Return From The Natives: How Margaret Mead Won the Second World War and Lost the Cold War

Mandler%E2%80%94whose volume The English National Character was a study of a nation from within%E2%80%94here examines Margaret Mead, who is notable for making a career of studying human culture from the out-side. Mead began exploring the natives of New Guinea with a mind towards child rearing, and at-tempted to use social anthropology to illuminate cultures for political and military use in WWII. As the war expanded she became convinced that anthropology could sit central to government actions. And from 1941-1950 it did. However, as WWII gave way to the Cold War, anthropology's insistence on no one culture being better than another was looked at as soft on Communism. Mandler attempts to rescue Mead's post-WWII period of study from failure and the author's premise, that Mead "won" WWII but "lost" the Cold War, is one that Mead herself believed and discussed openly. She managed to get her field into the central halls of U.S. policy, but found the constraints lacking. Balancing the real work of studying culture while pleasing politicians proved untenable and Mead settled on being a cultural critic in her home country, but Mandler concludes this may have been for the best. (May)