ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 shows how Margaret Mead did not join the modernists in ‘making it new’ but sought to reinvent both her discipline and the social world. What comes into view as I compare Mead’s poetry to Eliot’s is divergent forms of literary primitivism that are fed by different conceptualizations of foreign cultures. While both Eliot and Mead draw on other cultures to stage a cultural critique of modernity, they employ them differently: as sources of cultural rejuvenation in Eliot; as vanishing cultural forms in Mead. An analysis of Mead’s letters from Samoa also reveals that she reflected on the epistemic valence of sensory perception in her poetry and field notes long before she made her pioneering contributions to the anthropology of the senses.
