“A body of organized processes which can be described and classified, and their relations in space and time studied.” (Rivers [1916]1926, p. 4)
On her way back from Samoa in 1926, Margaret Mead (1972, p. 157) “met ayoung New Zealand psychologist, Reo Fortune, who had just won a2-year fellowship to Cambridge University as aprize for an essay he had written on dreams.” According to Mead (1972, p. 158), Fortune “had saturated himself in the work of W.H.R. Rivers, the Cambridge don whose work in physiology, psychoanalysis, and ethnology had excited people right round the world.” Rivers had died, unexpectedly and quite alone in his college rooms, in 1922 at the age of 58. Nonetheless, Rivers “was the man under whom [both Mead and Fortune] would have liked to have studied.”
Mead’s (1928) doctoral dissertation, completed on the basis of library research prior to her journey to Samoa, shows Rivers’ influence. She would surely have known of Rivers’ (1914a, Vol. 1, pp.363ff) comments on Samoa...
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Sullivan, G. (2012). Anthropology and Psychology, Case of W.H.R. Rivers. In: Rieber, R.W. (eds) Encyclopedia of the History of Psychological Theories. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-0463-8_243
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