Competitive and Cooperative Habits among The Manus of the Admiralty Islands … AND …Habits Among the Samoans…
Pre-publication Mimeographed Typescript,
Textual Variations with Published Version
Mead, Margaret. Competitive and Cooperative Habits Among the Manus of the Admiralty Islands; and Competitive and Cooperative Habits Among the Samoans. Mimeographed typescript, circa 1937.
4to.; homemade covers; cardboard boards, stapled; black cloth spine, frayed; brown handmade dust-jacket; handwritten title; loss to spine; covers darkened; edgeworn. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
Mimeographed typescript; a contributor’s copy of chapters seven, eight and nine of a book Mead contributed to and edited, titled, Cooperation and Competition among Primitive Peoples (1937); totaling 261 pages. Also included here is a chapter by Buell Quain, titled, “Competitive and Cooperative Habits among the Iroquois.” As noted on the upper cover, this copy belonged to Dr. May Mandelbaum Edel, who contributed a chapter to the published book: “The Bachiga of East Africa.”
We assume that each contributor had prepublication mimeograph typescripts of all the chapters. It appears Edel bound hers up in a number of conveniently sized volumes, each containing consecutive chapters; this one containing chapters seven through nine, numerically labeled.
This text varies significantly from the published version. Both of Mead’s chapters in the typescript are followed by lengthy appendices – 53 and 25 pages, respectively – which are not present in the published version. Though the overall content remains the same, grammar, punctuation, word placement and sentence restructuring changes are noted throughout the book. In addition, the text has been smoothed out by expert copyediting. Quain’s chapter also illustrates changes from the typescript to the published version; most noticeable is the difference in the spelling to “Algonkin” to “Algonkian.” There are no handwritten emendations.
Examples ameliorating copy editing changes are as follows: “Manus is a culture in which very exacting economic conditions and a mode of life which demands group labor obtain” (typescript, p. 53), which became, “Manus is a culture in which the very exacting economic conditions and the mode of life demand group labor” (book, p. 238). The “Sex and Marriage” chapter of the typescript begins, “Competition for women, except in the case of widows, has been translated into competition for desirable economic alliances” (typescript, p. 46), and closes, “There is a theory that women are scarce, and this is dramatized in the ghostly world by a violent scramble of all the ghosts whenever a female of any age dies” (ibid, p. 47). In the book, this latter sentence opens the chapter, and is followed by the one that begins, “Competition for women…” In the Samoan chapter, similar changes are made to sentence placement at the conclusion of the last section, titled, “The Channeling of Opposing Tendencies.” Mead describes the meaning of dance in Samoan culture, and concludes, “And significantly the one girl whom I found who suffered most from would be designated in our society as a ‘feeling of inferiority’ was a girl who could not dance, whose failure was in the field in which the Samoan permits individual display and success” (typescript, p. 54). This sentence is changed in the book to read, “…whose failure was in the field in which individual display and success are permitted” (book, p. 312).
The published book consists of thirteen chapters, as well as an Introduction, a Preface, and an Interpretive Statement by Mead, as well as an additional chapter by her titled, “The Arapesh of New Guinea.” Other contributors included Jeanette Mirsky, “The Eskimo of Greenland,” and “The Dakota”; Ruth Landes, ‘The Ojibwa of Canada”; Irving Goodman, “The Ifuago of the Phillipine Islands” and “The Bathonga of South Africa”; and Bernard Mishkin, “The Maori of New Zealand.”
Mead’s contributions, in particular, reflect her lifelong research of Samoan girls, Manus children, and the relationship bet
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