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Beginning in 1925, when as a young anthropologist of twenty-three she set off to do her first field work in Samoa, Margaret Mead has sent home to family and friends these letters from the field "to make a little more real for them" the exotic worlds that absorbed her. Now, in this complement to her best-selling memoir Blackberry Winter, Dr. Mead has brought together a selection of the 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 field trips and field visits in the sixties and seventies to Manus, several New Guinea sites, and Montserrat in the West Indies. Enhanced by more than 100 photographs, this collection is, as the author puts it, "a very personal record of what it has meant to be a practicing anthropologist over the last fifty years." Its readers share with Dr. Mead "the unique, but also cumulative, experience of immersing oneself in the ongoing life of another people, suspending for the time both one's beliefs and disbeliefs, and of simultaneously attempting to understand mentally and physically this other version of reality."
As a writer, Margaret Mead has a magical gift for selecting just those details that will make people and places---and herself in those settings---come alive. Vivid, lively, sometimes poetic, frequently funny, always intelligent, this fascinating book is in effect the informal autobiography of one of the most remarkable people of our time---a woman of rare insights, courage, integrity, and strength.
THE AUTHOR
MARGARET MEAD is Curator Emeritus of Ethnology, The American Museum of Natural History, New York; Adjunct Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University; and Visiting Professor of Anthropology, Department of Psychiatry, University of Cincinnati Medical College.
She began her field work with a study of the adolescent girl in Samoa and continues to do field research among the peoples of Oceania whom she has studied over the past fifty years. Dr. Mead believes that anthropological field work with living peoples in small, bounded communities is a vital preparation for participation in the planning and development of new planet-wide institutions.
Among her better-known books are Coming of Age in Samoa, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, Continuities in Cultural Evolution, Culture and Commitment and Blackberry Winter.
THE EDITOR
RUTH NANDA ANSHEN, philosopher and editor, plans and edits World Perspectives, Religious Perspectives, Credo Perspectives, Perspectives in Humanism, The Science of Culture Series and The Tree of Life Series. She also writes and lectures on the relationship of knowledge to the nature and meaning of man's new plateau of consciousness and to his understanding of and place in the universe. Dr. Anshen's book, The Reality of the Devil: Evil in Man, is a study in the phenomenology of evil, and is published by Harper & Row.
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Contents WORLD PERSPECTIVES- --What This Series Means Introduction I. Samoa, 1925-1926 II. Peré Village, Manus, Admiralty Islands, 1928-1929 III. Omaha Reservation, Summer, 1930 IV. New Guinea---Arapesh, Mundugumor and Tchambuli, 1931-1933 V. Bali and latmul, New Guinea, 1936-1939 VI. Return to Manus, 1953 VII. Field Visits in a Changing World, 1964-1975 Appendix: A Note on Orthography and My Use of Native Languages References and Selected Bibliography Acknowledgments Illustrations |
1925 - 1975
These letters from the field are one record, a very personal record, of what it has meant to be a practicing anthropologist over the last fifty years.
Field work is only one aspect of any anthropologist's experience and the circumstances of field work---the particular circumstances of any one occasion---are never twice the same nor can they ever be alike for two fieldworkers. Yet field work---the unique, but also cumulative, experience of immersing oneself in the ongoing life of another people, suspending for the time both one's beliefs and disbeliefs, and of simultaneously attempting to understand mentally and physically this other version of reality---is crucial in the formation of every anthropologist and in the development of a body of anthropological theory. Field work has provided the living stuff out of which anthropology has developed as a science and which distinguishes this from all other sciences.
Field work is, of course, very ancient, in the sense that curious travelers, explorers and naturalists have gone far afield to find and bring home accounts of strange places, unfamiliar forms of plant and animal life and the ways of exotic peoples. Ancient records refer to the unusual behavior of strangers, and for thousands of years artists have attempted to capture some living aspects of the peoples and creatures evoked in travelers' tales or the sacred mythology of some distant, little-known people. A generation ago students still were given Greek and Latin texts through which they not only learned about high civilizations ancestral to our own but also gained a view of exotic peoples as they were described by Greeks and Romans in their own era. In fact, generation after generation, philosophers and educators, historians and naturalists, polemicists and revolutionaries, as well as poets and artists and storytellers, have drawn on the accounts of peoples who seemed more idyllic or more savage or more complexly civilized than themselves.
