Society: The Floating, Social Laboratory

Yesterday marked the fourth and final day of the seminars on non-violent social change with renowned civil activist Dr. Vincent G. Harding. Here at our very university, the Service and Social Action Committee, the OMA, the Student Life Committee, the Divinity School, the and the departments of philosophy, religion, and politics graciously hosted Dr. Harding for a four-day long enriching conversation about the need for our generation to be the leaders in social change, specifically in the areas of education, citizenship, economic justice, and criminal justice. Every day, Dr. Harding ended with one particular messaged that truly resonated with the very nature of anthropology and even specifically, our reading of the introduction of Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead. Dr. Harding compared society and rather the world around us as a social laboratory. Every day, he shared a saying he heard about citizenship, “I am a citizen of a country that does not yet exist”. He urged us to shape our country how we want it by treating it society as a floating, social laboratory, one whereby we had the freedom and the conditions necessary to test and try out whatever it is that we wanted to do.

It is the specific comparison of society as a laboratory and the very nature of ethnography that connected me to our reading with Mead. In her introduction of Coming of Age in Samoa, Mead treats human civilization and, more specifically, culture as an environment where laboratory conditions do exist when she asked, “What method then is open to us who wish to conduct a human experiment but who lack the power either to construct the experimental conditions or to find controlled examples of those conditions here and there throughout our own civilization?” (Mead, 1928). Her solution that very much describes the uniqueness of anthropology and the appeal of anthropology as a true discipline of social science was as follows: “The only method is that of the anthropologist, to go to a different civilization and make a study of human beings under different cultural conditions in some other part of the world” (Mead, 1928). Here, Mead alluded to the power of anthropology as a mechanism of testing ideas and understanding the complex nature of the human experience and human struggle. It is only through anthropology that the understanding and exposure to different cultural conditions to learn about previously unknown social concepts and phenomena occurs.

Both Dr. Harding and Mead compare society to experimental conditions. What this basic analogy shows is that the understanding of the complexity of the human experience and advancement of the human condition requires obtaining new knowledge through both exposure to new cultural conditions and testing various hypotheses with the conditions. Both scholars imply this unpredictability and endless possibility of both experimental conditions and potential results when using society and essential, human kind, as an experiment. With experimentation must come a sense of exploration and open-mindedness to both new cultures and the knowledge that may be obtained from such an exploration. Mead (along with her fellow Boasians) viewed society in such a manner particularly because she embraced the Boasian concepts of historical particularism and cultural relativism. Both of these terms are essentially prerequisites required to even set up and engage in a human social experiment. Both allude to the importance of understanding a cultural within their own view and imply a need for the acceptance of all cultures and people.

Both Mead and Dr. Harding look at social experimentation as a fundamental mechanism in the understanding of the human struggle and, as a result, a means to improve it. Social experimentation, according to both scholars, seems like a daunting, complex, and rather deep task that comes with its set of lessons, benefits, and even consequences. If I’ve learned anything through this seminar as well as my studies in anthropology, it is that only through constant persistence, motivation, an “inner fire”, and a desire to elevate the entire human race as a whole will such a social experimentation and rather social exploration lead to new ideas, new concepts, new behavior, and ultimate, necessary social change.

Literature Cited:

Mead, Margaret 1928 Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization. foreword by Franz Boas. New York: William Morrow. Xiii + 170 pp.