half of the Holts’ back porch, screened off by a thin bamboo barrier—but she was never short of informants. Children and teenagers flocked to her for conversation and impromptu dance parties, arriving as early as five in the morning and staying until midnight. She hung a picture of Boas on her wall and decorated it with red hibiscus, taking it down occasionally to show the gaggle of children whenever they asked about the strange-looking man she seemed to revere. She soon took to signing her letters “Makelita,” the pronunciation of her name in Samoan. “I find I am happiest here,” she wrote in one of her bulletins, “when I am alone with the natives, either bathing or lying on the floor of a Samoan house watching the sea, or making long flowery speeches to some old chief.”
Still, as the hot summer began—winter back in New York—she worried that time was slipping away. She had collected little of value, at least not enough to justify the National Research Council fellowship or the considerable money that Edward Mead had spent for the passage on the Matsonia and Sonoma. Her old life was intruding as well. Sapir continued to send tortured letters, by turns pleading and insulting, calling on her to give up the farcical trip and return to his side. She wanted to burn them but decided she couldn’t do it, at least not yet. She wondered whether they were in fact documentary proof that she had made a terrible mistake—confirmation from a great scholar that traipsing off to the far side of the world had been a fool’s errand all along.
At the same time, Sapir kept up his correspondence with Benedict, urging that they work together to force Mead to get professional help when she returned. Full institutionalization might even be required. “Truly, my dear Ruth, Margaret is not well, and the physical part of it is almost negligible in comparison with the psychic,” he wrote. “Margaret’s most insidious enemy is her zestfulness, her unflagging interest in things….A girl as frail as Margaret has simply no right to accomplish what she does.”
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IN MID-DECEMBER, A DAY before her birthday, Mead wrote to Benedict as well, but the subject was not Sapir. She wanted to report on an inkling of an insight, the first time in months that she had a real sense of purpose. She began to suspect that there might be an actual big idea hidden somewhere among the palm trees.
Any student who paid attention in an introductory anthropology class, Mead said, knew that the main contrast between primitive and modern societies was the matter of formalism. Modern civilizations were fluid and adaptable, given to seeing the world in pragmatic ways based on factual evidence. Primitive peoples, however, believed in rules and rituals. Abiding by these formal dictates kept their world in balance. They gave society a clear set of procedures for summoning a rain god, calling forth a spirit to strike down an enemy, preventing marriages between the wrong individuals, and sanctioning the proper partners for princesses and priests. Polynesians were usually presented as the textbook case, with their taboos and intricate family trees of chiefs, “ritual virgins,” upon whose chastity the community’s well-being depended, and “talking chiefs,” or public orators who spoke in place of the chief himself.
But Samoans didn’t seem to behave this way at all, Mead reported. Her neighbors and acquaintances on Ta’u turned out to be rather ill-informed about the rules that were supposed to consume them. “The number of things that are optional and the ignorance of the general population of the things that aren’t is amazing,” Mead wrote to Benedict on December 15. “Theoretically the father’s mother is supposed to name the first baby, but nine people out of ten will tell you anybody can name it anything.” Rather than a deep concern with restrictions and ceremonies, the “general laissez-faire…attitude is too deeply engrossed in the culture.” This attitude could not be easily attributed to the influence of the Americans or earlier missionaries; it wasn’t, in other words, an instance of the cultural diffusion that Boas had identified in his own work and that Mead herself had written about in her dissertation. In their everyday lives, people seemed naturally to be making decisions in ways that were looser, more improvisational, than outsiders seemed to think.
Mead soon had a chance to see all this firsthand. The next month a hurricane swept over Ta’u and other islands. “All the houses in Vaitogi