Margaret Mead (December 16, 1901 – November 15, 1978) was an Americancultural anthropologist, author and speaker, who appeared frequently in the mass media during the 1960s and the 1970s.[1]
Mead was a communicator ofanthropology in modern American andWestern culture and was often controversial as an academic.[3] Her reports detailing the attitudes towards sex in South Pacific and Southeast Asian traditional cultures influenced the 1960ssexual revolution.[4] She was a proponent of broadening sexual conventions within the context of Western cultural traditions.
Margaret Mead, the first of five children, was born inPhiladelphia but raised in nearbyDoylestown, Pennsylvania. Her father, Edward Sherwood Mead, was a professor of finance at theWharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and her mother, Emily (née Fogg) Mead,[5] was a sociologist who studied Italian immigrants.[6] Her sister Katharine (1906–1907) died at the age of nine months. That was a traumatic event for Mead, who had named the girl, and thoughts of her lost sister permeated her daydreams for many years.[7]
Her family moved frequently and so her early education was directed by her grandmother until, at age 11, she was enrolled by her family atBuckingham Friends School inLahaska, Pennsylvania.[8] Her family owned theLongland farm from 1912 to 1926.[9] Born into a family of various religious outlooks, she searched for a form of religion that gave an expression of the faith with which she had been formally acquainted, Christianity.[10] In doing so, she found the rituals of theEpiscopal Church to fit the expression of religion she was seeking.[10] Mead studied one year, 1919, atDePauw University, then transferred toBarnard College.
Mead was married three times. After a six-year engagement,[15] she married her first husband (1923–1928),Luther Cressman, an American theology student who later became an anthropologist. Before departing for Samoa in 1925, Mead had a short affair with the linguistEdward Sapir, a close friend of her instructorRuth Benedict. However, Sapir's conservative stances about marriage andwomen's roles were unacceptable to Mead, and as Mead left to do field work inSamoa, they separated permanently. Mead received news of Sapir's remarriage while she was living in Samoa. There, she later burned their correspondence on a beach.[16] Between 1925 and 1926, she was inSamoa from where on the return boat she metReo Fortune, a New Zealander headed toCambridge, England, to studypsychology.[17] They were married in 1928, after Mead's divorce from Cressman. Mead dismissively characterized her union with her first husband as "my student marriage" in her 1972 autobiographyBlackberry Winter, asobriquet with which Cressman took vigorous issue. Mead's third and longest-lasting marriage (1936–1950) was to the British anthropologistGregory Bateson with whom she had a daughter,Mary Catherine Bateson, who would also become an anthropologist. She readily acknowledged that Bateson was the husband she loved the most. She was devastated when he left her and remained his loving friend ever afterward. She kept his photograph by her bedside wherever she traveled, including beside her hospital deathbed.[7]: 428
Mead'spediatrician wasBenjamin Spock,[1] whose subsequent writings on child rearing incorporated some of Mead's own practices and beliefs acquired from herethnological field observations which she shared with him; in particular,breastfeeding on the baby's demand, rather than by a schedule.[18]
Margaret Mead (1972)
Mead also had an exceptionally close relationship withRuth Benedict, one of her instructors. In her memoir about her parents,With a Daughter's Eye, Mary Catherine Bateson strongly implies that the relationship between Benedict and Mead was partly sexual.[19]: 117–118 Mead never openly identified herself aslesbian orbisexual. In her writings, she proposed that it is to be expected that an individual'ssexual orientation may evolve throughout life.[19]
She spent her last years in a close personal and professional collaboration with the anthropologistRhoda 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[20] clearly express a romantic relationship.[21]
Mead had two sisters, Elizabeth and Priscilla, and a brother, Richard. Elizabeth Mead (1909–1983), an artist and teacher, married the cartoonistWilliam Steig, and Priscilla Mead (1911–1959) married the authorLeo Rosten.[22] Mead's brother, Richard, was a professor. Mead was also the aunt ofJeremy Steig.[23]
