Margaret Mead

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The American anthropologist Margaret Mead (1901-1978) developed the field of culture and personality research and was a dominant influence in introducing the concept of culture into education, medicine, and public policy.

Margaret Mead was born in Philadelphia, Pa., on Dec. 16, 1901. She grew up there in a liberal intellectual atmosphere. Her father, Edward Sherwood Mead, was a professor in the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce and the founder of the University of Pennsylvania's evening school and extension program. Her mother, Emily Fogg Mead, was a sociologist and an early advocate of woman's rights.

In 1919 Mead entered DePauw University but transferred after a year to Barnard College, where she majored in psychology. In her senior year she had a course in anthropology with Franz Boas which she later described as the most influential event in her life, since it was then that she decided to become an anthropologist. She graduated from Barnard in 1923. In the same year she married Luther Cressman and entered the anthropology department of Columbia University.

The Columbia department at this time consisted of Boas, who taught everything, and Ruth Benedict, his only assistant. The catastrophe of World War I and the dislocations that followed it had had their impact on the developing discipline of anthropology. Anthropologists began to ask how their knowledge of the nature of humankind might be used to illuminate contemporary problems. At the same time the influence of Sigmund Freud was beginning to be felt in all the behavioral sciences. The atmosphere in the Columbia department was charged with intellectual excitement, and whole new perspectives for anthropology were opening up.

Early Fieldwork

Mead completed her studies in 1925 and set off for a year's fieldwork in Samoa in the face of opposition from older colleagues worried about sending a young woman alone to a Pacific island. Her problem was to study the life of adolescent girls. She learned the native language (one of seven she eventually mastered) and lived in a Samoan household as "one of the girls." She found that young Samoan girls experience none of the tensions American and European adolescents suffer from, and she demonstrated the kind of social arrangements that make this easy transition to adulthood possible.

On returning from the field Mead became assistant curator of ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History, where she remained, eventually becoming curator and, in 1969, curator emeritus. Her mandate in going to the museum was "to make Americans understand cultural anthropology as well as they understood archaeology."

When Mead wrote Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), her publisher, concerned that the book fell into no conventional category, asked for a chapter on what the work's significance would be for Americans. The result was the final chapter, "Education for Choice," which set the basic theme for much of her lifework.

In 1928, after completing a technical monograph, The Social Organization of Manuá, Mead left for New Guinea, this time with Reo Fortune, an anthropologist from New Zealand whom she had married that year. Her project was the study of the thought of young children, testing some of the then current theories. Her study of children's thought in its sociocultural context is described in Growing Up in New Guinea (1930). She later returned to the village of Peri, where this study was made, after 25 years, when the children she had known in 1929 were leaders of a community going through the difficulties of transition to modern life. She described this transition, with flashbacks to the earlier days, in New Lives for Old (1956).

New Field Methods

Mead's interest in psychiatry had turned her attention to the problem of the cultural context of schizophrenia, and with this in mind she went to Bali, a society where trance and other forms of dissociation are culturally sanctioned. She was now married to Gregory Bateson, a British anthropologist whom she had met in New Guinea. The Balinese study was especially noteworthy for development of new field techniques. The extensive use of film made it possible to record and analyze significant minutiae of behavior that escape the pencil-and-paper ethnographer. Of the 38,000 photographs which Mead and Bateson brought back, 759 were selected for Balinese Character (1942), a joint study with Bateson. This publication marks a major innovation in the recording and presentation of ethnological data and may prove in the long run to be one of her most significant contributions to the science of anthropology.

Studies Relevant to the "Public Good"

Largely through the work of Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, the relevance of anthropology to problems of public policy was recognized to a degree, though somewhat belatedly. When World War II brought the United States into contact with allies, enemies, and peoples just emerging from colonialism, the need to understand many lifestyles became apparent. Mead conducted a nationwide study of American food habits prior to the introduction of rationing. Later she was sent to England to try to explain to the British the habits of the American soldiers who were suddenly thrust among them. After the war she worked as director of Research in Contemporary Cultures, a cross-cultural, trans-disciplinary project applying the insights and some of the methods of anthropology to the study of complex modern cultures. An overall view of the methods and some of the insights gained is contained in The Study of Cultures at a Distance (1953).

