Margaret Mead Autograph Letter and Typed Manuscript Collection Signed to Protegee Louis-Pierre Ledoux.

MEAD, Margaret. [Louis-Pierre Ledoux].

Item Number: 135194

Extensive archive of autograph letters, typed bulletins, and extensive notes of advice sent by Margaret Mead to her protégée, anthropologist Louis-Pierre Ledoux. The archive includes: thirty-nine pages of typed notes of advice from Mead to Ledoux on doing anthropological research among the Murik people of the Sepik River region of New Guinea [includes her advice on developing the philosophy and agenda of the study and notes on getting curios out of the country. Ledoux was the second American visitor to the Murik people and first formally trained as an anthropologist to visit them. Mead had spent time in the region from 1927-33. Ledoux graduated Harvard in 1935 and spent at least six months thereafter in New Guinea making extensive notes and anthropological observations which resulted in a book-length manuscript that Ledoux never published, although he provided Mead a copy of the manuscript, which she extensively reviewed and annotated. Also included are Mead’s typed “Murik Notes” based on interviews with two adolescents who were visiting near Karawop in 1932 and a floor plan of how Ledoux should set up his living quarters]; an autograph letter signed by Mead to Ledoux dated November 22, 1939 with the original transmittal envelope in which Meade recounts how their mutual friends the Olivers visited her and that she liked them immensely, “Part of Doug’s last afternoon in Sydney was spent with me paying gas bills, depositing parcels and sporadically shopping, the latter expedition culminating in a presentation copy of Susan Stebbing’s “Thinking To Some Purpose,” fruit of an earlier luncheon debate on the relative merits of logic (as envisaged by D.O.) and intuition — or plainer hunches (as experienced by M.S.).” After graduating from Harvard in 1935, Louis-Pierre Ledoux did fieldwork in the Sepik River region of New Guinea, where he did extensive research on the Murik people with the Mead’s diligent guidance. The two had mutual friends in Douglas Oliver and his wife Eleanor, who were in Bougainville in the Solomon Islands and had both graduated from Harvard at the same time as Ledoux. Oliver went on to publish several books on the anthropology of the Solomon Islands and other Pacific locales; and three typewritten bulletins from May, June and August 1938 from Tambunum Village, Sepik River, New Guinea, sent to Ledoux by Mead’s mother and accompanied by a friendly handwritten letter from her. Part of a larger series of Bulletins, Meade composed these regular updates to send to friends and family documenting her work with British anthropologist Gregory Bateson, their research methods and how they spent their time. Mead’s third and longest-lasting marriage (1936–1950) was to the British anthropologist Gregory Bateson with whom she had a daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson, who would also become an anthropologist. This last bulletin is accompanied by a typed note from Mead’s mother dated September 30, 1939, “My daughter Margaret in a recent letter asked me to send you some Bulletins…” In near fine condition. Exceedingly rare. A fine association collection with the Mead’s personal Bulletins of particular scarcity.

After earning her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1929, American cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead set out for Samoa where she conducted research for her best-known work, Coming of Age in Samoa. Upon publication in 1928, the work drew both enormous popular attention and academic interest, establishing Mead as a leading figure in American anthropology and generating a heightened awareness of ethnographic study in the United States. Based on a 9-month study conducted in a small village of 600 people on the island of Ta'ū, the easternmost island of Samoa, Mead used her findings to assert her theory that culture had a leading influence on psycho-sexual development. The work was so ground-breaking in that it was one of the first anthropological texts based on immersive fieldwork as well as one of the first studies to use cross-cultural comparisons to highlight issues within Western society. The study became a leading text in the nature versus nurture debate, as well as in discussions on issues relating to family, adolescence, gender, social norms, and attitudes.