Myth Mongering

To Cherish the Life of the World: The Selected Letters of Margaret Mead, edited by Margaret Caffrey and Patricia Francis (Basic, 429 pp., $29.95)

MARGARET MEAD, the most famous anthropologist of the 20th century, once described field work as “the intensive months of trying to step as fully as one can into the reality of another culture.” That’s supposedly what she did in 1925, when she arrived in Samoa to study the psychology and sexual habits of island girls. She was just 23, and her head was full of the progressive ideas and cultural relativism that she had imbibed from “Papa Franz”-i.e., Franz Boas, her handlebar-mustachioed mentor at Columbia University.

About the Author

John J. Miller

John J. Miller, a former national correspondent for National Review, is the director of the Dow Journalism Program at Hillsdale College. He is the author of A Gift of Freedom: How the John M. Olin Foundation Changed America.

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To Cherish the Life of the World: The Selected Letters of Margaret Mead, edited by Margaret Caffrey and Patricia Francis (Basic, 429 pp., $29.95)

MARGARET MEAD, the most famous anthropologist of the 20th century, once described field work as “the intensive months of trying to step as fully as one can into the reality of another culture.” That’s supposedly what she did in 1925, when she arrived in Samoa to study the psychology and sexual habits of island girls. She was just 23, and her head was full of the progressive ideas and cultural relativism that she had imbibed from “Papa Franz”-i.e., Franz Boas, her handlebar-mustachioed mentor at Columbia University.

About the Author

John J. Miller

John J. Miller, a former national correspondent for National Review, is the director of the Dow Journalism Program at Hillsdale College. He is the author of A Gift of Freedom: How the John M. Olin Foundation Changed America.