For the theoretical basis of her work in the field of culture and personality Margaret Mead drew heavily on psychology, especially learning theory and psychoanalysis. In return she contributed significantly to the development of psychoanalytic theory by emphasizing the importance of culture in personality development. She served on many national and international committees for mental health and was instrumental in introducing the study of culture into training programs for physicians and social workers.

In the 1960s Mead became deeply concerned with the unrest among the young. Her close contact with students gave her special insight into the unmet needs of youth - for better education, for autonomy, for an effective voice in decisions that affect their lives in a world which adults seem no longer able to control. Some of her views on these problems are set forth in Culture and Commitment (1970). Her thoughts on human survival under the threats of war, over-population, and degradation of the environment are contained in A Way of Seeing (1970).

Ever since Margaret Mead taught a class of young working women in 1926, she became deeply involved in education, both in the universities and in interpreting the lessons of anthropology to the general public. She joined the anthropology department at Columbia University in 1947 and also taught at Fordham University and the universities of Cincinnati and Topeka. She also lectured to people all over America and Europe. Mead died in 1978 and was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Margaret Mead was a dominant force in developing the field of culture and personality and the related field of national character research. Stated briefly, her theoretical position is based on the assumption that an individual matures within a cultural context which includes an ideological system, the expectations of others, and techniques of socialization which condition not only outward responses but also inner psychic structure. Mead was criticized by certain other social scientists on methodological and conceptual grounds. She was criticized for neglecting quantitative methods in favor of depth analysis and for what has been called "anecdotal" handling of data. On the theoretical side she was accused of applying concepts of individual psychology to the analysis of social process while ignoring historical and economic factors. But since her concern lay with predicting the behavior of individuals within a given social context and not with the origin of institutions, the criticism is irrelevant.

There is no question that Mead was one of the leading American intellectuals of the 20th century. Through her best-selling books, her public lecturing, and her popular column in Redbook magazine, Mead popularized anthropology in the United States. She also provided American women with a role model, encouraging them to pursue professional careers previously closed to women while at the same time championing their roles as mothers.

Further Reading

Of the many studies of Margaret Mead's life and career, see With a Daughter's Eye: A Memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson (1984) by Mary Catherine Bateson; Margaret Mead: A Voice for the Century (1982) by Robert Cassidy; and Margaret Mead's Contradictory Legacy (1992), edited by Leonard Foerstel and Angela Gilliam. See also Anthropologists and What They Do (1965), which was written for high school students and contains accounts of her life in the university and in the field. Her essay "Field Work in the Pacific Islands, 1925-1967" appears in Peggy Golde, ed., Women in the Field: Anthropological Experiences (1970). A full-length study of Mead is Allyn Moss, Margaret Mead: Shaping a New World (1963). Hoffman R. Hays, From Ape to Angel: An Informal History of Social Anthropology (1958), has an essay appraising her career. There are essays on Mead's life in Eleanor Clymer and Lillian Erlich, Modern American Career Women (1959), and Eve Parshalle, The Kashmir Bridge-women (1965).

(1901-1978), anthropologist. Mead, who turned the study of primitive cultures into a vehicle for criticizing her own, was born in Philadelphia. Both her father, Edward Mead, an economist at the Wharton School, and her mother, Emily Mead, a sociologist of immigrant family life and a feminist, were devoted to intellectual achievement and democratic ideals.

Mead discovered her calling as an undergraduate at Barnard College in the early 1920s in classes with Franz Boas, the patriarch of American anthropology, and in discussions with his assistant, Ruth Benedict. The study of primitive cultures, she learned, offered a unique laboratory for exploring a central question in American life: how much of human behavior is universal, therefore presumably natural and unalterable, and how much is socially induced? Among a people widely convinced of the inferiority of women and the immutability of gender roles, clear answers to this question could have important social consequences.

Selecting the peoples of the South Pacific as the focus of her research, Mead spent the rest of her life exploring the plasticity of human nature and the variability of social customs. In her first study, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), she observed that Samoan children moved with relative ease into the adult world of sexuality and work, in contrast to children in the United States, where lingering Victorian restraints on sexual behavior and the increasing separation of children from the productive world made youth a needlessly difficult time. Westerners' deep-seated belief in innate femininity and masculinity served only to compound these troubles, Mead continued in Sex and Temperament (1935). Describing the widely varying temperaments exhibited by men and women in different cultures, from the nurturing men of the Arapesh tribe to the violent women of the Mundugumor, Mead maintained that social convention, not biology, determines how people behave. A decade later she qualified her environmental stance somewhat in Male and Female (1949), in which she analyzed the ways in which motherhood serves to reinforce male and female roles in all societies. She continued nevertheless to emphasize the possibility and wisdom of resisting traditional gender stereotypes.

