Margaret Mead, "And Keep Your Powder Dry"

"Only by taking out the beam from our own eye, and the mote from our neighbor's, both at once, can we hope to get anywhere."

By taking pause from anthropological work abroad to write "And Keep your Powder Dry," Margaret Mead answered a call to duty for which she felt obliged to her home country during World War II. To this end, Mead turns her focus and expertise as an anthropologist on the U.S., taking inventory of its human capital to determine what her country would need to fight and win the war. From this description, it would seem that she approaches the topic of peace as an end for which war is the means, but that is not necessarily the case. Rather, this book is used by Mead to seek an outcome for a world already entrenched in war, and to propose to her audience a globally peaceful future thereafter. She turns an eye trained in Anthropology yet tinted with her personal experiences on the U.S., its people, and its culture to offer solutions.

Americans, as Mead sees it, are driven to "advance" from generation to generation, creating a nuclear family that tends to sever itself from origins and extended relations. She uses the term "third generation" to describe the Americans of 1942; not aware of their European roots and striving to out pace prior generations. While this is a characteristic that is a strength for a pioneering spirit, it is one of the major weaknesses of American culture: yearning to tear down the old to make way for the new. One of the best examples of this can be seen in the importing of artisans and mechanizing processes to create what is needed without valuing the time and skill that preceded the end product. Mead also describes the country as overwhelmingly middle class; its people striving for upward mobility and quantifiable success, which is mirrored in the conditional love that parents give their children. America is also a puritan nation, with a belief that they are rewarded for their effort and faith in God. Mead postulates that in order to go to war, Americans need moral justification, even odds, and the knowledge that they did not pick the fight. She describes the American people as industrious and democratically inclined people who work better if they know that there is not a "parent hand" leading the course, something very different from the "streamlined" totalitarian state against which they were fighting. To head these uniquely American cultural characteristics is a key to bolstering strength in war.

By looking at the strengths of the American people for the task of winning a war, Mead is also able to reveal a map for future peace for which she sees Americans are suited as stewards. Mead distinguishes her vision from negotiated armistices, which she describes as a way for struggling nations to regroup and fight another day. She also distances herself from the kind of pacifism that tends to disparage warmongering and its participants with no guide for other options. Mead postulates, based on her own experience as an anthropologist, that war is not an innate characteristic of the human species. Rather it is taken by many as the most efficient way to reach a goal. Mead proposes that nations and individuals all over the planet have recently been caught in the same "net" of human existence; a global society intricately connected. Every culture has something to enrich the whole, and every individual has the right to cultivate what they have in them. Mead proposes that anthropologists, social scientists, and scientists, although currently speaking a somewhat "limited language", can work toward a connected and peaceful society. What is needed is the valuation of each individual and an understanding of our differences, something for which anthropologists are uniquely trained.Through a valuation of all individuals, not just from an ethnocentric perspective, and a respect for the offerings of all individuals, Mead creates a proposal for a sound, although admittedly distant, proposal for global cooperation based on initiative and democratically motivated science.

Citation Information:
Mead, M. (1971). And keep your powder dry: An anthropologist looks at America. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press.

Links:
War Only an Invention