Professional Documents
Culture Documents
B y MARGARET MEAD
N E of the recurrent problems which face the anthropologist is the selection from current researches in our own culture of concepts which have
cross-cultural promise, which are capable of a sufficient degree of heightened
abstraction, or of extrapolation, so as to be useful in increasing our interpretation of other cultures.2 Each time that a field of research is developed, by a
scientist in our own society, there is a chance that a new tool will be provided
to the field anthropologist. In remaining alert to such possibilities there are
two cautions which are worth making. The anthropologist who goes into the
field, well equipped with the most rewarding conceptual frame which he has
found in some current psychological research, may confine himself to illustration of that theme, paying so much attention to the relationship between his
data and the hypothesis in which he is interested that he will have no time or
energy to spare for a fresh responsive approach to the new relationships among
his data. When this is done, the results will be less rich because while it may be
useful to have some illustrations from primitive cultures of an hypothesis which
was constructed to include, at least partially, the concept of culture, finding
such illustrations is incomparably less important to the advance of science
than is draining the last drop of new suggestive meaning from the culture being
studied. If we arrange in a sequence work done among primitive peoples by
individuals, either psychologists, psychiatrists, or anthropologists, with varying degrees of specificity in the hypotheses which they wished to test out, we
find a correlated difference among their results in the richness and suggestiveness of the new hypotheses which are brought back.3
But while there is real danger that some of the rewards of months of painstaking field work, under difficult conditions, may be lost if the material is observed too rigorously from a predetermined point of view, there is also the
danger that without theoretical tools, the field anthropologist may not see
enough and may not sense the significance of what he does see.
In selecting the developmental point of view, especially some of the recent
aspects of the Gesell-Ilg4 approach to the study of maturation, for discussion
This paper appeared on the program of the American Anthropological Association, December 1945, and was read a t a Viking Fund dinner, in February, 1946.
* For discussions of this problem of cross-disciplinary borrowing of abstractions see : Mead,
M., 1930, 1932, 1942a, 1942b, 1944, 1945; Bateson, G., 1932, 1941.
Compare for instance the studies of S. F. Nadel on memory in different African cultures,
1937a, 193713, or the study of Lepcha childhood by Geoffrey Gorer, 1938, with the work of W.
Dennis, 1940, who used but was not primarily concerned with validating psychoanalytic hypotheses; or E. H. Erikson, 1943, with such studies as John Whiting, 1941, and C. Dubois, 1944.
Gesell, A,, and Ilg, F. L., 1943, contains a bibliography of the earlier Gesell literature. This
paper was delivered by Dr. Gesell a t a meeting of the N. Y. Neurological Society, January 8,
1946. For earlier bibliography of this general field, see McGraw, Myrtle B., 1935.
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recognized, stages in the sequence in which there are no extreme discontinuities apparent so that the child seems especially well balanced and able to confront life. Furthermore, this spiral model can be used to express another phenomenon which has been observed in the Yale clinic, the recurrence of certain
types of adjusting, as to eating, or reading, etc., in definite sequences. So Dr.
Ilg is able to place the periods a t which a childs appetite is likely to alter, and
say, If it does not happen within the next two or three months, then it will
not happen for another two years. At about age Y you can expect another
period of potential shift, etc. Or she can say: If a child has not shown some
interest in letters by Y age, it is probable that a t the next period of paying
attention he will not fully learn to read,-but that reading will not come until
about such and such a time. As individual differences are discernible in the
duration and intensity of different interrelated points on this growth spiral, it
becomes possible to characterize different types of children as those who show
different patterns of sequential repeat, stressing more the type of development
which comes around 4, 6, and 8 years, for instance, or around 5, 7, and 9 years.
(The exact and probably logarithmic relationships between these repetitive
emphases in sequential development have yet to be determined.)
We can now take these three concepts, a rhythm of growth with a definite
sequence which can be distorted or by-passed, but not hurried; a concept of
growth as proceeding from periods of consolidation to periods of expansion to
new consolidation, so that different points on the spiral will have a different
quality (in ability to adjust, vulnerability t o external pressures, accidents,
etc.) ; and a concept of patterned individual differences expressed in differing
emphases on different phases of the growth process. If we attempt to apply
these concepts to studies of culture, we find that we may look a t any culture
as to whether the cultural expectations of growth anticipate, coincide with, lag
behind or fail to recognize altogether, the innate growth pattern in the generalized form in which it may be attributed to all human infants. There are cultures like the Arapesh in which crawling is discouraged before the appearance
of teeth, or like the Balinese8 in which a child cannot set foot on the groundand therefore has little freedom off the carriers hip-until it is six and onehalf months old. Cultures which strap or bind their infants interfere with the
childs capacity for certain types of motor activity. While it has been reported
that students found that Balkan infants who had been swaddled, in a very few
days attained to the level of movement which other infants would have arrived a t through a series of stages, we do not yet have any way of measuring
the change in quality which is introduced when an activity is engaged in later
than was organically possible. There seems every possibility that the pattern
will be altered and that, while children in all cultures learn to walk, the way in
which they learn to walk and the time a t which they learn t o walk, in relation
Mead, M., 1935.
