Premium
Margaret Mead, Reo Fortune, and Mountain Arapesh Warfare
Author(s) -
Roscoe Paul
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
american anthropologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.51
H-Index - 85
eISSN - 1548-1433
pISSN - 0002-7294
DOI - 10.1525/aa.2003.105.3.581
Subject(s) - covert , gestalt psychology , new guinea , sociology , history , psychoanalysis , psychology , ethnology , philosophy , epistemology , linguistics , perception
In Sex and Temperament, Margaret Mead depicted the Mountain Arapesh of New Guinea as a gentle, nurturant people among whom warfare was "practically unknown." A few years later, however, Reo Fortune, her husband and cofieldworker, was to claim that warfare was "good Arapesh custom." This article reexamines this disagreement, addressing two issues: Did the Arapesh have a tradition of warfare?, and How do we reconcile the differences in Mead and Fortune's descriptions? I conclude that, prior to pacification, the Mountain Arapesh resorted to significant levels of violence and waged war on a regular basis. Mead was drawn to a contrary conclusion because of the comparative nature of her analysis and because of covert licenses in the theoretical gestalt she had acquired from Ruth Benedict, which rendered her analysis immune to contradictory data. I suggest that Freeman overlooked the effects of this gestalt in assessing Mead's work in Samoa. [Keywords: Margaret Mead, Reo Fortune, Mountain Arapesh warfare, Derek Freeman, Samoa]