By the 1950s Mead was widely regarded as a national oracle. She served as a curator at the Museum of Natural History from 1926 until her death and as an adjunct professor of anthropology at Columbia from 1954, but she devoted the greater part of her professional life to writing and lecturing. Married three times and the mother of only one child at a time when both divorce and only children were uncommon, Mead nevertheless achieved fame as an expert on family life and child rearing. In such books as Culture and Commitment (1970) and her autobiographical Blackberry Winter (1972), in magazine articles for Redbook, and in her lectures, Mead tried to persuade Americans that understanding the lives of other people could help them understand their own, that a greater ease with sexuality (homosexual as well as heterosexual) could enrich them, that motherhood and careers could and should go together, and that building support networks for the overburdened nuclear family would bring greater well-being for all.

Bibliography:

Jane Howard, Margaret Mead: A Life (1984).

Author:

Rosalind Rosenberg

See also Social Sciences.

1901-1978

Margaret Mead, an American anthropologist, was born on December 16, 1901, in Philadelphia and died on November 17, 1978, in New York City. She spent her entire career as a curator of the American Museum of Natural History and was an associate professor at Columbia University. After studying psychology and anthropology at Columbia, where she was influenced by the work of Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict, Mead first did fieldwork in eastern Samoa. In the published result, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), she wrote, "[A]dolescence represented no period of crisis or stress, but was instead an orderly developing of a set of slowly maturing interests" (p. 109). She also noted, within "a larger family community, in which there are several adult men and women, seems to ensure the [Samoan] child against the development of the crippling attitudes which have been labelled Oedipus complexes [and] the Electra complexes" (p. 147).

She made several trips to New Guinea and reported her findings in Growing Up in New Guinea (1930) and Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935). Through these writings, Mead established herself as the leading proponent of the so-called "culture and personality" school of anthropology. Her work emphasizes the diversity of cultures and the plasticity of human nature, the preponderant influence of cultural models in the development of personality, and the cultural determination of sexual roles (1949). Influenced by the work of Erik H. Erikson and Gregory Bateson (her third husband), Mead saw trauma specific to individual cultures as leading to particular types of development in those culture. Relying mostly on photographs, she attempted to describe the infantile experiences that determine the formation of character (Bateson and Mead, 1942).

Although she sometimes used psychoanalytic concepts (identification, erotogenic zone, narcissism), she was primarily engaged in a relativist critique of psychoanalysis. For example, she reproached Freud for confining himself to an examination of the "specific ambivalence of attitudes institutionalized in our own culture." She believed she had refuted Lucien LévyBruhl, Jean Piaget, and Freud by showing that primitive children "displayed no tendency for spontaneous animist thought."

Mead's work, unable to escape the doubts of relativism, has been contested both ethnographically and theoretically (Freeman, 1983). Her principal merit is that she drew anthropologists' attention to the importance of early infancy, education, diet, and sexuality. Her criticisms of psychoanalysis, however, were based on considerable misunderstandings of the field, as she herself later recognized. "Instead of making the laborious and often painful effort of understanding psychoanalysis, we have been content to use some of its products, especially projection tests," she wrote. As a result, Mead's observations relate only to manifest behavior and not to intrapsychic conflicts or the unconscious.

Bibliography

Bateson, Gregory, and Mead, Margaret. (1942). Balinese character: A photographic analysis. New York: New York Academy of Sciences.

Freeman, Derek. (1983). Margaret Mead and Samoa: The making and unmaking of an anthropological myth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Gordan, Joan (Ed.). (1976). Margaret Mead: The complete bibliography, 1925-1975. The Hague: Mouton.

Mead, Margaret. (1928). Coming of age in Samoa. New York: William Morrow.

——. (1930). Growing up in New Guinea. New York: William Morrow.

——. (1935). Sex and temperament in three primitive societies. New York: William Morrow.

