Letters from the Field, 1925-1975

Beginning in 1925, when at twenty-three she embarked on her first field work in Samoa, Mead sent family and friends these letters from the field “to make a little more real for them” the exotic worlds that absorbed her. In this complement to her bestselling memoir Blackberry Winter, Mead has assembled selected letters she wrote from Samoa in 1925-26; from Peré Village, Manus, in the Admiralty Islands, in 1928-29; from the Arapesh, Mundugumor, and Tchambuli, New Guinea, in 1932-33; from Bali and the Iatmul, New Guinea, in 1936-39; from Manus again in 1953; and during brief visits in the sixties and seventies to Manus, several new Guinea sites, and Montserrat in the West Indies. Enhanced by more than 100 photographs, these intelligent, vivid, frequently funny and sometimes poetic letters help us share with Mead “the unique, but also cumulative, experience of immersing oneself in the on-going life of another people, . . .attempting to understand mentally and physically this other version of reality.” Spanning fifty years and half the globe, these personal letters reveal Margaret Mead’s world as never before: A Pioneer in Ethnography: Follow Margaret Mead from her first trip to Samoa as a young woman to her final return trips to the Pacific Islands, witnessing decades of social change. Women in Science: Experience the challenges and triumphs of a groundbreaking female anthropologist in the early 20th century through her own candid, intelligent, and often funny correspondence. Cross-Cultural Studies: Journey to a rich variety of cultures—from Samoa and Bali to the remote tribes of New Guinea—as Mead seeks to understand different "versions of reality." A Visual Record: Enhanced by more than 100 of Mead’s own photographs, this collection brings the people and places of her fifty years of fieldwork to vivid life.