Word: anthropologist
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...They look more alive than dead." I So said Physical Anthropologist Owen Beattie last week of the three British sailors he and his colleagues at the University of Alberta had dug out from Arctic permafrost. Buried in 1846, the corpses are in flawless condition, down to the 19th century outfits and funeral head wrappings. The hands of one of the corpses, says Beattie, are long and delicate, like a pianist's. Petty Officer John Torrington, 20, left, Able Seaman John Hartnell, 25, and Royal Marine William Braine, 34, died after the two ships of Sir John Franklin...
...scientists, putting the demands of native custom before those of scientific knowledge is a disturbing trend. Ancient bones often provide the sole link to prehistoric societies, giving evidence of diet, brain size, stature, disease and longevity. Should scientists be deprived of the right to study these precious fossils, says Anthropologist Milford Wolpoff of the University of Michigan, "it would be an unparalleled tragedy." Studies of aboriginal bones are yielding some particularly important findings. Scientists had long assumed that the original Australians migrated to the continent from Indonesia about 10,000 years ago and, isolated from the influence of other societies...
Even as a young woman of 27, about to earn her first fame as the author of Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), Mead seemed an odd sort of anthropologist. She was a city person, passionately attached to Manhattan, who positively disliked the country. She became claustrophobic in native huts. She had little taste for artifacts. Her passion was for collecting people. From the time she took charge of her playmates' games, Mead proved a relentless organizer of others, regardless of their sex. In college, she formed the "Ash Can Cats," her first extended family, and bound these classmates...
...with colleagues, she was scarcely less demanding of her friends. People she had not seen for a while were subjected to "marathons of conversation, often exhausting." From Samoa to Greenwich Village, it seemed, she was everybody's mother-an irony not lost on Mary Catherine Bateson, now an anthropologist herself, who judged Mead to be "less than fully nurturant" when it came to her own daughter. Bateson expresses bittersweet amusement at her mother's boast that when Baby Cathy was six weeks old, "we let the nurse go and took care of her ourselves for a whole weekend...
...will those future generations that Mead so maternally cared about view her? These two books make the controversy started since her death by the anthropologist Derek Freeman, a professor in Australia, seem a bit beside the point. Did, as Freeman argues, Mead misread her celebrated Samoans? Were they as marvelously gentle as she thought them to be? Mead's conclusion, or wish, may have been less a matter of scholarship or research than of character. More evangelist than scientist, she appeared to believe that the ultimate purpose of anthropology is to increase a sense of life's possibilities...