During World War II, Mead along with other social scientist like Gregory Bateson and Ruth Benedict, took on several different responsibilities. In 1940, Mead joined the Committee for National Morale.[24] In 1941, she also contributed to an essay that was released in the Applied Anthropology, which created strategies to help produce propaganda with the intent of raising national morale.[24] In 1942, Mead served as the executive director of the Committee on Food Habits of the National Research Council, which served to gather data on American citizens ability to get food and their overall diet during the war.[24] During World War II, Mead also served on the Institute for Intercultural Studies (IIS), whose prime objective was to research the “national character” of the Axis powers to try and foster peace between the two sides.[24] She was curator ofethnology at the American Museum of Natural History from 1946 to 1969. She was elected a Fellow of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1948,[25] the United StatesNational Academy of Sciences in 1975,[26] and theAmerican Philosophical Society in 1977.[27] She taught atThe New School and Columbia University, where she was an adjunct professor from 1954 to 1978 and a professor of anthropology and chair of the Division of Social Sciences atFordham University's Lincoln Center campus from 1968 to 1970, founding their anthropology department. In 1970, she joined the faculty of theUniversity of Rhode Island as a Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Anthropology.[28]
Following Ruth Benedict's example, Mead focused her research on problems of child rearing, personality, and culture.[29] She served as president of theSociety for Applied Anthropology in 1950[30] and of theAmerican Anthropological Association in 1960. In the mid-1960s, Mead joined forces with the communications theoristRudolf Modley in jointly establishing an organization called Glyphs Inc., whose goal was to create a universal graphic symbol language to be understood by any members of culture, no matter how "primitive."[31] In the 1960s, Mead served as the Vice President of theNew York Academy of Sciences.[32] She held various positions in theAmerican Association for the Advancement of Science, notably president in 1975 and chair of the executive committee of the board of directors in 1976.[33] She was a recognizable figure in academia and usually wore a distinctive cape and carried a walking stick.[1]
Mead was featured on two record albums published byFolkways Records. The first, released in 1959,An Interview With Margaret Mead, explored the topics of morals and anthropology. In 1971, she was included in a compilation of talks by prominent women,But the Women Rose, Vol. 2: Voices of Women in American History.[36]
She is credited with the pluralization of the term "semiotics".[37]
In 1948 Mead was quoted inNews Chronicle as supporting the deployment ofIban mercenaries to theMalayan Emergency, arguing that using Ibans (Dyaks) who enjoyed headhunting was no worse than deploying white troops who had been taught that killing was wrong.[38]
In 1972, Mead was one of the two rapporteurs from NGOs to the UN Conference on the Human Environment. In 1976, she was a key participant atUN Habitat I, the first UN forum on human settlements.
Mead died ofpancreatic cancer on November 15, 1978, and is buried at Trinity Episcopal Church Cemetery,Buckingham, Pennsylvania.[44]
Mead's first ethnographic work described the life of Samoan girls and women on the island of Tau in the Manu'a Archipelago in 1926.[45] The book includes analyses of how children were raised and educated, sex relations, dance, development of personality, conflict, and how women matured into old age. Mead explicitly sought to contrast adolescence in Samoa with that in America, which she characterized as difficult, constrained, and awkward. In the foreword toComing of Age in Samoa, Mead's advisor,Franz Boas, wrote of the book's significance:[46]
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.
In this way, the book tackled the question of nature versus nurture, whether adolescence and its associated developments were a difficult biological transition for all humans or whether they were cultural processes shaped in particular societies. Mead believed childhood, adolescence, gender, and sex relations were largely driven by cultural practices and expressions.
Mead's findings suggested that the community ignores both boys and girls until they are about 15 or 16. Before then, children have little social standing within the community. Mead also found that marriage is regarded as a social and economic arrangement in which wealth, rank, and job skills of the husband and wife are taken into consideration. Aside from marriage, Mead identified two types of sex relations: love affairs and adultery. The exceptions to these practices include women married to chiefs and young women who hold the title of taupo, a ceremonial princess, whose virginity was required. Mead described Samoan youth as often having free, experimental, and open sexual relationships, including homosexual relationships, which was at odds with mainstream American norms around sexuality.
