The slights and betrayals, the underground flings and seething animosities, the granite friendships as well as the roiling rivalries were as much a part of the seminar evenings in Grantwood as Dakota verbs and New Guinean masks. But whether they were discussing rituals, religion, sexuality, or any other aspect of social life, Boas had taught his students to resist making grand schemas or big conclusions. He had long been clear on what he called "the most difficult problem of anthropology": Were there universal laws to human societies, and if so, how might one go about discovering them? 

Anthropology should be a conversational science, Boas felt. It ought to be a dialogue between one's own way of seeing things and someone else's. Where it led was toward specific histories and unique experiences, toward a particular community -- this one here -- and its most precious ways of understanding its place in the world. To be an anthropologist was to be committed to the critical refinement of your own experience. That was the whole point of purposefully throwing yourself into the most foreign and remote of places. You had to gather things up before you refined them down. Anthropologists should be innately skeptical about jumping too quickly from their own culture-bound schemas to pontificating about the Nature of Man. 

But Mead was feeling the tug toward a more ambitious, all-encompassing science. She could claim no theoretical advance as her own, no broad finding that people would recognize as a signature contribution. "I find I am growing more and more cynical all the time about good work winning through," she complained to Benedict.

Since finishing her doctorate, she had failed to land a professorial position. Her annual salary as an assistant curator at the American Museum of Natural History was a little under $2,400. Benedict at least had an academic job; she had recently been elevated from a lectureship to an assistant professorship in Boas's department, earning about $3,600 a year -- although this was still far less than the salary of a male visiting scholar. Mead worried that she herself was fated to be little more than a popularizer or, as she had once complained, "that awful animal a 'lady scientist.'"

By her 30th birthday, Mead had become one of the most recognizable names in anthropology -- at least to non-anthropologists. Newspapers and magazines quoted her as an authority on marriage, child-rearing, adolescence, and other subjects. Coming of Age in Samoa was one of the very few books in the field that people outside academia could name. But she wondered what you had to sacrifice to make sure that your work mattered in the world. "I don't think having the worst paid job in the Museum, and never having been offered another job, and having been panned or damned with faint praise in all the journals of my own science, is wonderful recognition," she said to Benedict. You needed academic prestige to make your ideas stick, and so far that was very much lacking.

As the Grantwood evenings showed, it was hard to separate your scholarly work from the swirl of relationships -- academic, professional, social, romantic -- that developed as you tried both to write your books and to live your life. Can what you produce ever really be divorced from your own biography....?