——. (1949). Male and female. New York: William Morrow.

——. (1972). Blackberry winter: My earlier years. New York: William Morrow.

——. (1978). The evocation of psychologically relevant responses in ethnological field work. In George D. Spindler (Ed.), The making of psychological anthropology (pp. 88-139). Berkeley: University of California Press.

—BERTRAND PULMAN

An American anthropologist of the twentieth century, who revolutionized the field of anthropology in 1928 with her book Coming of Age in Samoa, which emphasized the role of social convention rather than biology in shaping human behavior. In later writings, she described how the behavior of men and women differed from one culture to another and thereby challenged the notion that all gender differences were innate.

Quotes:

"If you associate enough with older people who do enjoy their lives, who are not stored away in any golden ghettos, you will gain a sense of continuity and of the possibility for a full life."

"We won't have a society if we destroy the environment."

"Nobody has ever before asked the nuclear family to live all by itself in a box the way we do. With no relatives, no support, we've put it in an impossible situation."

"The suffering of either sex -- of the male who is unable, because of the way in which he was reared, to take the strong initiating or patriarchal role that is still demanded of him, or of the female who has been given too much freedom of movement as a child to stay placidly within the house as an adult -- this suffering, this discrepancy, this sense of failure in an enjoined role, is the point of leverage for social change."

"People in America, of course, live in all sorts of fashions, because they are foreigners, or unlucky, or depraved, or without ambition; people live like that, but Americans live in white detached houses with green shutters. Rigidly, blindly, the dream takes precedence."

"It is an open question whether any behavior based on fear of eternal punishment can be regarded as ethical or should be regarded as merely cowardly."

See more famous quotes by Margaret Mead

• Born: 1901
• Died: 1978
• Occupation: Actor
• Active: '70s
• Major Genres: Culture & Society, Nature

Biography

Margaret Mead
Born	December 16, 1901(1901-12-16) Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Died	November 15, 1978 (aged 76) New York City
Education	A.B., Barnard College (1923) M.A., Columbia University (1924) Ph.D., Columbia University (1929)
Occupation	Anthropologist
Spouse(s)	Luther Cressman (1923-1928 Reo Fortune (1928-1935) Gregory Bateson (1936-1950)
Children	Mary Catherine Bateson (b. 1939)

Margaret Mead (December 16, 1901 – November 15, 1978) was an American cultural anthropologist, who was frequently a featured writer and speaker in the mass media throughout the 1960s and 1970s.

She was both a popularizer of the insights of anthropology into modern American and Western culture, and also a respected, if controversial, academic anthropologist. Her reports about the attitudes towards sex in South Pacific and Southeast Asian traditional cultures amply informed the 1960s sexual revolution. Mead was a champion of broadened sexual mores within a context of traditional western religious life.

A committed Anglican Christian, she took a considerable part in the drafting of the 1979 American Episcopal Book of Common Prayer.^[1]

She was a recognizable figure in academia, usually wearing a distinctive cape and carrying a tall, forked walking stick.^[2]

Contents 1 Biography 1.1 Birth, early family life and education 1.2 Personal life 1.3 Career and later life 2 Work 2.1 Coming of Age in Samoa 2.2 Research in other societies 3 Legacy 4 See also 5 Publications by Mead 6 Notes 7 Further reading 8 External links

Biography

Birth, early family life and education

Mead was the first of five children, born into a Quaker family,^[3] and raised in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. Her father, Edward Sherwood Mead, was a professor of finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and her mother, Emily Fogg Mead,^[4] was a sociologist who studied Italian immigrants.^[5] Her family moved frequently, so her early education alternated between home-schooling and traditional schools.^[5] Margaret studied one year, 1919, at DePauw University, then transferred to Barnard College where she earned her Bachelor's degree in 1923.

She studied with Professor Franz Boas and Dr. Ruth Benedict at Columbia University before earning her Master's in 1924.^[6] Mead set out in 1925 to do fieldwork in Polynesia.^[7] In 1926, she joined the American Museum of Natural History, New York City, as assistant curator.^[8] She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1929.^[9]

Personal life

Margaret Mead was married three times. Her first marriage, from 1923 to 1928, was to Luther Cressman, a theological student during his marriage to Mead, and later an anthropologist himself. Mead dismissively characterized her marriage to Cressman as "my student marriage" in Blackberry Winter, a sobriquet with which Cressman took vigorous issue. She was then married to New Zealander Reo Fortune, a Cambridge graduate, from 1928 to 1935; Fortune was also an anthropologist — his Sorcerers of Dobu remains the locus classicus of eastern Papuan anthropology — but he is best known for his Fortunate number theory. Her marriage to Fortune was described by her as a more passionate one, embarked upon when she was told that she could not have children and abandoned when she was given hope by another physician that childbearing might indeed be possible.

