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"As an anthropologist," says one colleague, "she is not a Jesus. She is a St. Paul." Paul, of course, was not welcomed unequivocally by his fellow Christians, and for all her prestige, Dr. Mead is not considered beyond criticism by her colleagues. Younger anthropologists sometimes dismiss her broad field inquiries as no more substantial than "a wind blowing through the palm trees." Other Pacific investigators have produced evidence that runs counter to her assessments of tribal personality. Most of all, anthropologists stand aghast at the way her powerful mind sometimes links fact and implication with little more than pure faith. One of her sternest critics, Columbia Anthropologist Marvin Harris, says dryly: "The courage of one's convictions is a blessing with which Mead has been liberally endowed." She permits few ripostes. When attacking the wrongheadedness of a fellow scholar, says a cowed friend, "she is truly like one of those terrible Indian goddesses, standing on her victims with her tongue sticking out."
The Whole of Life. Nonetheless, she has been proved right so often that her critics have to take her seriously—and she is unlikely to give them a rest. In December, Margaret Mead officially retires from her job at the museum, but she will keep her office there, install a new hall on the "Peoples of the Pacific" and continue to write. She is helping to organize the social science division for Fordham University's new Lincoln Center college and plans to keep on making trips to the South Pacific.
Margaret Mead has been a powerful catalyst in making anthropology relevant to contemporary man—and now, obviously, is no time to quit. "At this moment in history," she says, "we have virtually the whole of man's life spread out before us—people who are living as they may have lived for the past 30,000 years and astronauts who are beginning to live as we will live tomorrow. On my first field trips I worked with the comforting knowledge that everything I reported was unique, vanishing, and would be useful for anthropology. Today those people and I live in the same world, and my knowledge of their past has changed the world climate so that it is ready for them to assert their rights as human beings. It's sentimental to object to the fact that people are coming into a world community. We're not going to go back."
-On several trips she worked successively with two husbands, from both of whom she is now divorced. "Anthropological marriages are like theatrical marriages," she says succinctly. "They add more of a strain to the relationship."