Date: Mon, 18 Dec 2000 14:25:48 From: "Richard L. Warms" Subject: Re: Reo Fortune Hi Cyril, Thanks a lot. That was a great, easily understandable explanation. In anthropology, Reo Fortune is a fun character. I know about his from his work on Dobu and, mostly , from his involvement with Margaret Mead. Here's the story (I'm working from memory here, so don't trust the dates). In the 1920s, Mead married Luther Cressman, a childhood friend who was indeed studying to be a minister. Shortly after the marriage, Cressman took off for England to continue his studies, and Mead left for fieldwork (I believe on Samoa). On the way to England, on the ship, she met Reo Fortune, who swept her off her feet with his intellectual brilliance. Mead thought that Fortune was a bit unstable, but she believed that she was unable to have children (later disproved with the birth of Mary Catherine Bateson) and thought Fortune was an ideal intellectual companion. She divorced Cressman and married Fortune. They were in the US for a year or two then took off to do additional ethnographic fieldwork in the Sepik River Valley in New Guinea. It so happened that Gregory Bateson was doing fieldwork at the same time in roughly the same place. Soon there was a relationship between Mead and Bateson, but they kept it very secret because both were afraid of Fortune...afraid that if he found out about Bateson and Mead, he would be violent. As soon as Mead returned to the US, she divorced Fortune and married Bateson. Bateson was Mead's longest marriage...about 15 years, and they had a daughter, who became a well known academic. Of course, beyond all this, the real love interest of Mead's life was her mentor Ruth Benedict, with whom she had a physical relationship up to the time of Benedict's death...a loss that Mead perhaps never full recovered from. In anthropology, Fortune, is, of course, one of the classics, but at least here in the US, is considered by most to have been quite unstable, possibly psychotic, or borderline thus. It is often said that his classic description of the Dobu reflected more about his own paranoias than about them. All the best, Rich W.