Her third and longest-lasting marriage (from 1936 to 1950) was to British anthropologist Gregory Bateson, also a Cambridge graduate, with whom she had a daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson who would also become an anthropologist. Early in his career, Dr. Benjamin Spock was her pediatrician for the baby. Mead's experiences observing how babies were raised in other cultures, and her implementation of some of the same techniques such as breastfeeding on demand according to the baby's need rather than a schedule, were influential on Spock's subsequent writings on child-rearing.^[10] She readily acknowledged that Bateson was the one she loved most of her three husbands, possibly in part because he was the father of her only child. She was devastated when he left her, and she remained his loving friend to her life's end, keeping his photograph by her bedside wherever she traveled, including beside her hospital deathbed.^[11]

Mead also had an exceptionally close relationship with Ruth Benedict. In her memoir about her parents, With a Daughter's Eye, Mary Catherine Bateson implies that the relationship between Benedict and Mead contained an erotic element.^[12] While Margaret Mead never openly identified herself as lesbian or bisexual, the details of her relationship with Benedict have led others to identify her thus; in her writings she proposed that it is to be expected that an individual's sexual orientation may evolve throughout life.^[13]

She spent her last years in a close personal and professional collaboration with anthropologist Rhoda Metraux, with whom she lived from 1955 until her death in 1978. Letters between the two published in 2006 with the permission of Mead's daughter^[14] clearly express a romantic relationship.

Mead's granddaughter, Sevanne Margaret Kassarjian, is a stage and television actress who works professionally under the name Sevanne Martin,^[15] Martin having been the intended name for her prematurely born elder brother, who lived only long enough to be christened.^[16]

Both of Mead's surviving sisters were married to famous men. Elizabeth Mead (1909-1983), an artist and teacher, married cartoonist William Steig, and Priscilla Mead (1911-1959) married author Leo Rosten. Both of these marriages produced children and ended in divorce. Mead also had a brother, Richard Mead (1904-1975), a professor of business.

Mead's sister Katharine (1906-1907) died at the age of nine months. This was a traumatic event for Mead, who had named this baby, and thoughts of her lost sister permeated her daydreams for many years.^[17]

Career and later life

During World War II, Mead served as executive secretary of the National Research Council's Committee on Food Habits. She served as curator of ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History from 1946 to 1969. She taught at The New School and Columbia University, where she was an adjunct professor from 1954 to 1978. She was a professor of anthropology and chair of the Division of Social Sciences at Fordham University's Lincoln Center campus from 1968 to 1970, founding their anthropology department. Following the example of her instructor Ruth Benedict, Mead concentrated her studies on problems of child rearing, personality, and culture.^[18] She held various positions in the American Association for the Advancement of Science, notably president in 1975 and chair of the executive committee of the board of directors in 1976.^[19]

Mead was featured on two Folkways Records albums. The first, released in 1959, An Interview With Margaret Mead, explored the topics of morals and anthropology. In 1971, Mead was again featured on But the Women Rose, Vol.2: Voices of Women in American History, a compilation album of female leaders.^[20]

In later life, Mead was a mentor to many young anthropologists and sociologists, including Jean Houston.^[21]

Mead died of pancreatic cancer on November 15, 1978. She was buried at Trinity Episcopal Church in Buckingham, Pennsylvania.

Work

Coming of Age in Samoa

Main article: Coming of Age in Samoa

In the foreword to Coming of Age in Samoa, Mead's advisor, Franz Boas, wrote of its significance that

Courtesy, modesty, good manners, conformity to definite ethical standards are universal, but what constitutes courtesy, modesty, very good manners, and definite ethical standards is not universal. It is instructive to know that standards differ in the most unexpected ways.

