New Guinea Island lies in the southwest Pacific, north of Australia. It is the second largest
island in the world after Greenland, within the Southern Hemisphere. The island is divided
among two countries: Papua New Guinea to the east, and Indonesia to the west.
Countries ranging from the Netherlands to Portugal and Britain have fought over the oil,
copper and gold deposits since the 16th century. Anthropologists were also drawn to the
tribes that have existed here for 40,000 plus years. “The island is presently populated by almost
a thousand different tribal groups and a near-equivalent number of separate languages,
which makes New Guinea the most linguistically diverse area in the world. Ethnologue's
14th edition lists 826 languages of Papua New Guinea.” (Wikipedia.org)
Lily King writes “Anthropology at that time was in transition, moving from the study of men
dead and gone to the study of living people, and slowly letting go of the rigid belief that the
natural and inevitable culmination of every society is the Western model.”
Margaret Mead’s father was a professor of finance and her mother, a sociologist who
studied Italian immigrants. Mead married 3x: her “student marriage,” her middle marriage
to New Zealander & Anthropologist Reo Fortune, and lastly, to British Anthropologist
Gregory Bateson. The marriage to Bateman was her longest lasting marriage (1936-1950),
they had one daughter (her pediatrician was Benjamin Spock), who also became
an anthropologist.
Mead and her second husband, Reo Fortune, were in the Admiralty Islands in the late 1920s.
From 1931-1933 they were located up the Sepik River, in the northeastern edge of the
territory under Australian rule. It was the end of 1932, when Margaret Mead, Reo
Fortune (husband) and Gregory Bateson (future husband) came together. Upon meeting,
there was a connection and an invitation from Bateson for the couple to remain in the
area instead of continuing on to Australia. Bateson found a tribe for them to study and eventually a love triangle developed. Mead was 31, and the gentlemen in their late 20s. Lily King's
inspiration for her book Euphoria came from reading a biography about Margaret Mead by
Jane Howard. The book was purchased in a book store that was closing and King "felt like I had
to buy m something." The chapter that served as inspiration for Euphoria was titled
"The Closest I've Ever Come to Madness."
Mead’s book Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) brought her recognition and launched her as
the world’s most famous anthropologist, her striking accounts of adolescent sexuality
were attention getting. Her next book Growing Up in New Guinea (1930) and Sex and
Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935), were instrumental in moving the
feminist movement forward in America.
In an interview, when asked why Mead was so important, King stated:
"It seemed that her interest in anthropology was to promote social change in
America. And that's a very political thing for an anthropologist to be doing; you
are suppose to be objective. So much of what she was writing , attitudes towards
women, childrearing, the family...she thought the small claustrophobic narrow
minded American family was extremely oppressive and dangerous to the rearing
of children."
In Euphoria, Lily King gives us a sense of what Margaret Mead was like as an individual.
Did King pull off this fictional re-imagining of Margaret Mead?
Come join the discussion on January 5th...