In 1970,National Educational Television produced a documentary in commemoration of the 40th anniversary Mead's first expedition to New Guinea. Through the eyes of Mead on her final visit to the village of Peri, the film records how the role of the anthropologist has changed in the forty years since 1928.[47]
After her death, Mead's Samoan research was criticized by the anthropologistDerek Freeman, who published a book arguing against many of Mead's conclusions inComing of Age in Samoa.[48] Freeman argued that Mead had misunderstood Samoan culture when she argued that Samoan culture did not place many restrictions on youths' sexual explorations. Freeman argued instead that Samoan culture prized female chastity and virginity and that Mead had been misled by her female Samoan informants. Freeman found that the Samoan islanders whom Mead had depicted in such utopian terms were intensely competitive and had murder and rape rates higher than those in the United States. Furthermore, the men were intensely sexually jealous, which contrasted sharply with Mead's depiction of "free love" among the Samoans.[49]
Freeman's book was controversial in its turn and was met with considerable backlash and harsh criticism from the anthropology community, but it was received enthusiastically by communities of scientists who believed that sexual mores were more or less universal across cultures.[50][51] Later in 1983, a special session of Mead's supporters in theAmerican Anthropological Association (to which Freeman was not invited) declared it to be "poorly written, unscientific, irresponsible and misleading."[52] Some anthropologists who studied Samoan culture argued in favor of Freeman's findings and contradicted those of Mead, but others argued that Freeman's work did not invalidate Mead's work because Samoan culture had been changed by the integration of Christianity in the decades between Mead's and Freeman's fieldwork periods.[53]
Eleanor Leacock traveled to Samoa in 1985 and undertook research among the youth living inurban areas. The research results indicate that the assertions ofDerek Freeman were seriously flawed. Leacock pointed out that Mead's famous Samoan fieldwork was undertaken on an outer island that had not been colonialized. Freeman, meanwhile, had undertaken fieldwork in an urban slum plagued by drug abuse, structural unemployment, andgang violence.[54]
Mead was careful to shield the identity of all her subjects for confidentiality, but Freeman found and interviewed one of her original participants, and Freeman reported that she admitted to having willfully misled Mead. She said that she and her friends were having fun with Mead and telling her stories.[55]
In 1996, the authorMartin Orans examined Mead's notes preserved at the Library of Congress and credits her for leaving all of her recorded data available to the general public. Orans points out that Freeman's basic criticisms, that Mead was duped by ceremonial virgin Fa'apua'a Fa'amu, who later swore to Freeman that she had played a joke on Mead, were equivocal for several reasons. Mead was well aware of the forms and frequency of Samoan joking, she provided a careful account of the sexual restrictions on ceremonial virgins that corresponds to Fa'apua'a Fa'auma'a's account to Freeman, and Mead's notes make clear that she had reached her conclusions about Samoan sexuality before meeting Fa'apua'a Fa'amu. Orans points out that Mead's data support several different conclusions and that Mead's conclusions hinge on aninterpretive, rather thanpositivist, approach to culture. Orans went on to point out concerning Mead's work elsewhere that her own notes do not support her published conclusive claims. Evaluating Mead's work in Samoa from a positivist stance, Orans's assessment of the controversy was that Mead did not formulate her research agenda in scientific terms and that "her work may properly be damned with the harshest scientific criticism of all, that it is 'not even wrong'."[56][page needed]
On the whole, anthropologists have rejected the notion that Mead's conclusions rested on the validity of a single interview with a single person and find instead that Mead based her conclusions on the sum of her observations and interviews during her time in Samoa and that the status of the single interview did not falsify her work.[57] Others such as Orans maintained that even though Freeman's critique was invalid, Mead's study was not sufficiently scientifically rigorous to support the conclusions she drew.[56][page needed]
In 1999, Freeman published another book,The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis of Her Samoan Research, including previously unavailable material. In his obituary inThe New York Times, John Shaw stated that Freeman's thesis, though upsetting many, had by the time of his death generally gained widespread acceptance.[52] Recent work has nonetheless challenged Freeman's critique.[58] A frequent criticism of Freeman is that he regularly misrepresented Mead's research and views.[59][page needed][60] In a 2009 evaluation of the debate, anthropologist Paul Shankman concluded:[59]
There is now a large body of criticism of Freeman's work from a number of perspectives in which Mead, Samoa, and anthropology appear in a very different light than they do in Freeman's work. Indeed, the immense significance that Freeman gave his critique looks like 'much ado about nothing' to many of his critics.
While nurture-oriented anthropologists are more inclined to agree with Mead's conclusions, some non-anthropologists who take a nature-oriented approach follow Freeman's lead, such as Harvard psychologistSteven Pinker, biologistRichard Dawkins, evolutionary psychologistDavid Buss, science writerMatt Ridley, classicistMary Lefkowitz[61][page needed].
