Margaret Mead

Life

Mead studied at Barnard College and Columbia University under Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict. At 23 she went to Samoa alone; the resulting Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) made her famous and launched a lifetime of fieldwork in the Pacific, including the Balinese research she undertook with her third husband, Gregory Bateson. She worked for more than fifty years at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and became one of the best-known public intellectuals in the United States. Her daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson, also became a writer on systems and culture.

Influences

Boas taught her that culture, not biology, shapes most of what we take as human nature. Benedict gave her the idea of cultures as patterned wholes. Through Bateson and the wartime Macy meetings she encountered feedback and communication theory, which offered a way to describe culture as a self-regulating system.

Contributions

Mead and Bateson attended the Macy Conferences from the first meeting, and pushed for the social sciences to be part of cybernetics from the beginning. Mead was also involved in the founding of the American Society for Cybernetics in the 1960s.

At the society’s first annual symposium, in October 1967, she gave the keynote, “The Cybernetics of Cybernetics”, asking whether cybernetic ideas could be applied to the society that was trying to use them. Heinz von Foerster later took up the phrase as the title for the study of observing systems, and it became a name for second-order cybernetics.

Why it matters today

Mead’s question still applies: the institutions that design feedback systems are themselves feedback systems, and usually fail to apply their own insights to themselves. Her insistence that anthropologists and social scientists sit at the same table as engineers is a model for interdisciplinary work on technology.

Further reading

• Margaret Mead, “The Cybernetics of Cybernetics”, in Purposive Systems (1968)
• Mary Catherine Bateson, With a Daughter’s Eye (1984)