Second paragraph of third chapter:

Straightening her eyeglasses, taking in the overall effect, she sighed.

I got this because I had been in contact with the author for a peculiar reason. Back in 2020, when The Canterville Ghost won the 1945 Retro Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form, we had the usual difficulties in tracking down the heirs of the creators to send them the trophy. Eventually I found out that the writer of the script, Edwin Harvey Blum, had a living daughter, and duly got in touch with her and sent her the rocket. (In retrospect, we should have also considered the heirs of director Jules Dassin as potential recipients. I think we did contact MGM, and they were not interested.)

I also discovered that Deborah Blum had written this book, and given my vague general interest in anthropology, I bought it; but it then lingered on my unread shelf for five years, to the point that it was the non-fiction book that had been there longest. (Next on that pile is The Politics and Culture of Honour in Britain and Ireland, 1541-1641, by Brendan Kane.)

Anyway, I finally got to it. It’s a reconstruction of the love life of Margaret Mead, between her young marriage to schooldays crush Luther Cressman, her affairs with Andre Sapir and Ruth Benedict, and her meeting with eventual second husband Reo Fortune, basically the first third of her life (she lived from 1901 to 1978).

Other people’s sex lives are always interesting, of course, but I felt this missed several beats. Blum has chosen to write a novelistic reconstruction of conversations and other events, rather than a historical treatment of the surviving correspondence (of which apparently there is a heck of a lot), and I always wonder how much has been made up in cases like this. (See also Persia.)

More importantly, the most interesting thing about Margaret Mead is not who she did or didn’t sleep with in her early twenties, but her contribution to anthropology, and this is only briefly covered in the book, which ends with her return from Samoa in 1926 and lightly skips over her subsequent work and fame. It would be nice to be able to draw a line connecting her emotional and intellectual progress, but that isn’t really attempted here and may not in the end be possible.

Not Blum’s fault at all, but I’d also like to read more some time about Alfred Cort Haddon, one of the founders of anthropology, who popped up in my PhD research thirty years ago as a zoology professor at the Royal College of Science in Dublin, before he became famous as Haddon the Head-Hunter. He crossed paths with Margaret Mead a couple of times, but was forty-five years older and lived on a different continent, so it is entirely fair that Blum does not write much about him here.

Mead’s feminism is particularly interesting (and insufficiently explored in this book). I would like to know how many young women in early 1920s America, marrying at 21, refused to change their names to their husband’s. It would certainly never have occurred to my grandmother, born two years before Margaret Mead in the same city (Philadelphia). I got a much better sense of Mead’s personal mission from her first husband’s moving tribute to her.

All social science, but especially anthropology, owes Margaret Mead a tremendous debt. At twenty-three years of age she did what no woman in anthropology had done. She went on a poverty-level fellowship compared to the generous stipends now given. She violated the canons of the Establishment by writing a report that was interesting, readable, and relevant to the lives of people in our society. She popularized anthropology. The departments in which some of her critics, both friendly and hostile, now teach owe their existence to Margaret’s popularization of the subject matter. If what she wrote in Coming of Age in Samoa tended to produce an outburst of demand for greater sexual freedom among our young people, it did that because it was a lance puncturing the old pustule of hypocrisy. She became a celebrity, and having been made that by the media she cleverly turned it to her own use to support her programs.

Over a half-century ago, this twenty-three-year-old girl who had never before been out of the country, went to an isolated island under financial conditions a contemporary graduate student would probably reject as demeaning, and there made her first field study. She had the firm conviction that she could establish and hold her place in the profession with men. Her record proves she was right and in the doing she became a pioneer in the women’s movement. We all are indebted to her in some degree. Colleagues as scholars will correct her errors, the perspective of time will establish her scientific work, and we, her professional associates, will gain stature both personally and professionally, if we rightly honor the remarkable young girl and the woman Margaret became.

Anyway, you can get Coming of Age here.

Second paragraph of third chapter:

[Chris] Whitty had reason to be worried. Some months earlier a highly infectious disease called Ebola had started to sweep through Britain’s former colony of Sierra Leone and neighboring Liberia and Guinea. Groups such as the World Health Organization and Medecins Sans Frontieres had rushed to halt the contagion. So had the UK, French, and American governments, Barack Obama’s American administration had even sent four thousand troops to Liberia. The world’s best medical experts at places such as Harvard were hunting for a vaccine, and computer scientists were using Big Data tools to track it.

Gillian Tett and I were contemporaries as undergraduates at Clare College, Cambridge, in the 1980s; she studied archaeology and anthropology, and I studied natural sciences (specialising in astrophysics in the end). We did not know each other well, though we lived on the same staircase in our first year. I’ve seen her precisely twice since then, when she gave a presentation on the causes of the 2008 crisis in Brussels in 2009 and when we caught up at a college reunion in 2022 and found we had both been working on Ukraine. She is now the Provost of King’s College, next door.

Before becoming a Financial Times journalist, Tett was an anthropology student whose doctorate examined Islam and Communism in rural Tajikistan. I came to anthropology a bit later in my life – for bureaucratic reasons, my PhD, which was in the history of science, was administered in the Social Anthropology department at the Queen’s University of Belfast. I developed a deep respect for that discipline, and I’ve written about this here in the context of the House of Lords and, er, England. In my day job as a public affairs consultant in Brussels, it seems to me that I get a much better understanding of what is going on and what is likely to happen by applying anthropological analysis of human behaviour and organisational culture than by the traditional methods of political science, let alone philosophy.

Tett doesn’t make quite such grand claims for her discipline in her book Anthro-Vision. She argues merely that it would be good to take an anthropological perspective into account in making important decisions, as well as the legal, economic, political etc points of view that already are well represented around the table. Among the topics she examines are the response to the 2013-14 Ebola outbreak in West Africa; the failure of bankers to spot the risks in their own behaviour that caused the 2008 financial crisis; the appeal of Donald Trump; the difference between remote and office working; and the intriguing rise of environmental, social, and corporate governance as a serious concern in the top boardrooms of the private sector.

I think that she undersells the case for anthropology. As I said above, I think it is actually superior as an analytical framework, perhaps precisely because it is insufficiently used. On the other hand, she also frames herself as a feminist outsider who has a healthy scepticism about the claims of capitalists; but can a Financial Times journalist truly be a mere observer of the world of high finance? With that slight pinch of salt, I strongly recommend the book as a refreshingly different look at what is really going on in the world, and how important (and often bad) decisions get made. You can get it here.