But only in this century have we attempted systematically to explore and comprehend the nature of the relationship between the observer and that which is observed, whether it is a star, a microscopic particle, an ant hill, a learning animal, a physical experiment or some human group isolated for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years from the mainstream of the world's history as we know it. Throughout my lifetime the implications of the inclusion of the observer within the circle of relevance have enormously widened and deepened. Einstein lectured at Columbia University while I was an undergraduate at Barnard. I read Erwin Schrodinger's Science and the Human Temperament when it appeared in English in 1935. And of course I belong to the generation of those who learned from Freud that observers of human behavior must become aware of how they themselves have become persons and respond to those whom they are observing or treating. This kind of consciousness was systematized in psychoanalytic theory and practice as transference and counter-transference; analysts, attending intensively to the slightest change in the rhythm of their analysands' speech or movement, learned to attend at the same time to their own flow of imagery and to grasp the relationship between the two.
As these insights became widely known and were incorporated in scientific thought and practice, a counter-tendency also developed among certain scientists concerned with the study of human behavior. Having discovered how deeply the observer is involved in what is observed, they made new efforts to ensure objectivity and to systematize methods of observation that would minimize the effect of observer bias. Sophisticated statistical methods were developed that effectively eliminate the individual observation as well as the individual observer. Experiments were devised using double-blind methods and observers were given formal check lists on which to note, for example, the behavior of infants in such ways that no hint of intuitive response would be preserved in the records that eventually saw the light of day.
In the natural sciences students were carefully trained to cast every experiment within a rigid framework that controlled the development of hypotheses, the use of methods of recording and analysis and the limits of the conclusions---a style of research recording that for a long time almost completely disguised the actual complexities of scientific advance under a mask of uniform orderliness. Following this precedent, social scientists elaborated the paraphernalia of objective social science. Their methods, identified as "science," were pitted against what were called "impressionistic" methods, in which the records of the human observer were presented without the sanitizing operations which appeared to remove the observer from the scene.
In this conflict between those who attempted to mechanize the intelligence and skills of the observer and those who tried to make the most of the idiosyncratic skills and intuitions of the observer, by enlarging and deepening the observer's self-awareness, anthropologists occupied a middle ground.
We were slowly devising ways in which our reports on the culture of a primitive people could be made objective in the sense that another fieldworker, comparably trained, might be expected to elicit the same order of data from members of the same culture. This was particularly the case in linguistics, since methods of standardized phonetic recording can be used to reproduce the regularities of an unwritten language in such a way that the data can be analyzed and used for comparative purposes by other linguists. In this work the sensitivities of the individual human ear are fully enlisted, both the ear of the native speaker of the language to whom the field linguist must present alternative sound sequences and the ear of the fieldworker who writes down the language. Today this can be supplemented by tape recordings of the process, which allow another listener to hear and compare.
With less initial precision---for language has the special advantage of being coded by speaker and listener in the same way---cultural anthropologists learned to record the kinship usages of a people by fitting the terms to the biological phenomena of reproduction, so that the terms for mother's brother, for example, or daughter's son can be as unequivocally specified as the method by which the outrigger of a canoe is lashed to the canoe can be described and diagramed.
Through the use of such techniques---and the training of students to use these techniques reliably and confidently---the ethnographic monograph came to contain a large body of ordered information which was reasonably independent of observer bias, whether that bias was owing to ethnocentricity, temperamental preferences, research interests or applied aims. Our methods of describing a ceremony or an economic exchange or the complex details of an agricultural process and of recording the texts of folk-tales and myths have become sufficiently formalized so that, if a large body of such diversified data is split in half, others trained in the same paradigms may be expected, by careful analysis, to arrive at comparable results.
But we were also developing a special approach to field work as a whole. That is, while we were learning how to apply the various formal techniques in the field---how to take down linguistic texts in phonetic script and how to learn a language and record it, how to trace socially contrived relationships through the ramifications of biologically derived relationships, how to relate a people's own color classifications to a color chart based on our contemporary understanding of the psycho-physiology of color perception and, especially, how to teach our informants how to teach us---we were also learning how to live in the field. This became known as "participant observation." It began as the observer moved from the mission compound or from the rocking chair on the porch of some inn or the office of a colonial administrator to the place where the people actually live.
