Blackberry Winter

Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years
by Margaret Mead
Original Publisher: New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972
1995 Reprint (pictured left) by Kodansha America, Inc

When I first fastened onto the idea that I was going to study anthropology, I was sixteen years old and eager to learn what I could of the discipline, from whatever source. One of the first books I bought was Blackberry Winter, Margaret Mead’s memoir of her earlier years. The used paperback ended up at the bottom of a growing stack of texts on the anthropological life, theory, and practice. Despite my best intentions, the well-worn book drifted from the bottom of one stack to the bottom of another, and over the years lost its place in the rotation that had became a rather intensive reading schedule.

It was only recently that a glance at the bookshelf reminded me of this unfulfilled promise. I had been teaching a live version of my intergenerational memoir-writing course, Writing Across Generations, and student discussions had inspired a renewed surge of interest in the self-awareness of the autobiographical process. Who better to turn to, I thought, than Margaret Mead, a true pioneer of anthropology who had had the foresight to write not just “her people,” but also herself into being.

How appropriate the timing of this reading, for in her prologue, Mead writes,

When I ran with the other children across the fields in the Buckingham Valley to watch a fire or to test the ice on the winter ponds, I knew how the lives of the people around us differed from the lives of their ancestors. And I was aware how our lives were changing before our eyes. When my grandmother decided to learn how to make butter, it was not the same things as making butter at home in the days before mechanically made butter could be bought in a store. When a zeppelin floated lazily in the sky above our meadows, I related it both to the first flights in balloons and to ideas about air travel as yet unrealized. And when our neighbors in the many places we lived during childhood behaved in ways that were different from ours and from one another, I learned that this was because of their life experience and the life experiences of their ancestors and mine..(p.3).

I connected to this passage in a very real way, for what I had hoped to accomplish in the writing of my course was to illuminate the currents of contrast and continuity that are best exemplified by the family unit. Grandparents who pass tradition to their children may live to see these same traditions enacted by grandchildren, and simultaneously see them subverted by time, technology, and the shifting winds of culture.

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