The Making of American Studies in Bosnia

In 1939, when Margaret Mead came home from the South Seas, she had spent much of the last seventeen years studying six different cultures. She then began work on a study which, in methodology, is perhaps her most original work. The resultant publication, which appeared shortly after the United States had at last entered fully into the second World War, was a work of applied science, its object of analysis her fellow citizens. To a scholar of American Studies today, And Keep Your Powder Dry is an odd read, to put it mildly. Blissfully freed of theoretical predications or predicaments, it is culture writing from back in the day when anthropologists studied others, but rarely their own.1 By 1942, however, the world had come to a pass such that, according to Mead, “[t]here was no more time to go far afield for the answers which lay crystallized in the life of distant, half-forgotten peoples” 3 . She adds, If we were not at war, if the whole world were not at war, if every effort of each human being were not needed to ask the right questions so that we may find the right answers in time, I would not be writing this book 12 .