However, this is only the beginning. Living in the village by night as well as by day and for long uninterrupted months, the field anthropologist witnesses thousands of small events which never would have become visible, let alone intelligible, at a greater distance. It is, in fact, a very peculiar situation, for while the anthropologist "participates" in everyday life he---or she---also observes that participation and both enters into genuinely meaningful and lasting relationships with individuals and learns from those relationships the nature of "relating" in that society.
It is sometimes assumed that participant observation means taking on a kind of protective coloring or even assuming a disguised or a fictitious role---an "as if" relationship to the people among whom one is living---as a way of observing them. Actually there is a kind of absurdity in this, as the fieldworker is always present notebook in hand, asking questions, trying to learn and to understand, and the field work becomes rich and rewarding to the extent that the people one is studying accept the legitimacy of one's work and at least some of them, in turn, begin to develop the second-level consciousness of self-awareness.
This new kind of field work, in which anthropologists live for an extended period in the midst of the people whose way of life they wish to understand, was just beginning when I entered anthropology. During the next decade it was developed, almost independently, in England by Bronislaw Malinowski and his students and in the United States by the students Franz Boas sent into the field to work on new kinds of problems in which an intimate understanding of many individual members of a primitive society was necessary. Our methods, which developed out of the conditions in which we worked, were grounded---as they still are---in certain fundamental theoretical assumptions about the psychic unity of mankind and the scientist's responsibility to respect all cultures, no matter how simple or how exotic, and to appreciate the worth of the people who are studied in order to increase our systematic understanding of the capacities and potentialities of Homo sapiens.
We knew that we had been bred in our culture and could never lose our own cultural identity; we could only learn about others through the recognition that their membership in their culture and our membership in ours, however different in substance, were alike in kind. But we did not yet recognize that every detail of reaching the field and of interchange with those who tried to bar or who facilitated our way to our field site were also part of our total field experience and so of our field work. This we have learned very slowly as we have learned to use our disciplined subjectivity in the course of a long field trip among isolated peoples distant in time and space from our own society. We have learned that every part of the field experience becomes part of our evolving consciousness---the impressions gained on the journey, our interchanges with government personnel at many levels, with missionaries and teachers and businessmen, the inaccurate as well as the accurate information accumulated from other travelers, the bright or the subdued light in which we first glimpse the villages where we intend to work, the letters that reach us, the books we read, the chills and fevers that accompany work in hot jungles or high, cold mountains.
When I started to write these letters, I had no sense that I was discussing the making of a method, that in making what I was doing intelligible to myself and to my family and friends I was recording steps in the development of a new kind of holistic approach. But I returned from my first field trip to Samoa to discuss the relationship between Samoans and the United States Navy not in terms of an ideologically defined separation of exploiting imperialists and an exploited people, but in the light of my own experience of the way both groups, through their perceptions of each other, were becoming part of a larger whole. However, it was only twenty-five years later---and only after the Manhattan Project had produced the atom bomb---that I realized the basic difference between such a project, which could be pursued in isolation from the rest of the society, and the applications of anthropological knowledge, which depend on the diffusion throughout the wider society of the particular findings about the capacities of our human nature and the constraints imposed by our shared common humanity.
From my own first field trip to Samoa participation has involved entering into many facets of the life of the people I have worked among---eating the food, learning to weave a mat or make a gesture of respect or prepare an offering or recite a charm as they had been taught to do, using the disciplined awareness of how I myself felt in the circumstances as one further way of coming to understand the people who were my teachers as well as the subjects of my study.
For the anthropologist living in the midst of a village, waking at cock crow or drum beat, staying up all night while the village revels or mourns, learning to listen for some slight change in the level of chatter or the cry of a child, field work becomes a twenty-four-hour activity. And everything that happens, from the surly refusal of a boatman to take one across the river to one's own dreams, becomes data once the event has been noted, written up, photographed or tape recorded.
As the inclusion of the observer within the observed scene becomes more intense, the observation becomes unique. So the experience of each fieldworker on each particular field trip differs from all other comparable experience. This, too, must be part of one's awareness. And the more delicate and precise the methods of recording---and I have lived through all the improvements from pencil and notebook and still photography to video tape---the more fully these unique experiences become usable parts of our scientific data. Equipped with instruments of precision and replication that were developed to meet the requirements of natural scientists for objectivity and replicable observations, human scientists are able to bring back from the field records of unique, subjectively informed experience which can be analyzed and later reanalyzed in the light of changing theory.
