Mead, Margaret

Quotes Edit
"Chief among our gains must be reckoned this possibility of choice, the recognition of many possible ways of life, where other civilizations have recognized only one. Where other civilizations give a satisfactory outlet to only one temperamental type, be he mystic or soldier, business man or artist, a civilization in which there are many standards offers a possibility of satisfactory adjustment to individuals of many different temperamental types, of diverse gifts and varying interests." (Coming of Age, 274)

"Historically our own culture has relied for the creation of rich and contrasting values upon many artificial distinctions, the most striking of which is sex. It will not be by the mere abolition of these distinctions that society will develop patterns in which individual gifts are given place instead of being forced into an ill-fitting mould. If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse human gift will find a fitting place." (Sex and Temperament: 322)

"Anthropology demands the open-mindedness with which one must look and listen, record in astonishment and wonder that which one would not have been able to guess." (1950: xxvi)

Biography and History Edit
Margaret Mead is probably the most famous anthropologist of the 20th century, particularly in US popular culture. She studied with Franz Boas at Columbia in the 1920s and, turned her PhD thesis into an extremely influential and popular book entitled Coming of Age in Samoa (1926). She was a strong proponent of Boas' version of cultural relativism, and sought to show that social rules around adolescence and sexuality could be radically different from one place to another.

She continued to do research in the South Pacific for the next two decades. In the late 1940s, with Gregory Bateson, she participated in the seminars that gave rise to Cybernetics. She taught primarily at Columbia and the New School for Social Research.

In the years after that Mead became a larger-than-life figure. Her contention that the rules of sexuality were imposed by society resonated strongly with younger generations in 1950s and 1960s, and her fame skyrocketed.

Work Edit
"Coming of Age in Samoa," (1928) remains Mead's most famous work and one of the highest selling works by any anthropologist. Based on her PhD research with young women in Samoa, Mead tried to show that adolescent women there experienced their childhood very differently from kids in the US.

In the 1930s she wrote several follow-up studies including "Growing-Up in New Guinea" and "Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies."

Her later work took an even more decidedly Feminist angle, with "Male and Female" in 1949, and a series of books thereafter that argued for liberalizing American Society.

Influences Edit
Mead studied with Boas and was a strong proponent of his version of cultural relativism. For instance, Coming of Age sought to show that social rules around adolescence and sexuality could be radically different from one place to another.

She was also strongly influenced by Ruth Benedict (another one of her teachers) with whom she maintained a close relationship. Benedict's idea of "culture patterns" was useful in shifting Mead's understanding of culture in a psychoanalytic direction, and later in making the connection to Cybernetics.

Analysis Edit
In some ways Mead politicized Boas' work more explicitly than he did, suggesting that as long as things like sexual mores were culturally constructed, they could (and should) be changed. But she also shifted into new terrain. Where Boas had been primarily concerned with the racist theories of his day, Mead took on the sexist ones. By arguing that sex was a culturally-constructed phenomenon she created a specifically relativist kind of feminism that continues to be highly influential.

Critique Edit
Mead's work was always intended to be popular and polemical, and it does come across as a bit simplistic. But in part because of her popularity, Mead has probably been the target of more violent criticism than any other anthropologist. Her strong constructivist feminist understanding of sex and gender made her a favourite target of sociobiologists, who believed that gender roles (among other social categories) were more biologically ingrained than the Boasian school believed. This argument between culturalists and sociobiologists was also very much an argument between feminists and sociobiologists which became known as the nature vs. nurture debates.

Shortly after her death in 1979, her work became part of one of the iconic nature-nurture controversies of the 1980s. Derek Freeman, a New Zealand Anthropologist, spent close to 20 years trying to expose Mead as a fraud, and through this to disprove the cultural relativist position. Freeman's work in turn was largely discredited by Mead's many fans in the American Anthropology community. The controversy itself is an interesting study in the extreme positions of the nature-nurture debate and the in the politics of anthropological knowledge. Freeman's work was published just as anthropology entered the "reflexive turn" which made his critique (which was no more reflexive than Mead's original work) largely moot.

Sources Edit
Mead, Margaret. 1954. Coming of age in Samoa: A study of adolescence and sex in primitive societies: Penguin books.

Mead, Margaret. 1949. "Male and female: a study of the sexes in a changing world."

Mead, Margaret. 1963. Sex and temperament in three primitive societies, vol. 370: Morrow New York.

Janiewski, Dolores and Lois W Banner. 2004. Reading Benedict/reading Mead: feminism, race, and imperial visions: JHU Press.

Shankman, Paul. 2000. "Culture, Biology, and Evolution: The Mead–Freeman Controversy Revisited." Journal of Youth and Adolescence 29:539-556.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Mead