Transcript of Telephone Interview with Dr.

Debra Curtis, Professor of

Anthropology at Salve Regina University
What do you do in the field of anthropology?
I am a cultural anthropologist and I teach at Salve Regina in Newport, Rhode Island. I
have been a faculty member there since 1999.
What is your specialty in the field of anthropology?
I specialize in the subject of gender, sexuality, girls, globalization, and consumer culture.
Has Margaret Mead contributed to your work in any way?
Yes. Margaret was the first female anthropologist to work among adolescent girls and my
first book is sort of like a Margaret Mead study one-hundred years later. Margaret wrote Coming
of Age in Samoa in the 20s and she was looking at young girls and their coming of age practices
and how they understood what it meant to be female in Samoa. I did a similar study, but it was
explicitly about sexuality on a small island in the Caribbean called Nevis. My book is called
Pleasures and Perils.
As an anthropologist, what are your views on the nature vs. nurture debate?
Well, I certainly understand that people are very interested in looking for biological
determinacy for social behavior, or biological underpinning for social behavior, whether they are
trying to identify genes or genetic markers, or if they are interested in brain studies. I am more
interested in the malleability of human behavior and the ways in which human behavior is
expressed very differently across cultures and throughout history. I am more interested in the
ways in which culture shapes our behaviors, but more than that, I am interested in the ways
culture shapes biology.
How do you feel Margaret Mead has contributed to modern day anthropology?
I wouldnt be sitting here if it werent for Margaret Mead. She impacted the way some
anthropologists see themselves as professionals. She opened up subject matters that were
disregarded by men such as the focus on children, child rearing, and womens issues. American
anthropology would not be what it is today without Margarets influence.
What are your thoughts regarding the controversy Margaret Mead received involving her
research in Samoa?
One of the things about anthropology thats different from other social sciences is that the
anthropologist goes into the field and lives among a group of people for a long period of time.
Most anthropologists today in 2016 understand that thats not an entirely objective process; its
what we call a subjective process. In other words, there is always going to be an interaction

between the observer, Margaret, and that who is observed. For Derek to go to Samoa decades
later and say Margarets findings were untrue, I mean, I think that if anyone went to Nevis, the
small island in the Caribbean where I lived in 2003, if they went there now, they might find some
of my findings objectionable. First of all, you have to examine what Dereks outlook was. Derek
believed anthropology was an objective discipline, that the ethnographic, or final product, was a
complete picture of the society. Most anthropologists dont see the world like that. We
understand that what we write is highly subjective and that it was based on our being there and
what we observed. I dont give too much thought to this argument. He had a different intellectual
agenda and most anthropologists dont take his comments seriously, at least the ones that I know.