American icon: at the centenary of her birth, Margaret Mead is remembered as the world's most influential anthropologist

Margaret Mead arrived at the American Museum of Natural History in 1926. Having just completed her first significant ethnographic research in Samoa, she was appointed assistant curator in the Department of Anthropology. She was only twenty-five years old. Mead was given a temporary office in an attic room in the Museum's west tower. So well did she like this out-of-the-way office, with its views of the rooftops of New York City and its two stairways (ideal, she said, for creeping down one stairway while someone to be avoided, such as a too-solicitous elderly curator, was laboring up the other) that she stayed there the rest of her life.

Arriving at that same office in 1972 to be interviewed by Mead for a position as her assistant (I was an undergraduate anthropology major at Barnard College), I felt as though finding my way through the maze of the Museum and up the precipitously winding stairs to Mead's inner sanctum must have been a test she'd devised to determine my suitability. Like Mead, I soon grew fond of the office's remote location and the bird's-eye view of the busy streets below. In a way, the tower's position symbolizes Mead's relationship to the Museum and to anthropology: like the tower, which is both part of and set apart from the Museum's overall structure, Mead was part of the institution and the discipline of anthropology yet also apart from them. She felt strongly that both the Museum and her discipline must not just be a repository of artifacts but must engage in finding solutions to challenges facing society.

Over the course of her fifty-two-year association with the Museum, Margaret Mead was a scientist, curator, teacher, author, social activist, and media celebrity. The success of her first book, Coming of Age in Samoa, published in 1928, had thrust her into the media spotlight. The book's comparison of adolescence in the South Seas and in the United States made it a bestseller at a time when the public was concerned with the social transformations among Jazz Age youth. In the early 1950s, as television became widespread, Mead appeared on the CBS program Adventure, a series produced live from the Museum, to talk about trance among the Balinese and the impact of World War II on social change in remote societies of New Guinea.

Mead's flair for writing and public speaking, combined with her belief that anthropologists and museums should address contemporary social issues, led to her participation--as an expert in human behavior--in United Nations conferences and other international forums and to her acting as a consultant to institutions and organizations worldwide. She discussed the role of the scientist in society, the changing nature of the family, racial inequality, peaceful alternatives to war, population growth, environmental degradation, and the creation of humane human settlements. Her wide-ranging concern for humanity led Time, in 1969, to declare Mead "mother to the world."

It is thus not surprising that when the Museum celebrated its 125th anniversary in 1995 by publishing a guidebook to fifty of its treasures, Margaret Mead herself is listed as treasure no. 38, right between the Folsom Point (treasure no. 37) and the Peregrine Falcon Diorama (treasure no. 39). The guidebook states that Mead "brought the serious work of anthropology into the public consciousness" through her books, the courses she taught at Columbia University, the articles she wrote in a monthly column for Redbook, and the frequent interviews with her that were published in magazines and newspapers and broadcast on radio and television.

When I visited the Museum last spring, the newly renovated Hall of the Peoples of the Pacific--which had opened in 1971, decades after Mead began planning it--had recently reopened. I was pleased to see that the hall now incorporates Mead in the exhibition. Continuous videotapes show interviews with her and about her. Photographs of Mead and the people she studied, quotes from her notes and lectures, and artifacts she collected give the viewer insights into the process of doing fieldwork and add a social and historical context to her life.

Artifacts of Mead's own life are also presented--the Presidential Medal of Freedom that she received posthumously from President Jimmy Carter, as well as her signature red cape and stick. The label reads: "In her later years, Margaret Mead regularly wore a cape and used a style of walking stick often called a thumbstick. Those two items became a familiar sight as Dr. Mead traveled about for her numerous lectures and conferences."

Margaret Mead used to joke that when she didn't want to be recognized, all she had to do was leave her cape and thumbstick at home. How fitting that she has become both a Museum treasure and an artifact.

Nancy C. Lutkehaus is chair of the gender studies program and an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. She is the author of the forthcoming Margaret Mead and the Media: Anthropology and the Creation of an American Icon.

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