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to their actual innate maturational capacity, may be very significant as a factor in personality formation. For instance the Balinese child is encouraged to
walk earlier, as creeping i s culturally abhorred, and the child has frequent experiences of overextension and loss of balance; and loss of balance is a preoccupation of Balinese throughout their lives, playing a role in their rejection of
alcohol, disorientation after traveling in motor cars, etc. At each stage the degree of discrepancy or exact correspondence will be registered a t a deutero
level,g and become a factor in later development. So throughout the maturation
cycle, the cultural pattern is one factor in the development of the total personality. The innate rhythmic maturation potential is a second.
If one compares this hypothesis with the tabula rasa school of thought, it
will be seen how much more complicated and how much more systematic it is.
Each act of learning will have occurred in one of a series of definite relationships to the organisms degree of readiness for that act, and from these relationships deutero learnings will occur which may be finally stated in such terms
as attitude towards effort, trust in physical environment or in own skill, etc.
The differences among cultures in which readiness for a given piece of learning
is looked for, and cultures in which the importance of a given item of learning
is so emphasized that the child is prematurely hurried into it, and cultures in
which it is felt that capacities for behavior are revealed a t socially premature
points and so need be retarded or interfered with are very striking. Once we
seriously begin to explore cultures from this point of view, we may find, for
instance, that the learnings which a culture most successfully transmits are
those which are most closely attuned to the human growth rhythm, or we may
find that hypertrophy of certain skills or arts may be due to such a coincidence
of emphasis and timing. Throughout such inquiries it is necessary to recognize
that such differences may be due for instance not t o the age a t which a child is
taught t o draw, but to the presence or absence of opportunities for certain
sorts of free and certain sorts of precision movements, a t a stage before the
child would be capable of drawing. The Gesell-Ilg method makes it possible
to follow through the development of special bodily emphases, or special
emphases on segments of the body, as on arm movements, leg movements, or
the importance of the head, as these reappear in different stages in the maturation sequence.
The most striking differences will be found between those cultures in which
learning is regarded as an individual matter, where the appearance of walking,
talking, heterosexual expression, etc., is waited for until the individual displays readiness, and those cultures in which by the use of a calendar, or
through a ceremonial of initiating novices in groups, or because of the extreme
fluctuations of seasonal life, a new step of development is enforced, either upon
an individual or upon a group with very slight recognition of degree of readiBateson, G . , 1942.
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hood, climacteric, etc. (It will be noted that I am assuming that the Gesell-Ilg
approach should apply to the whole life cycle and not only to the rising curve
from conception to maturity.) Even such cultural attitudes as the Samoan
acceptance of a state of unwillingness or disgruntlement, or the English
acceptance of mood in children may provide a sheltering state within which
the individual can develop more easily.
The third facet of the Gesell-Ilg approach, the possibility of discerning a
series of patterns or types among the individual differences, still awaits more
work and need only be mentioned here. If it becomes possible to discriminate
types of maturation and to place them schematically on different sides of the
spiral-of-growth model, we will then have an instrument which will make it
possible to deal systematically with the hypothesis that in different cultures
different constitutional types have been institutionalized, It has seeemed clear
for a long time that the best approach to this problem would be through differentiating types of maturation as opposed to working with types of adult constitutional difference. But the material has never been available to do this. If
it were found-from the examination of Gesells data and other similar types
of data-that types of innate maturation style could be distinguished, these
differences could be counterpoised against detailed records of cultural expectations,and we would be able to study these cultures which had come to specialize in exactly hitting a natural rhythm, peculiar to one constitutional type,
and also those cultures where child-rearing practices tend towards smoothing
out the differences by superimposing patterns specifically congenial to no type,
or intermediate patterns which blur the distinctions between types. It should
also provide a device by which such problems as class and sex typing, and
regional differences in larger cultures can be approached. Finally by giving us
a conceptual tool with which to handle the question of deviance, it will provide
a method for studying social change, which may be seen as becoming effective
to the extent that the customary patterning of maturation is altered for part
or all of the population, thus embodying in their character formation the character changes appropriate to the changed cultural state.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
BATESON, G .
1932 The Social Structure of the Iatmul People. Oceania Mono., Part IV.
1941 The Frustration-Aggression Hypothesis and Culture. Psych. Review, 48, 4: 350-355.
1942 Social Planning and the Concept of Deutero Learning. Part of Chapter lV, Second
Symposium on Science, Philosophy and Religion, N.Y.
BATESON, G., AND Y. MEAD
1942 Bdinese Character: A Photographic Analysis. New York Academy of Sciences, N.Y.
DENNIS, W.
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DUBOIS, C.
1943 Observations on the Yurok: Childhood and World Image. Univ. of California Press,
Berkeley.
GESELL, A.
1946 Paper delivered a t a meeting of the New York Neurological Society, January 8th,
1946.
GESELL, A., AND F. L. ILG
1943 Infant and Child in the Culture of Today. Harper Bros., N.Y.
CORER, G.
1943 Infant and Child Culture of Today. Harper & Co., N.Y.
MCGRAW, M.