Boas went on to point out that at the time of publication, many Americans had begun to discuss the problems faced by young people (particularly women) as they pass through adolescence as "unavoidable periods of adjustment." Boas felt that a study of the problems faced by adolescents in another culture would be illuminating.

And so, as Mead herself described the goal of her research: "I have tried to answer the question which sent me to Samoa: Are the disturbances which vex our adolescents due to the nature of adolescence itself or to the civilization? Under different conditions does adolescence present a different picture?" To answer this question, she conducted her study among a small group of Samoans — a village of 600 people on the island of Ta‘u — in which she got to know, live with, observe, and interview through an interpreter 68 young women between the ages of 9 and 20. She concluded that the passage from childhood to adulthood — adolescence — in Samoa was a smooth transition and not marked by the emotional or psychological distress, anxiety, or confusion seen in the United States.

As Boas and Mead expected, this book upset many Westerners when it first appeared in 1928. Many American readers were shocked by her observation that young Samoan women deferred marriage for many years while enjoying casual sex but eventually married, settled down, and successfully reared their own children.^{[citation needed]}

In 1983, five years after Mead had died, Australian anthropologist Derek Freeman published Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth, in which he challenged Mead's major findings about sexuality in Samoan society, claiming evidence that her informants had misled her. After years of discussion, many anthropologists concluded that the truth would probably never be known, although most published accounts of the debate have also raised serious questions about Freeman's critique.^[22]

Research in other societies

Another extremely influential book by Mead was Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies. This became a major cornerstone of the feminist movement, since it claimed that females are dominant in the Tchambuli (now spelled Chambri) Lake region of the Sepik basin of Papua New Guinea (in the western Pacific) without causing any special problems. The lack of male dominance may have been the result of the Australian administration's outlawing of warfare. According to contemporary research, males are dominant throughout Melanesia (although some believe that female witches have special powers). Others have argued that there is still much cultural variation throughout Melanesia, and especially in the large island of New Guinea. Moreover, anthropologists often overlook the significance of networks of political influence among females. The formal male-dominated institutions typical of some high-population density areas were not, for example, present in the same way in Oksapmin, West Sepik Province, a more sparsely populated area. Cultural patterns there were different from, say, Mt. Hagen. They were closer to those described by Mead.

Mead stated that the Arapesh people, also in the Sepik, were pacifists, although she noted that they do on occasion engage in warfare. Meanwhile, her observations about the sharing of garden plots amongst the Arapesh, the egalitarian emphasis in child-rearing, and her documentation of predominantly peaceful relations among relatives hold up. These descriptions are very different from the "big-man" displays of dominance that were documented in more stratified New Guinea cultures — e.g., by Andrew Strathern. They are, indeed, as she wrote, a cultural pattern.

In brief, her comparative study revealed a full range of contrasting gender roles:

• "Among the Arapesh, both men and women were peaceful in temperament and neither men nor women made war.
• "Among the Mundugumor, the opposite was true: both men and women were warlike in temperament.
• "And the Tchambuli were different from both. The men 'primped' and spent their time decorating themselves while the women worked and were the practical ones — the opposite of how it seemed in early 20th century America."^{[citation needed]}

Mead also researched the European shtetl, financed by the American Jewish Committee. Although her interviews at Columbia University with 128 European-born Jews disclosed a wide variety of family structures and experiences, the publications resulting from this study and the many citations in the popular media resulted in the Jewish mother stereotype, intensely loving but controlling to the point of smothering, and engendering guilt in her children through the suffering she professed to undertake for their sakes.^[23]

She also was a co-founder and supporter of the Parapsychological Association, a group advocating for the advancement of parapsychology and psychical research.

Legacy

On January 19, 1979, President Jimmy Carter announced that he was awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously to Mead. U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young presented the award to Mead's daughter at a special program honoring Mead's contributions, sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History, where she spent many years of her career. The citation read:^[24]

"Margaret Mead was both a student of civilization and an exemplar of it. To a public of millions, she brought the central insight of cultural anthropology: that varying cultural patterns express an underlying human unity. She mastered her discipline, but she also transcended it. Intrepid, independent, plain-spoken, fearless, she remains a model for the young and a teacher from whom all may learn."

