THE LENS, NOT THE VIEW:

For Mead and Benedict, social theory was a tool for making sense of the world, but it could also be a lever against your own predicaments. To do anthropology well, you had to alienate yourself from everything familiar, to take a slow train toward another way of seeing reality. The payoff was a liberating and original way of viewing your own society, denuded of its specialness and its constraints. And if you had always felt somehow out of kilter in your own culture--an "abnormal" or a "deviant," an "invert" or a "mixed type," as Benedict would later put it in her writings--you might come to understand why your own life had been such a struggle.

"I believe every person of ordinary sex endowment has a capacity for diffuse 'homosexual' sex expression," Mead wrote to Benedict in 1933, this time from a new field site in New Guinea. "To call men who prefer [a] different expression 'feminine' or women ... 'masculine,' or both 'mixed types' is a lot of obfuscation." Everything was to some degree potentiality, until it got channeled in a specific direction by circumstance and the rule-scape into which one was born. Mead had seen all of this at work among people she met in the field--the "deviants" who lived perfectly satisfactory lives when a given society made room for them--and she could see it in herself, in the hidden yearnings and desires she shared with Benedict. She was now pursuing a new line of thought that would be "the climax of the work I've done this last year," she told Benedict, "a combination of anthropology and reviewed biography."

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