Letters from the Field, 1925-1975 Review & Ratings

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Letters from the Field, 1925-1975 Review

This book is a collection of letters written by Margaret Mead to friends and family while she was working in the field. The letters span her entire career, from 1925 until 1975, and are accompanied in every chapter by photos by and of Mead. I found the letters quite intriguing, both for what they said as well as for what they didn't say. Some of the letters provide travelogue-like details of what conditions were like at her research sites. Some tell us a little more of what she was really thinking about the people and cultures that she later wrote formal descriptions of. Some of the later letters are quite formal, more journal entries than personal letters.
I found some of the most interesting materials actually to be the short introductions that Mead wrote at the beginning of each chapter, where she glosses quickly over the enormous upheavals in her personal life. In chapter 1, she says goodbye to her "student husband, Luther Cressman." In the next chapter, she notes that she stopped in Auckland on her way to the Admiralty Islands to marry Reo Fortune before starting her 1928-29 research project in Manus. Then in chapter 5, she stops in Singapore to marry Gregory Bateson in preparation for their 1936-1939 project in Bali. Since I had only read Mead's professional writings before, the book's casual mentions of frequent successive marriages aroused some curiosity about her personal life. A quick Web search revealed quite a bit more, including a long-standing connection with Ruth Benedict (see for example "Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict: The Kinship of Women" by Hilary Lapsley). If you are interested in the life and work of Margaret Mead, this book will give you some insight into Mead's own opinions of what she was observing that go beyond the objective descriptions found in her formal works.

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