Does field work continue today in the areas Mead and Bateson originally studied?
Anthropologists are building on the field work of Mead and Bateson, continuing to describe the process of social change. Some recent examples: In 1995 Peter and Ellen Demerath did extensive research in Manus, Papua New Guinea, where Mead did field work in 1929 and again in the 1950s. Gerald Sullivan has studied and written about Mead and Bateson’s important years in Bayung Gede, Bali, where they produced a pioneering work in visual anthropology that used a combination of motion picture film, photographs and notes to document their research. In 1991, Paul Roscoe, of the University of Maine, went up to Alitoa, the Mountain Arapesh settlement where Mead and Reo Fortune spent eight months in the early 1930s. Research on the Chambri was resumed in 1974-75 by Deborah Gewertz, who reexamined the pattern of relationships between men and women that Mead had described. Gewertz, who has returned repeatedly to Chambri with her husband and colleague, Frederick Errington, found that Mead’s insistenc