But the process of obtaining the information is very curious and exacting. Psychoanalysts, who must pay such intense and continuous attention to every slightest nuance in the communication process at the end of the day can close the door of their consulting room, turn off their insightful attention and go out into the world to become, apparently, as unselfconsciously unaware as the least analyzed of their acquaintances. The field anthropologist cannot give the same kind of undivided attention to the full kaleidoscope of events, all of which together become the background experience which must be turned into data---the behavior of a woman with a fish to sell, the behavior of two children watching an old man who is preparing to tell a tale, the expression of a boy with a bleeding cut to be bound up. But field anthropologists never can turn off their attention. Visitors from outside this closed circle of attention are both a temptation and an interruption. Letters from home wrench one's thoughts and feelings inappropriately away.
Nevertheless, letters written and received in the field have a very special significance. Immersing oneself in life in the field is good, but one must be careful not to drown. One must somehow maintain the delicate balance between empathic participation and self-awareness, on which the whole research process depends. Letters can be a way of occasionally righting the balance as, for an hour or two, one relates oneself to people who are part of one's other world and tries to make a little more real for them this world which absorbs one, waking and sleeping.
Over the years I have come to realize that each generation of young anthropologists can only build on the present. They can't go back and they can't do it over again. They have to go on in a world that has changed, making observations and developing theory in ways that were not yet possible before their own teachers went to the field and that will no longer fully satisfy their own students when they, in turn, begin their field research. Books and monographs record the outcome of field experience. But we have very few records, written for others to read, of field work in process.
These letters constitute such a record. For from the very first letter, written when the whole adventure of my field work was still before me, to the most recent ones, which incorporate in some sense all my changing field work experience, they were designed to be read by a group of people, and a very diverse group at that, to whom for various reasons I wanted to remain explicable. When I wrote that first letter, in the summer of 1925, I was on the long sea voyage that was taking me by stages to Samoa, where my family and friends had never been and probably would never go. There was no way of knowing what lay ahead in the many months I would spend on those far Pacific islands, but I wanted them to share somehow in what happened so that, when I came home, they would know me better, not as a stranger but as myself.
I knew my parents would have no difficulty with the idea of field work. My mother, as a graduate student in sociology, had made a study of Italian immigrants and my father treated the troubles of small businesses, which his students in corporation finance brought to him for consultation, as so many short field trips into the real world. But neither my mother nor my father had ever been out of the United States or further west than Iowa. My grandmother had given me a sense of what natural science was about and had taught me botany, but she had no real feeling for studying strange and exotic peoples, who were stereotyped in some mental image of "the wild man of Borneo." And I think that in the beginning I saw my grandmother at the center of my audience---the one person whom I wanted most to understand what my work was about and the one it would be hardest to convince that I had chosen well in becoming an anthropologist.
My friends were a small close group. We were bound together by our interest in poetry and the theater and by the importance we gave to our personal relationships, our intense friendships, our love affairs and our struggles to relate ourselves to men and women in the next older generation who were close to us in mind but far removed in practice. What each of us was writing, who had fallen in love with whom, how we severally coped with miseries that kept us still together---these were our common preoccupations. There were also my student husband, Luther Cressman, who was traveling in Europe and who wrote to me describing paintings and places he especially liked, and my former college roommate, Louise Rosenblatt, who wrote to me from Grenoble, where she was preparing to write her thesis, L'Idée de l'art pour l'art dans la littérature anglaise pendant la période Victorienne. All these formed a second group. The third group included my parents-in-law, a country doctor and his musician wife, and my five brothers-in-law, whose interests then or later centered in the natural sciences.
Everyone for whom I was writing those field letters from Samoa was clear in my mind, as clear as if I were writing to each one alone. I could visualize how they looked, imagine what they were feeling and guess what their questions would have been had they been present. In fact, I hardly had to do so, for every six weeks while I was in Samoa a boat would bring the mail---a huge batch of seventy or eighty letters, which I would sit and stare at, spread out on my bed, bracing myself for whatever news they brought, whatever questions they raised.
Scattered through my earlier field letters are a handful written to individuals, people with whom I had a professional as well as a personal relationship---Franz Boaz, who was still my professor when I wrote to him from Samoa; Ruth Benedict, who had arranged for the summer field work on the Omaha reservation, about which I wrote to her; William Fielding Ogburn, whose student assistant I had been; and Clark Wissler, who was the chairman of my department at the American Museum of Natural History. I have included these few personal letters both for the sake of their content and because they touch on professional preoccupations.
