On Creating a Usable Culture : Margaret Mead and the Emergence of American Cosmopolitanism

Margaret Mead’s career took off in 1928 with the publication of __Coming of Age in Samoa.__ Within ten years, she was the best-known academic in the United States, a role she enjoyed all of her life. In __On Creating a Usable Culture,__ Maureen Molloy explores how Mead was influenced by, and influenced, the meanings of American culture and secured for herself a unique and enduring place in the American popular imagination. She considers this in relation to Mead’s four popular ethnographies written between the wars (__Coming of Age in Samoa, Growing Up in New Guinea, The Changing Culture of an Indian Tribe,__ and __Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies__) and the academic, middle-brow, and popular responses to them. Molloy argues that Mead was heavily influenced by the debates concerning the forging of a distinctive American culture that began around 1911 with the publication of George Santayana’s "The Genteel Tradition." The creation of a national culture would solve the problems of alienation and provincialism and establish a place for both native-born and immigrant communities. Mead drew on this vision of an "integrated culture" and used her "primitive societies" as exemplars of how cultures attained or failed to attain this ideal. Her ethnographies are really about "America," the peoples she studied serving as the personifications of what were widely understood to be the dilemmas of American selfhood in a materialistic, individualistic society. Two themes subtend Molloy’s analysis. The first is Mead’s articulation of the individual’s relation to his or her culture via the trope of sex. Each of her early ethnographies focuses on a "character" and his or her problems as expressed through sexuality. This thematic ties her work closely to the popularization of psychoanalysis at the time with its understanding of sex as the key to the self. The second theme involves the change in Mead’s attitude toward and definition of "culture"—from the cultural determinism in __Coming of Age__ to culture as the enemy of the individual in __Sex and Temperament.__ This trend parallels the consolidation and objectification of popular and professional notions about culture in the 1920s and 1930s. __On Creating a Usable Culture__ will be eagerly welcomed by those with an interest in American studies and history, cultural studies, and the social sciences, and most especially by readers of American intellectual history, the history of anthropology, gender studies, and studies of modernism.

Ethnobotany of Pohnpei examines the relationship between plants, people, and traditional culture on Pohnpei, one of the four island members of the Federated States of Micronesia. Traditional culture is still very strong on Pohnpei and is biodiversity-dependent, relying on both its pristine habitats and managed landscapes; native and introduced plants and animals; and extraordinary marine life. This book is the result of a decade of research by a team of local people and international specialists carried out under the direction of the Mwoalen Wahu Ileilehn Pohnpei (Pohnpei Council of Traditional Leaders). It discusses the uses of the native and introduced plant species that have sustained human life on the island and its outlying atolls for generations, including Piper methysticum (locally known as sakau and recognized throughout the Pacific as kava), which is essential in defining cultural identity for Pohnpeians. The work also focuses on ethnomedicine, the traditional medical system used to address health conditions, and its associated beliefs.

Pohnpei, and indeed the Micronesian region, is one of the world’s great centers of botanical endemism: it is home to many plant species found nowhere else on earth. The ultimate goal of this volume is to give readers a sense of the traditional ethnobotanical knowledge that still exists in the area, to make them aware of its vulnerability to modernization, and to encourage local people to respect this ancient knowledge and keep such practices alive. It presents the findings of the most comprehensive ethnobotanical study undertaken to date in this part of Micronesia and sets a new standard for transdisciplinary research and collaboration.

Contents Acknowledgments 1 .Introduction 2. The Problem of American Culture 3. The “Jungle Flapper” Civilization, Repression, and the Homogenous Society 4. “Lords of an Empty Creation” Masculinity, Puritanism, and Cultural Stagnation 5. “Every Woman Deviating from the Code” Cultural Lag, Moral Contagion, and Social Disintegration 6. “Maladjustment of a Worse Order” Temperament, Psychosexual Misidentifi cation, and the Refuge of Private Life 7. On Creating a Usable Culture Notes References Index Margaret Mead's career took off in 1928 with the publication of 'Coming of Age in Samoa'. In this book, Maureen Molloy explores how Mead was influenced by, and influenced, the meaning of American culture and secured for herself a unique place in the American popular imagination