A PEOPLE TRANSFORMED

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 915, 22 February 1957, Page 12

A PEOPLE TRANSFORMED

NEW LIVES FOR OLD, Cultural Transforma-tion-Manus, 1928-1953, by Margaret Mead; Victor Gollancz, English price 25/-. HE impact of the culture of one people on that of another has been throughout history the fuel which heats the pot in which brews change and progress. In looking at sych acculturation too often it is the material thing alone we can see-the bowler hat above the kimino, the watch on the Eskimo wrist. Yet it is in the mind that the cultural pattern resides, the mind that tells one man it is correct to wall up his aged mother in an igloo to die, or another that it is correct to get her Universal Superannuation. This remarkable book is written by one of the great students of the mind and culture and is the result of an extraordinary series of coincidences. Margaret Mead, with the New Zealand anthropologist Dr. Reo Fortune,

made a detailed study of the culture of the Manus people of New Guinea in 1928-29, particularly in reference to the way children grow into a culture until it is part of themselves, and a number of books resulted from the work. The Manus were subjected to one of the most massive exposures to the culture of another people which they could experience when their islands formed a base for the United States armed forces in the war, and a million men passed through it. They saw a culture which had so mastered the material that human life and health became the allimportant thing on which no expenditure of time and money was too great for either white or black man, for the equipment and care of American Negro soldiers impressed the Manus perhaps more than anything

else. The awareness of the outside world so changed this New Guinea ,people that while Margaret Mead left them twenty-five years ago they beat the death drums for one going into the unknown; when she

returned she was able to discuss with them the committee work of the United Nations on native affairs and be completely understood. And this, with the. very men she had known ag children twenty-five years before. ‘ She describes the change in their attitudes both of mind and of organisation with that detailed attention which distinguishes the true anthropologist, _and with many a shrewd side observation from a lifetime of work. In particular she assesses the place of the "cargo cult" which swept like a wave of religious hysteria over the area, in which all goods were destroyed in readiness for mysterious ships full of modern treasures which were to arrive from over the water. She has something (but not enough) to say of the native leader Paliau who unified the Manus and adjacent tribes into a new cultural pattern, and what was virtually a new religion. It is impossible to read this book superficially; it is packed with important and fascinating detail which demands one’s closest attention,

D. W.

McKenzie