Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the troubled birth of psychedelic science By BenjaminBreen. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2024. 384 pp.
Year: 2024
Type: book-review
Abstract: With its catchy title, historian Benjamin Breen's Tripping on Utopia brings together controversial findings about the human mind, social engineering, and professional responsibility.He delineates the time frame and focus of an inquiry into psychoactive drug research by stating that "Timothy Leary and the Baby Boomers did not usher in the first psychedelic era.They ended it" (3).The Controlled Substances Act of 1970 placed mescaline, psilocybin, and LSD in Schedule I, making them illegal not only because of health risks but also in reaction to the rising countercultural populism in that fraught era of civil rights and anti-war activism.Meanwhile, federal agencies, including the military, had been supporting clandestine experimentation to weaponize the same drugs for mind-control applications.Congressional hearings in the mid-1970s, for instance, exposed the CIA's MK-ULTRA projects within the United States in violation of its charter.Breen's contextualization of the earlier initiatives is welcome in light of the more recent resumption of officially sanctioned studies of therapeutic possibilities for the drugs in question.Inclusion of Margaret Mead's name in the subtitle signals her significant positioning at the intersection of these concerns, enticing anthropological readers to tease out broader implications explored in other studies of militarized anthropology (Lucas, 2009;Mandler, 2013;McFate, 2018;Price, 2016).Breen barely touches on cross-cultural ethnographic investigations of psychoactive plants, exemplified by Mead's foray into peyote studies through her account of Omaha acculturation in the early 1930s.He addresses neither the innovative peyote research by James Mooney and Paul Radin around the turn of the 20th century nor the fieldwork of Barbara Myerhoff and Peter Furst during the period he covers.Ethnobotanical, ethnopharmacological, and ethnoreligious contributions by Furst and others-such as Richard Evans Schultes, Marlene Dobkin de Rios, and Wade Davis-would also be relevant in a more ethnological approach to drugs, but their scholarship is beside the point here.At stake is the place of anthropologists in this "secret history of the first wave of psychedelic science," with its "abuses of medical ethics, devil's bargains with militarism, and disillusionment with utopian promises" (3).For an anthropological reading, Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson serve as threads to follow through Breen's widely ranging survey.In response to issues raised by the Great Depression, World War II, and the geopolitical and domestic unrest of the immediate postwar period, Bateson, Mead's husband from 1936 to 1950, was in some ways even more influential than she was in generating theoretical insights and empirical findings about psychoactive drugs.Both understood the future of humanity as dependent on making the world safe for diversity, which would require breakthroughs in cultural evolution.Resolutely rejecting mystical interpretations, they envisioned mind-expanding drugs as a catalyst for scientific discoveries.Their documentation of Balinese trances alerted them to the importance of set and setting to derive socially integrative benefits from altered states of consciousness.Both threw themselves into efforts to win World War II.Mead recruited colleagues for government programs to formulate food policies and reinforce morale.She assisted Ruth Benedict in national personality-and-culture studies at a distance (funded by the US Navy), which continued after the war.Bateson joined the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA, and served in Southeast Asian combat zones.With lasting regrets, he engaged in what came to be called psyops (psychological operations) to influence an enemy's thinking.Mead and Bateson were the only anthropologists in a series of interdisciplinary gatherings-beginning in 1942 and inspired by the paradigmchanging ideas of Norbert Wiener-which redirected their own thinking and eventually transformed human society at the global level.These Macy Conferences developed a more comprehensive understanding of the universe as comprising not only matter and energy but also information and communication.Bateson continued to pursue Wiener's initial impulse that led to the emergence of the field of cybernetics, encompassing living and cultural systems (and helping him explain the symbolism of Iatmul coming-of-age rituals he had witnessed in New Guinea).In contrast, the math-734
Source: American Anthropologist
DOI: 10.1111/aman.28009
Author: Jim Weil
Institution: Science Museum of Minnesota
Language: English
Subfield: Clinical Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4401690921