngsters in a culture, they are likely to attribute it to their own shortcomings. Through an approach that more closely resembles the creation of a work of art, they hope to capture those features that are idiosyncratic to and constitutive of a society. And they are keenly aware that this picture is inherendy subjective—other artistically attuned anthropologists might well come up with a different, if not even an opposite, image. For after all, are not all cultures repositories of paradoxes?

We must properly ask whether these are mere swings of the pendulum, the exchange of one set of tattered luggage for another, or whether we can properly speak here of progress in the proper study of humankind. I have no reluctance in asserting that progress has occurred in the social/behavioral/human sciences (though the disciplines have yet to agree on a name for their pursuits!). Margaret Mead was using the tools and ideas of her time in admirably skillful ways, but sophisticated instrumentation and methods of analysis make it more likely that we will draw sustainable conclusions about what youngsters can do and understand. Had Mead returned to the Manus of 1928, armed with the instrumentation of today, she might have achieved firmer answers to the question of the understandings, imaginations, and artistic repertoire of their young children. Theoretical constructs drawn from cognitive science and evolutionary psychology would have alerted her to play arrangements, competition for resources, youngsters’ intuitive theories about the physical, biological, and psychological worlds. And our heightened appreciation of the limits and biases of interpretations would have encouraged Mead to put forth a more tentative, more nuanced picture of the society and occasionally to look in the mirror, as she strove to describe what she observed.

The world of scientific description is a world far different from the world of human values. Margaret Mead’s own optimistic and progressive American lens, critical of the harsh edges of capitalism yet alert to the possibility of continual progress across the globe, opened her eyes to certain aspects of the Manus, while blinding her to others. There is no reason to think that our current view—tainted by the end of the Cold War, the rise of globalism, or the patent diversity of the planet—would be any clearer or less prejudicial. Moreover, while we may quarrel with Mead’s own progressively tinted educational prescriptions—based on her reading of Dewey, her admiration for Samoa, and her ambivalence about the Manus—there is no reason to think that our own educational visions today are any closer to the mark—or indeed, that we have firm knowledge of what the mark might be! Just as we return to the greatest works of art at various ages and derive new inspirations from them, so, too, we can revisit important scientific treatises and wrestle with them anew. For raising many of the right questions, coming up with some acute answers, and rendering one compelling—if partial—picture of an intriguing society, we continue to remain in the debt of Margaret Mead, a master artist as well as a pioneering scientist.

—Howard Gardner

REFERENCES

Freeman, D. Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983.

———. The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis of Her Samoan Research. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1998.

Geertz, C. The Interpretation of Culture. New York: Basic Books, 1973.

Iamo, W. The stigma of New Guinea: Reflections on anthropology and anthropologists. In L. Foerstel and A. Gilliam (Eds.), Confronting the Margaret Mead Legacy. Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press, 1992.

Mead, M. Coming of Age in Samoa. New York: Morrow, 1928.

———. Growing Up in New Guinea. New York: Morrow, 1975.

Preface for the 1975 Edition

This was my second book, and the first anthropological study of young children’s growth in a