LOOKING like a cross between a stern schoolmarm and an impish witch, the short (5 ft. 2 in.), broad-beamed woman in a floor-length, toga-like gown marched onto the stage at the American Museum of Natural History last week, clutching her ever-present forked walking stick. Then, peering at the overflow audience of nearly 1,500, Margaret Mead, who at 67 is something more than an anthropologist and something less than a national oracle, undertook one of her favorite tasks. She told her audience what is afoot in the world and some good ways to improve it.
The subject of the lecture, her third in the museum's annual Man and Nature series, was social change. Dr. Mead argued that primitive societies barely perceived change; a child repeated almost exactly the lives of his parents. In more advanced societies, which changed faster, children often abandoned their parents' ways and modeled their behavior on teachers or heroes. Now, however, the kind of change fostered by technology has removed even those models. Youths today, she argued, are like children of wilderness pioneers—the first natives in a new world. "For the first time in human history," she said, "there are no elders anywhere who know what the young people know." Parents who would understand what their own generation has wrought, she implied, will have to reverse the traditional pattern and let their children teach them what the real issues and questions are.
Like the other 60 or so lectures she delivers each year, this one was packed with provocative opinion, and necessary forays into social science jargon were leavened with literate wit. Unmistakably, the dogmatic pronouncements were drawn from Margaret Mead's 44 years as a pioneering field researcher. "I have seen what few people have ever seen," she says, "people who have moved from the Stone Age into the present in 30 years—kids who say, "My father was a cannibal, but I am going to be a doctor!' "
Her career as a disciplined observer of human behavior began when she was nine: her economist father and sociologist mother encouraged her to record the speech patterns of her younger sisters in a notebook. As a child, Dr. Mead once recalled, she precociously read "hundreds of books a year and every magazine, allowed or forbidden, that came into the house." By the age of 13 she was ghostwriting papers for members of a women's self-improvement society near her home in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. She arrived at Manhattan's Barnard College the very model of a liberated young woman with a passion for social reform.
Instead of entering politics, she decided to earn a Ph.D. in the then unfamiliar field of anthropology. Under Franz Boas, the founder of American anthropology as an academic discipline, she caught the conviction that study of primitive societies could teach sophisticated Western man a good deal about his own institutions—and about changing them. At 23, she set off for six months alone among remote fisherfolk in American Samoa. The result of her research, published in 1928 when she was 26, was Coming of Age in Samoa.