Because I typed my letters, I could make several copies and I worked hard to make each letter intelligible to this varied, known and loved group of people. What I did not learn until I returned home from my first field trip late in 1926 was how many other people---relatives of relatives, members of my mother's little highbrow reading circle, neighbors, friends of friends and friends' lovers---read my letters or the copies typed by my mother, among others, to be passed on.
In this manner a style was set during my first field trip, in which I wrote for an intimate, identified audience that widened but without my willing it. As the years went by I adapted my writing to that knowledge by including as probable readers unknown others who were close to people who were close to me---an audience at one step removed from intimacy. This continued up to the war years.
After the war, when I returned to New Guinea in 1953, new methods of reproduction made it possible for me to have twenty-five or fifty or a hundred copies made at home to mail to an ever-widening circle. Then, as the group grew larger, the subject matter about which I wrote in my field letters became somewhat more formal. Later still, an occasional field letter was published or was used as the basis for an article or by a biographer writing for children. I myself published parts of several field letters in a chapter in Women in the Field, edited by Peggy Golde, a book designed to give women---and men, as well---some idea of what field work is like.
Through the years, as people who had read my first letters died and others came to take their place, field work became a commonplace among young anthropologists, who experienced hardships beside which my own discomforts and discomfitures appear trivial. And in these years the adventure of field work, of the attempt to enter deeply into another culture, became more rather than less exciting. Moreover, understanding of the relationship between what the anthropologist does in the field and the results of that research assumed new dimensions as books were published, books that appealed to a wide audience and in time became part of the undergraduate curriculum in many colleges---such books as Malinowski's Argonauts of the Western Pacific, Reo Fortune's Sorcerers of Dobu, Edward Sapir's Language, my Coming of Age in Samoa, Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture and Ruth Bunzel's The Pueblo Potter.
In the 1920s, when so few people knew anything at all about field work, it seemed to me necessary to describe in my letters each step in the process of groping my way into unknown territory. But writing from New Guinea on later field trips, I felt it was more important to document the series of accidents that determined the actual location of a field site. This was in response to an accusation anthropologists were beginning to encounter, namely, that we found what we were looking for. Those who had--and have---no sense of how highly and diversely cultures are patterned could not ---and even today cannot---imagine how different one's research emphases would have been had the carriers or the canoe crew offloaded one's paraphernalia among another people only a few miles further on, but still almost as difficult to reach as the moon.
Although the number of those who read my field letters grew very considerably over time and the changing appreciation of anthropology among literate Americans led me to cast my preoccupations in a somewhat different mold, these letters still were addressed to readers who knew me---as I knew them---very well or at least to readers who were given the letters by someone who could describe the kind of person I am. Unlike a journal, they were never simply jottings for myself, which I then passed on to others. Nor were they the kind of self-conscious production in the form of a "private" diary which some writers construct for posterity---for an unknown audience of readers as yet unborn who, it is assumed, will be deeply interested in the agonies and ecstasies of creation.
In fact, I did keep a diary, complete but stripped of comment, as an index to events and records. This was an act of responsibility in case my field work was interrupted and someone else had to make sense of it. I also typed all my notes in the field so that they could be used by another person---and for this typing I came to use the best rag-content paper so that now, decades later, every page is intact. And I kept my private coding up to date just in case there might be a hurricane tonight or an earthquake tomorrow. My letters from the field were neither substitutes for proper field notes nor were they designed to orient some unfortunate successor who had undertaken to put my notes in order. They served another purpose.
Very rarely I have found a remark in a letter that somehow failed to get into my notes. The comment was then a useful supplement to the recorded state of my understanding of the culture at the date I wrote it. And once in a while in a letter I would describe some event with greater vividness---as I might later, writing a book---to convey the full sense of that particular occasion and at the same time to fix it in my mind.
But generally these letters were intended to convey to various people about whom I cared---in later years people with whom I had worked on committees, at conferences, on joint publications and in shared projects, as well as my family and old friends---what it was like on this trip, this year. Unlike an autobiography, in which one seeks to make oneself intelligible to an unknown audience, the letters were essentially a way of keeping up to date with the people who knew me best and with whom I liked to share some of my current preoccupations. Knowing this, the reader today may sense in these letters the kind of intimacy one usually experiences only in correspondence with one identified person, especially someone with whom the writer has had a long, complex relationship. Every word was measured for different people, each of whom was in some way close to me. The others, whom I did not know, remained accidental listeners at a conversation not expressly meant for them.
