| MARCH IS WOMEN'S
HISTORY MONTH
The St. Augustine Campus Library is featuring the Life
and Work of Margaret Mead.
'The most celebrated anthropologist of the twentieth century,
Margaret Mead (1901–1978) was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
on December 16, and died in New York City on November 15. Her career
began with a shift from psychology when Ruth Benedict (1887–1948)
and Franz Boas (1858–1942), two of her teachers at Columbia,
attracted her with Benedict's challenge that they had "nothing
to offer but an opportunity to do work that matters." Bridging
these two fields, Mead became a founder of the culture and personality
school of anthropology; she was deeply committed to making anthropological
knowledge matter—especially in a world of rapid scientific
and technological change.
Mead's
career took off when she went to Samoa at age twenty-three to study
adolescent girls and to explore whether the emotional strains of
adolescence were uniform across cultures or varied depending on
socialization and experience. This led to her first book, Coming
of Age in Samoa (1928), a bestseller that gave many readers their
first awareness that their assumptions about human behavior might
not always apply. Although this book was caricatured and attacked
by the anthropologist Derek Freeman in 1983, twenty years of debate
has affirmed her descriptions, showing that Freeman's insistence
on the biological determination of variations observed fifty years
after Mead's work in other areas of Samoa supplemented but could
not refute Mead's basic emphasis on learned—and therefore
potentially variable—behavior.
Mead's subsequent fieldwork up until World War II took her
to four different New Guinea societies and to the Omaha tribe of
Nebraska with her second husband, Reo Fortune, and then to Bali
and another New Guinea society, the Iatmul, with her third husband,
the anthropologist and ecological thinker Gregory Bateson. During
this period, she focused primarily on child rearing and personality
development and secondarily on gender differences, where she pioneered
the comparative study of gender roles. Her work appeared both in
further trade books such as Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive
Societies (1935) and in detailed technical monographs such as The
Mountain Arapesh (published in three parts, 1938–1949), establishing
the pattern of applying her findings in the field to the dilemmas
of industrialized society, and writing in several genres for different
audiences. She also innovated in methodology, beginning the use
of projective tests in fieldwork and, with Bateson, invented a new
technique of visual anthropology exemplified in Balinese Character
(1942). Her fieldwork archives are available at the Library of Congress.
World War II led Mead and other social scientists to focus
on industrialized nations as part of the war effort. Mead collaborated
with Benedict in developing the application of anthropology to contemporary
cultures made inaccessible by war and political conflict, primarily
through the Columbia University Research in Contemporary Cultures
project. This methodology, described in The Study of Culture at
a Distance (1953), which led to multiple publications by many authors,
involved the creation of interdisciplinary and intercultural teams
not unlike contemporary focus groups, and the analysis of literary
and artistic materials in ways that anticipated contemporary cultural
studies. Mead founded the Institute for Intercultural Studies in
New York in 1944 to house these projects and a variety of later
activities.
The war had precipitated rapid and often devastating culture
change, and Mead's postwar focus was on change, particularly the
possibilities of purposive culture change. In 1953 she returned
to Pere, a Manus village in the Admiralty Islands (now part of Papua
NewGuinea) she had studied with Fortune, to analyze the effects
of the war on a community with little previous outside contact.
In Manus, she found that a charismatic leader had promoted the choice
of integration into the outside world and the villagers were positive
about change rather than demoralized by it; that rapid change is
sometimes preferable to gradual change; and that children could
play a key transformative role (Mead 1956). Mead was one of those
who introduced the concept of "culture" into the thinking
of readers, with profound intellectual and ethical results, but
her emphasis on purposive culture change reaffirmed ethical issues
avoided by some cultural relativists, and she insisted that many
human institutions, such as those of warfare and racism, be seen
as human inventions that could be modified or replaced, rather than
as "natural" and unavoidable. Her understanding of the
role of individuals and groups in the remaking of Manus society
was key to her book Continuities in Cultural Evolution (1964), best
summarized in her often quoted phrase, "Never doubt that a
small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world."
Mead believed that the understanding of cultural diversity
offered a new kind of freedom to human societies, and she worked
tirelessly and skillfully to disseminate anthropological ideas,
lectured widely, published profusely, and was quick to
understand the possibilities of new media. Unlike many academics,
she saw communicating to the public as a professional obligation
of comparable intellectual integrity to her more narrow professional
writing. She also taught for many years at Columbia University and
the New School for Social Research. At the same time, Mead worked
with colleagues in other fields who kept her close to new developments
in biology and neurology. She was an active member of the Macy Conferences
on Cybernetics and on Group Process in the postwar period and of
the World Federation for Mental Health. She was associated for more
than fifty years with the American Museum of Natural History, serving
in her later years as its Curator of Ethnology. She served as president
of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the
American Anthropological Association, and was a founder of the Scientists'
Institute for Public Information. She received twenty-eight honorary
degrees, more than forty academic and scientific awards, and was
awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom following her death in
1978."
- MARY CATHERINE BATESON
Source: "Mead, Margaret."Encyclopedia
of Science, Technology, and Ethics. Carl Mitcham, ed. 4 vols. Macmillan
Reference USA, 2005. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington
Hills, Mich.: Gale, 2010. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRC
Each month the library
features a topic or person. Check
out past features.
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