Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies

Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies is a book by anthropologist Margaret Mead, published in 1935. Based on her ethnographic fieldwork, Mead profiled three New Guinea cultures with distinct gender systems, and explored the question of what happens when an individual’s emotional disposition is at odds with society’s gender expectations.

The focus of the book is temperament, that is patterns of personality and emotions, and "with the cultural assumptions that certain temperamental attitudes are 'naturally' masculine and others 'naturally' feminine."[1]: xxi  The three societies in question were all in the Sepik River basin of Papua New Guinea: the Mountain Arapesh people, the Mundugumor (or Biwat) people, the Tchambuli (now spelled Chambri) people. Mead describes how "each tribe has certain definite attitudes towards temperament, a theory of what human beings, either men or women or both, are naturally like, a norm in terms of which to judge and condemn those individuals who deviate from it."[1]: xxi 

Mead's most visible conclusion was that:

If those temperamental attitudes which we have traditionally regarded as feminine—such as passivity, responsiveness, and a willingness to cherish children—can so easily be set up as the masculine pattern in one tribe, and in another be outlawed for the majority of the women as well as for the majority of men, we no longer have any basis for regarding such aspects of behavior as sex-linked.[1]: 279–280 

The distinction between femininity and masculinity on the one hand, and biological sex on the other presaged the sex–gender distinction, which is at the core of the sociology of gender roles and a central concept in feminist thought.[2]: 155–56 

David Lipset characterized Sex and Temperament as "an important event in the history of both the culture concept and feminist theory" and as "an unmatched ethnographic comparison of three Sepik groups."[3]: 694  According to Maureen Malloy, Sex and Temperament "consolidated [Mead's] reputation as someone committed to questioning the sexual taboos of the contemporary West, grounding her views in intrepid research among exotic savages and conveying her research in accessible books that reached a wide public.."[4]: 38 

Fieldwork

Mead conducted eighteen months of field research for Sex and Temperament while working jointly with her husband Reo Fortune from 1931 to 1933. The couple had previously worked as researchers on Manus (six months in 1928–29) and on an Omaha reservation in Nebraska (three months in 1930).[5]: 79  Mead and Fortune first spent eight months studying Mountain Arapesh culture in "a small mountaintop hamlet" that felt physically and culturally isolated to them.[5]: 80–81  They next moved to Mundugumor village on a river, which had been affected by both colonial pacification efforts (suppressing tribal warfare) and labor recruitment.[5]: 81  Mead reports that she and Fortune consulted with on a final fieldsite with colonial district officer Eric Robinson, who proposed either the Washkuks or the Tchambuli. Initial scouting of the Washkuk community found it both remote and dispersed and the ethnographers opted to live with Tchambuli.[5]: 236  Mead and Fortune then met fellow anthropologist Gregory Bateson and moved to Tchambuli Lake and their final field site, with Bateson continuing his fieldwork nearby with the Iatmul culture. Mead and Bateson began an romantic affair during this time,[5]: 81–88  and Fortune eventually refused to share his ethnographic notes on the Mundugumor and Tchambuli with Mead for the book.[6]: 348–351 

Ethnographic description

The book is divided into four parts, covering "the Mountain-Dwelling Arapesh," "the River-Dwelling Mundugumor," and the "Lake-Dwelling Tchambuli," and finally in Part Four, analyzing the socialization into gendered temperament across these societies and in the West. According to Mead, while both the Arapesh and the Mundugumor have a gender division of labor and roles, their expecations about emotional temperament are the same for men and women: "any idea that temperamental traits of the order of dominance, bravery, aggressiveness, objectivity, malleability, are inalienably associated with one sex (as opposed to the other) is entirely lacking"[1]: xxii  She describes the Mountain Arapesh as "trained to be co-operative, unaggressive, responsive to the needs and demands of others" and the Mundugumor as "ruthless, aggressive, positively sexed individuals, with the maternal cherishing aspects of personality at a mininum." Her emotional characterization of the Tchambuli defines women as "the dominant, impersonal managing partner" and men as "the less responsible and emotionally dependent person."[1]: 279 

Mead's characterizations of each of the three peoples has been subject to vigorous scholarly debate, including by her research collaborator and ex-husband Reo Fortune (on the Arapesh), Nancy McDowell (on the Mundugumor), and Deborah Gewertz and Frederick Errington (on the Tchambuli),[3]

Critical evaluation of findings

Deborah Gewertz (1981) studied the Chambri (called Tchambuli by Mead) in 1974-1975, and found no evidence of such gender roles. Gewertz states that as far back in history as there is evidence (1850's) Chambri men dominated over the women, controlled their produce and made all important political decisions. In later years there has been a diligent search for societies in which women dominate men, or for signs of such past societies, but none have been found (Bamberger 1974).[7]

Jessie Bernard criticized Mead's interpretations of her findings and argued that Mead's descriptions were subjective. Bernard argues that Mead claimed the Mundugumor women were temperamentally identical to men, but her reports indicate that there were in fact sex differences; Mundugumor women hazed each other less than men hazed each other and made efforts to make themselves physically desirable to others, married women had fewer affairs than married men, women were not taught to use weapons, women were used less as hostages and Mundugumor men engaged in physical fights more often than women. In contrast, the Arapesh were also described as equal in temperament, but Bernard states that Mead's own writings indicate that men physically fought over women, yet women did not fight over men. The Arapesh also seemed to have some conception of sex differences in temperament, as they would sometimes describe a woman as acting like a particularly quarrelsome man. Bernard also questioned if the behavior of men and women in those societies differed as much from Western behavior as Mead claimed. Bernard argued that some of her descriptions could be equally descriptive of a Western context.[8]

References

  1. ^ a b c d e Mead, Margaret (1963). Sex and temperament in three primitive societies. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
  2. ^ Marso, Lori J. (2016-07-15). Fifty-One Key Feminist Thinkers. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-317-19276-3.
  3. ^ a b Lipset, David (2003). "Rereading Sex and Temperament : Margaret Mead's Sepik Triptych and its Ethnographic Critics". Anthropological Quarterly. 76 (4): 693–713. ISSN 1534-1518. Retrieved 2025-11-03.
  4. ^ Molloy, Maureen A. (2008-02-20). On Creating a Usable Culture: Margaret Mead and the Emergence of American Cosmopolitanism. University of Hawaii Press. ISBN 978-0-8248-3116-5.
  5. ^ a b c d e Dobrin, Lise M.; Bashkow, Ira (2010). ""The Truth in Anthropology Does Not Travel First Class": Reo Fortune's Fateful Encounter with Margaret Mead". Histories of Anthropology Annual. 6 (1): 66–128. ISSN 1940-5138. Retrieved 2025-11-02.
  6. ^ Banner, Lois W. (2003). Intertwined lives: Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and their circle. New York: Knopf. ISBN 978-0-679-45435-9.
  7. ^ Bamberger, Joan, The Myth of Matriarchy: Why Men Rule in primitive society, in M. Rosaldo & L. Lamphere, Women, Culture, and Society (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1974), p. 263.
  8. ^ Kaplan, David, and Robert Alan Manners. Culture theory. Prentice Hall, 1972, pp. 175–180
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