See also

Systems science portal

• Elsie Clews Parsons
• Tim Asch
• Visual anthropology
• Zora Neale Hurston

Publications by Mead

As a sole author

• Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) ISBN 0-688-05033-6
• Growing Up in New Guinea (1930) ISBN 0-688-17811-1
• The Changing Culture of an Indian Tribe (1932)
• Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935)
• And Keep Your Powder Dry: An Anthropologist Looks at America (1942)
• Male and Female (1949) ISBN 0-688-14676-7
• New Lives for Old: Cultural Transformation in Manus, 1928-1953 (1956)
• People and Places (1959; a book for young readers)
• Continuities in Cultural Evolution (1964)
• Culture and Commitment (1970)
• Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years (1972; autobiography) ISBN 0-317-60065-6

As editor or co-author

• Cultural Patterns and Technical Change, editor (1953)
• Primitive Heritage: An Anthropological Anthology, edited with Nicholas Calas (1953)
• An Anthropologist at Work, editor (1959, reprinted 1966; a volume of Ruth Benedict's writings)
• The Study of Culture At A Distance, edited with Rhoda Metraux, 1953
• Themes in French Culture, co-authored with Rhoda Metraux, 1954
• The Wagon and the Star: A Study of American Community Initiative co-authored with Muriel Whitbeck Brown, 1966
• A Rap on Race, co-authored with James Baldwin, 1971
• A Way of Seeing, co-authored with Rhoda Metraux, 1975

Notes

1. ^ Howard, 347-348.
2. ^ "Margaret Mead As a Cultural Commentator". Margaret Mead: Human nature and the power of culture. Library of Congress. http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/mead/oneworld-comment.html. Retrieved 2008-03-08. 
3. ^ Margaret Mead Biography and Bibliography at LitWeb.net
4. ^ Shaping Forces - Margaret Mead: Human Nature and the Power of Culture (Library of Congress Exhibition)
5. ^ ^{a b} "Margaret Mead" by Wilton S. Dillon
6. ^ Encyclopædia Britannica's Guide to Women's History
7. ^ Great Lecture Library . com : Chautauqua Institution
8. ^ Margaret Mead
9. ^ Margaret Mead
10. ^ Moore, Jerry D. (2004). Visions of Culture: An Introduction to Anthropological Theories and Theorists. Rowman Altamira. p. 105. ISBN 0759104115. 
11. ^ Howard, 428.
12. ^ Bateson, Mary Catherine (1984). With a Daughter's Eye: A Memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. New York: William Morrow. pp. 117-118. ISBN 0-688-03962-6.  See also Lapsley (1999).
13. ^ M.C. Bateson, 120-22.
14. ^ To Cherish the Life of the World: Selected Letters of Margaret Mead. Margaret M. Caffey and Patricia A. Francis, eds. With foreword by Mary Catherine Bateson. New York. Basic Books. 2006.
15. ^ New York Times wedding announcement. Retrieved 9 November 2007.
16. ^ M.C. Bateson.
17. ^ Howard, Jane (1984) Margaret Mead: A Life. New York: Simon and Schuster
18. ^ The Columbia Encyclopedia, Fifth Edition, 1993.
19. ^ Margaret Mead
20. ^ Mead at Smithsonian Folkways
21. ^ Howard, 370-71.
22. ^ See Appell 1984, Brady 1991, Feinberg 1988, Leacock 1988, Levy 1984, Marshall 1993, Nardi 1984, Patience and Smith 1986, Paxman 1988, Scheper-Hughes 1984, Shankman 1996, and Young and Juan 1985.
23. ^ "The Jewish Mother", Slate, June 13, 2007
24. ^ "Jimmy Carter: Presidental Medal of Freedom Announcement of Award to Margaret Mead". The American Presidency Project. January 19, 1979. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=32524. Retrieved 2009-10-20. 

