University of Hawaii Press On Creating a Usable Culture: Margaret Mead and the Emergence of American Cosmopolitanism

Margaret Mead's career took off in 1928 with the publication of ""Coming of Age in Samoa"". Within ten years, she was the best-known academic in the United States, a role she enjoyed all of her life. In ""On Creating a Usable Culture"", Maureen Molloy explores how Mead was influenced by, and influenced, the meanings of American culture and secured for herself a unique and enduring place in the American popular imagination. She considers this in relation to Mead's four popular ethnographies written between the wars (""Coming of Age in Samoa"", ""Growing Up in New Guinea"", ""The Changing Culture of an Indian Tribe"", and ""Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies"") and the academic, middle-brow, and popular responses to them.Two themes subtend Molloy's analysis. The first is Mead's articulation of the individual's relation to his or her culture via the trope of sex. Each of her early ethnographies focuses on a ""character"" and his or her problems as expressed through sexuality. This thematic ties her work closely to the popularization of psychoanalysis at the time with its understanding of sex as the key to the self. The second theme involves the change in Mead's attitude toward and definition of ""culture""-from the cultural determinism in ""Coming of Age"" to culture as the enemy of the individual in ""Sex and Temperament"". This trend parallels the consolidation and objectification of popular and professional notions about culture in the 1920s and 1930s. Review On Creating a Usable Culture presents a lucid and intriguing analysis of Margaret Mead's place in U.S. culture in the 1920s and 1930s. By focusing on Mead's early work at this important moment in the search for the meanings of 'American, ' Maureen Molloy reveals both the relevance of that society to the genesis of Mead's career as a public intellectual and why Americans were so receptive to her studies of Samoa, New Guinea, and Native America. Malloy also skillfully situates Mead, the anthropologist, within the intellectual world of the 'arbiters of American culture' who both criticized U.S. society and hoped to redefine it.--Julia E. Liss This is a carefully and meticulously researched analysis of the cultural and social context in which Margaret Mead worked. Maureen Molloy's major aim is to read Mead's early ethnographic texts as 'cultural artifacts' and thus situate them within the particular cultural and social contexts from which they emerged. Using a wide variety of sources, including anthropology, cultural studies, American studies, cultural and intellectual history, and philosophy, Molloy describes the 'place' these works had at the time. There are many books about Margaret Mead out there, but none ask the questions asked here, and certainly none approaches the quality of this one. It is extremely sound and original.--Nancy McDowell About the Author Maureen A. Molloy is professor of women's studies at the University of Auckland.