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Margaret Mead: The complete bibliography, — The Hague: Mouton. This bibliography contains over fourteen hundred entries and includes name and subject indices, as well as a useful introduction by Mead herself. It illustrates just how prolific Mead was an author. Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content on this page.
Please subscribe or login. Oxford Bibliographies Online is available by subscription and perpetual access to institutions. For more information or to contact an Oxford Sales Representative click here. Not a member? Sign up for My OBO. Already a member? Publications Pages Publications Pages. Subscriber sign in You could not be signed in, please check and try again. Mead argued that non-Western cultures offered alternative often better ways to be human. Why was she so vilified for it?
In , after 50 years at the pinnacle of American opinion, the anthropologist Margaret Mead died with a secure reputation and a lustrous legacy. Her ascent seemed to mirror the societal ascent of American women. The tensions in public opinion were hers, too.
But posthumous reputation is a brittle thing. Issues change, standards shift, new thinkers rise: few names last forever. What happened? His criticisms have stuck. Freeman gave her opponents a readymade cudgel to bludgeon not only her anthropological work but everything she represented beyond that. And what, indeed, was that?
T he explosively curious and acerbic Margaret Mead was born in and brought up by a tough academic family in Pennsylvania. After a childhood dotted with melancholy, her purpose in life — anthropology — emerged in her undergraduate years at Barnard College in New York City. As a graduate student at Columbia University in the s, she fell under the sway of Franz Boas. The moustachioed polymath was born in Germany and defined American anthropology.
It was his programme, his school of thought, that cleaved off anthropology from nearby disciplines, setting out what anthropologists do, and why. The physical method searches for facts from which general laws can be deduced. Facts themselves are interesting only insofar as they can be roped together to form unbreakable laws, which set the contours of what is possible and yield testable predictions.
At the end of the 19th century and into the early 20th, racialist biology ruled the human sciences. Differences between societies were ascribed to differences in the essential biological makeup of their members, that is, to race.
A natural political consequence of such a view is, of course, eugenics. But what could replace race as an explanation of the differences between human societies? Here was set the cornerstone of US anthropology: Boas replaced race with culture.
It could be changed — for the better. This is not what Boas meant. Culture was custom. Learned behaviour and patterns of thinking, taught to children by means of folklore, instruction and their own imitation of adults, becomes a lens through which one experiences and affects the world. It is also, crucially, the reference point through which all behaviour is rationalised. This is a culture, and there are uncountable cultures that mould the ways that people act out their lives. Boas never jettisoned biology entirely: he simply made culture far more influential.
For progressives who embraced cultural determinism, this meant that poverty, crime and racial inequality were outcomes of economic disadvantage, not innate differences.
There was nothing inevitable about them. This idea launched a thousand anthropologists towards the ends of the earth. They exited the seminar room to enter the field, to learn of the ways we humans can — and do — comport ourselves. That is, we must do ethnography. So that is what Mead set out to do. Her living quarters, a US naval dispensary, was a poor choice because it separated her from the Samoans. It was a mark of acceptance after nearly a year of ethnographic research.
Part of the Boasian project was to break down what seemed to be universal laws of humanity. G Stanley Hall, the American psychologist and educator, had made the study of adolescence a topic of serious enquiry. He subscribed to a form of biological determinism that he followed to its eugenic endpoint he was a member of the American Eugenic Research Organization, and a passionate anti-Semite.
To put it unscientifically, adolescence is the pits. Hall held that this was true for everyone, everywhere, in all times. The very biology that makes us human also makes adolescence hell. It would also, Mead was well aware, hold some pertinent lessons for how Americans should raise their own young. They could do better, and Mead would show them how. Sure enough, two years after Mead returned to New York, Coming of Age in Samoa was published, and would become one of the most famous anthropological books ever.
She was Mead argued that Samoan girls, unlike Americans, were able to navigate adolescence easily. One distinction was the involvement of the community in raising children, particularly the extended family. Another distinction: openness. Giving birth, for instance, was not sequestered away.
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