Further reading

• Gregory Acciaioli, ed. (1983) "Fact and Context in Etnography: The Samoa Controversy" in Canberra Anthropology (special issue), 6(1): 1-97.
• George Appell (1984) "Freeman's Refutation of Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa: The Implications for Anthropological Inquiry" in Eastern Anthropology, 37: 183-214.
• Mary Catherine Bateson (1984) With a Daughter's Eye: A Memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, New York: William Morrow. ISBN 0-688-03962-6
• Ivan Brady (1991) "The Samoa Reader: Last Word or Lost Horizon?" in Current Anthropology, 32: 263-282.
• Hiram Caton, ed. (1990) The Samoa Reader: Anthropologists Take Stock, University Press of America. ISBN 0-8191-7720-2
• Richard Feinberg (1988) "Margaret Mead and Samoa: Coming of Age in Fact and Fiction" in American Anthropologist, 90: 656-663.
• Leonora Foerstel and Angela Gilliam, eds. (1992), Confronting the Margaret Mead Legacy: Scholarship, Empire and the South Pacific, Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
• Derek Freeman (1983) Margaret Mead and Samoa, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-54830-2
• Derek Freeman (1999) The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis of Her Samoan Research, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. ISBN 0-8133-3693-7
• Esther Schiff Goldfrank (1983) Another View. Margaret and Me in Ethnohistory 30 (1): 1-14.
• Lowell D. Holmes (1987) Quest for the Real Samoa: the Mead/Freeman Controversy and Beyond, South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey.
• Jane Howard (1984) Margaret Mead: A Life, New York: Simon and Schuster.
• Hilary Lapsley (1999) Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict: The Kinship of Women, University of Massachusetts Press. ISBN 1-55849-181-3
• Eleanor Leacock (1988) "Anthropologists in Search of a Culture: Margaret Mead, Derek Freeman and All the Rest of Us" in Central Issues in Anthropology, 8(1): 3-20.
• Robert Levy (1984) "Mead, Freeman, and Samoa: The Problem of Seeing Things as They Are" in Ethos, 12: 85-92.
• Jeannette Mageo (1988) "Malosi: A Psychological Exploration of Mead's and Freeman's Work and of Samoan Aggression" in Pacific Studies, 11(2): 25-65.
• Mac Marshall (1993) "The Wizard from Oz Meets the Wicked Witch of the East: Freeman, Mead, and Ethnographic Authority" in American Ethnologist, 20(3): 604-617.
• Rhoda Metraux (1980) Margaret Mead. A Biographical Sketch in American Anthropologist 82: 262-269.
• Bonnie Nardi (1984) "The Height of Her Powers: Margaret Mead's Samoa" in Feminist Studies, 10: 323-337.
• Allan Patience and Josephy Smith (1987) "Derek Freeman in Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of a Biobehavioral Myth" in American Anthropologist, 88: 157-162.
• David B. Paxman (1988) "Freeman, Mead, and the Eighteenth-Century Controversy over Polynesian Society" in Pacific Studies, 1(3): 1-19.
• Roger Sandall (2001) The Culture Cult: Designer Tribalism and Other Essays. ISBN 0-8133-3863-8
• Nancy Scheper-Hughes (1984) "The Margaret Mead Controversy: Culture, Biology, and Anthropological Inquiry" in Human Organization, 43(1): 85-93.
• Paul Shankman (1996) "The History of Samoan Sexual Conduct and the Mead-Freeman Controversy" in American Anthropologist, 98(3): 555-567.
• Brad Shore (1982) Sala'ilua: A Samoan Mystery, New York: Columbia University Press.
• Elizabeth Stassinos (1998) "Response to Visweswaren, 'Race and the culture of anthropology,'" in American Anthropologist, 100 (4): 981-983.
• Elizabeth Stassinos (2009) "An Early Case of Personality: Ruth Benedict's Autobiographical Fragment and the Case of the Biblical 'Boaz'" in Histories of Anthropology, Volume 5, Regna Darnell and Frederick W. Gleach, eds., U. Nebraska Press. ISSN 1557-637X
• Mary E. Virginia (2003) "Benedict, Ruth (1887-1948)" in DISCovering U.S. History online edition, Detroit: Gale.
• R.E. Young and S. Juan (1985) "Freeman's Margaret Mead Myth: The Ideological Virginity of Anthropologists" in Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology, 21: 64-81.

External links

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Margaret Mead

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Margaret Mead

• Creative Intelligence: Female ("The Silent Revolution: Creative Man In Contemporary Society" Talk at UC Berkeley, 1962 (online audio file)
• The Institute for Intercultural Studies - ethnographic institute founded by Mead, with resources relating to Mead's work
  • Margaret Mead biography at IIS
• Library of Congress, Margaret Mead: Human Nature and the Power of Culture
• American Museum of Natural History, Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival
• Works by or about Margaret Mead in libraries (WorldCat catalog)

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