However, there were limits that I myself imposed. This collection might also be called "what I told my friends it was like to do field work." I did not tell them all of it by any means. There were fits of homesickness, the sudden conviction that a wrong choice of field site had been forced on us, tremendous difficulties both when I did and when I did not identify happily with the people I was studying, bitter arguments and sometimes, especially in the years before the war, frustration at being so far removed from events that were reshaping the world. Dashes in Ruth Benedict's diaries, published in An Anthropologist at Work, give some idea of the pictures she had in mind that developed out of the letters I wrote her from Samoa. But matters of this kind are best kept for letters to the one person who may be expected to understand and sympathize with some particular heartache. It would have made no more sense to broadcast one's miseries than to have cast messages onto the waters of the wide Pacific, hoping for some uplifting return three or four months later. Nor would it have made sense to write in detail about the day-to-day intricacies of field work. Who else besides a handful of fieldworkers who shared ways of thinking about theory and method and the exigencies of field work would respond helpfully? Most emphatically, these letters do not present a whole, complete picture of what a fieldworker feels, even about field work. It is certainly not a picture that has been touched up with brighter colors. But there are omissions related to the fact that what I wrote about was selected for those who were concerned and interested, but not desperately concerned or deeply professionally involved.
Field work is today part of our everyday life in many forms. Visual records of births and deaths and open-heart surgery are displayed for a general audience on the television screen, arguments take place in Congress as to whether pupils in the fifth grade should be exposed to a documentary film in which they can see Eskimo children watching a seal being butchered, and in many settings hot discussions focus on the question of whether anyone should be allowed to take notes about other persons to which those others will not have full access. We see in photographs and on television coronations and funerals, political celebrations and public hangings, natural disasters and battles while they are going on, conveyed to us by satellite, and we have somehow to reconcile in our minds our own beliefs and preferences, whatever knowledge we may have and the images presented to us by the persons controlling the camera's eye and the microphone.
Only during World War II did we begin to learn that anyone, anywhere in the world, might be listening. And from that time on the anthropologist had to assume a new responsibility to speak---and of course write---about every people in the world, however remote, in ways that they, their friends and their descendants would find bearable and intelligible.
But such an expectation of openness to the world did not exist before the war. Very few Americans had learned that mail could be opened by a government anxious to learn about one's political loyalties or activities. True, in Samoa, cables were subject to scrutiny by the Navy in the interests of intelligence and once I was commanded to put into "plain English" a message which I had phrased as "Reiteration."
For the most part anthropologists even then were careful in their books and articles and published reports to disguise identities and to protect those who might otherwise have come into conflict with officialdom over some colonialist government's regulations. But, in personal letters, the respect or the irritation, the affection or the plain-spoken dislike that shines through was private to the extent that it was not designed for, and seemed most unlikely ever to reach, the eyes of those about whom we were writing. This seemed to be equally true of the fieldworker' s private diary, in which, having no one at all to talk to when he was angry or tired or depressed, he let himself go temporarily so that, the next morning, having faced his feelings, he was able to get on with his work in a reasonable frame of mind.
Fortunately, I never needed to keep such a diary. But there were other situations. I remember a photographer once asking: "Why don't you take some popular brand of soap along and photograph those people using it? You could bring the picture back and sell it. They'll never know!" It is true that they might not have then, but they would be very likely to today. Needless to say, this was not a kind of thing that appealed to me or to anthropologists in general. But in the mid-1920s, even when I was writing a book, I did not stop to consider, while I was disguising the names of the Samoan girls whose love affairs I was discussing, how their grandsons fifty years later would feel about their grandmothers' behavior. Sometimes we were alerted by the comic, but almost invariably denigrating cartoons in a magazine like The New Yorker. More often we learned about misinterpretations and new kinds of resentment from the hot political controversies of the war years and events in the years that came after.
Nevertheless, in these letters, except when an individual might somehow be harmed, I have let stand statements made in a way I would not make them today. But my letters do reflect in various ways the changing sensitivities of later years. And for good reasons there may be no letters. In 1955, during my short return trip to Bali with Ken Heyman, in the midst of the swirling uncertainties of Dutch, Indonesian and Balinese politics, I wrote no letters at all and did not even risk transcribing my notes until I returned home.
We live in a world today in which an apparent slip of the tongue by a major political candidate and, equally, an imprudent remark on an open postcard mailed home by a Peace Corps worker in a Third World country can set off an international incident. In the prewar years when most of these letters were written, the principal hazard was that a lonely patrol officer might stop a police boy with a mail bag, read one's correspondence and then forget to send it on its way. But that was long ago. Now, in the face of the pride of a very new country like Papua New Guinea, one must be prepared to take full responsibility not only for all one says today but also for everything one said---or is said to have said---in the past that survives into the present.
I remember a sharp-tongued and very sophisticated old cousin of my mother's commenting that she preferred the appendices to the text of my books. "They really tell you something," she said. And, if the circumstance that in these letters I could take myself and my friends for granted proves to be difficult for some readers, there are other forms of publication to which they can turn. There is my autobiography, Blackberry Winter, in which I tried to describe what there was about my upbringing that made it possible for me to work with peoples who were, in those earlier days, very distant from us in evolutionary time and with very young people today to whom I have to try to speak clearly across the yawning generation gap of the mid- 1960s. Elsewhere I have published intellectual autobiographical statements. There are the books designed for general audiences and, in addition, monographs and specialist papers related to all the peoples among whom I have done field work, samples of notes, samples of the process of transforming notes into general statements and samples of a day's diary.
Because I think that field work---the intensive long months of trying to step as fully as one can into the reality of another culture---is a peculiar and tremendously exacting adventure, I have gathered together these letters from the field. I have not published all of them or, in some cases, the whole of long letters. In Samoa, my first field experience, where I was alone as a fieldworker, I wrote long and very full accounts in my field letters; only a fraction of them are included here. Where our working conditions were particularly difficult, as in Mundugumor, I did not write at length. And on almost every field trip, as the pace of work quickened and recording expanded with our growing knowledge, the gap between field letters grew. It is a pity that it is so, but it is also a realistic reflection of the field work situation.
These letters, then, are one record of the way modern anthropological field work evolved---a record, based on the experience of one fieldworker, of what goes into the making of a modern anthropologist and into the evolution of anthropological theory, which is both holistic and based on the analysis of the patterning of the finest detail. When the early letters were written, we did not even have a name for what we were doing, except the very general term "field work." The major shift came when anthropologists went to live in the community and shared, twenty-four hours a day, in the sights and sounds, the tastes and smells, the pace and rhythm of a reality in which every detail was not only different in itself but was differently organized as a perceptual scheme.
Only very slowly did we begin to take into account that we ourselves change with each step of the journey, with each new image presented to us in some casual comment and with each day in the field as we learned the language and as nonsense syllables and meaningless gestures resolved themselves into elaborate patterns of behavior. The development of intensive photography made it possible to record some of these changes in our ability to see and understand in the contrast between photographs and films made the first day and the last.
Visually, the illustrations may make a great difference to some readers. With one or two exceptions, I was never able to send photographs home from the field and so my family and friends, for whom the Pacific islands were far more strange and distant then than they have become now, had to create an image of their own with far less to go on. Other fieldworkers, reading between the lines, will know "what the jest is worth."
I have eaten your bread and salt,
I have drunk your water and wine.
The deaths ye died I have watched beside,
And the lives ye led were mine.I have written the tale of our life
For a sheltered people's mirth,
In jesting guise---but ye are wise,
And ye know what the jest is worth.
By now almost all the older adults and a great many of the young people on whom I depended in the field have died. Fa'amotu, my Samoan "sister" in Vaitogi, died in San Diego in the spring of 1976. But I Madé Kaler, our gifted and indefatigable secretary during our whole time in Bali, who later became head of a school in Den Pasar, is still well and active.
After an interval of forty years, when I found my Arapesh villagers again, reassembled at Hoskins Bay in New Britain, where they were participating in the development of a modern oil palm enterprise, there were only two women who had known me as adults. The others, children when we were in Alitoa, knew of me only as a myth. But in my own memory, in photographs and in words, those I never saw again live on, transfixed in time. In the mind of one who studied them as children, they became more than friends, much more than babies who were dosed and nursed back to health. For even the small children were collaborators in an undertaking that transcended both me and them---the attempt to understand enough about culture so that all of us, equally members of humankind, can understand ourselves and take our future and the future of our descendants safely in our hands.
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