In her 2015 bookGalileo's Middle Finger,Alice Dreger argues that Freeman's accusations were unfounded and misleading. A detailed review of the controversy by Paul Shankman, published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2009, supports the contention that Mead's research was essentially correct and concludes that Freeman cherry-picked his data and misrepresented both Mead and Samoan culture.[62][page needed][63][64]
A survey of 301 anthropology faculty in the United States in 2016 had two thirds agreeing with a statement that Mead "romanticizes the sexual freedom of Samoan adolescents" and half agreeing that it was ideologically motivated.[65]
Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935)
Mead'sSex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies[66] became influential within thefeminist movement since it claimed that females are dominant in the Tchambuli (now spelledChambri) Lake region of the Sepik basin ofPapua 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 throughoutMelanesia. Others have argued that there is still much cultural variation throughout Melanesia, especially in the large island ofNew Guinea. Moreover, anthropologists often overlook the significance of networks of political influence among females. The formal male-dominated institutions typical of some areas of high population density were not, for example, present in the same way inOksapmin,West Sepik Province, a more sparsely-populated area. Cultural patterns there were different from, say,Mount Hagen. They were closer to those described by Mead.
Mead stated that theArapesh people, also in the Sepik, werepacifists, but she noted that they on occasion engage in warfare. Her observations about the sharing of garden plots among the Arapesh, theegalitarian emphasis in child rearing, and her documentation of predominantly peaceful relations among relatives are very different from the "big man" displays of dominance that were documented in more stratified New Guinea cultures, such as byAndrew Strathern. They are a different 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 theMundugumor, 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."[67]
Deborah Gewertz (1981) studied the Chambri (calledTchambuli by Mead) in 1974–1975 and found no evidence of such gender roles. Gewertz states that as far back in history as there is evidence (1850s), Chambri men dominated the women, controlled their produce, and made all important political decisions. In later years, there has been a diligent search for societies in which women dominate men or for signs of such past societies, but none has been found (Bamberger 1974).[68]Jessie Bernard criticised Mead's interpretations of her findings and argued that Mead's descriptions were subjective. Bernard argues that Mead claimed the Mundugumor women were temperamentally identical to men, but her reports indicate that there were in fact sex differences; Mundugumor women hazed each other less than men hazed each other and made efforts to make themselves physically desirable to others, married women had fewer affairs than married men, women were not taught to use weapons, women were used less as hostages and Mundugumor men engaged in physical fights more often than women. In contrast, the Arapesh were also described as equal in temperament, but Bernard states that Mead's own writings indicate that men physically fought over women, yet women did not fight over men. The Arapesh also seemed to have some conception of sex differences in temperament, as they would sometimes describe a woman as acting like a particularly quarrelsome man. Bernard also questioned if the behaviour of men and women in those societies differed as much from Western behaviour as Mead claimed. Bernard argued that some of her descriptions could be equally descriptive of a Western context.[69]
Despite its feminist roots, Mead's work on women and men was also criticized byBetty Friedan on the basis that it contributes to infantilizing women.[70]
In 1926, there was much debate aboutrace and intelligence. Mead felt the methodologies involved in the experimental psychology research supporting arguments of racial superiority in intelligence were substantially flawed. In "The Methodology of Racial Testing: Its Significance for Sociology," Mead proposes that there are three problems with testing for racial differences in intelligence. First, there are concerns with the ability to validly equate one's test score with what Mead refers to asracial admixture or how muchNegro or Indian blood an individual possesses. She also considers whether that information is relevant when interpreting IQ scores. Mead remarks that a genealogical method could be considered valid if it could be "subjected to extensive verification." In addition, the experiment would need a steady control group to establish whether racial admixture was actually affecting intelligence scores. Next, Mead argues that it is difficult to measure the effect that social status has on the results of a person's intelligence test. She meant that environment (family structure, socioeconomic status, and exposure to language, etc.) has too much influence on an individual to attribute inferior scores solely to a physical characteristic such as race. Then, Mead adds that language barriers sometimes create the biggest problem of all. Similarly, Stephen J. Gould finds three main problems with intelligence testing in his 1981 bookThe Mismeasure of Man that relate to Mead's view of the problem of determining whether there are racial differences in intelligence.[71][72]
In 1929, Mead and Fortune visitedManus, now the northernmost province of Papua New Guinea, and traveled there by boat fromRabaul. She amply describes her stay there in her autobiography, and it is mentioned in her 1984 biography byJane Howard. On Manus, she studied the Manus people of the south coast village of Peri. "Over the next five decades Mead would come back oftener to Peri than to any other field site of her career.'[7][73]: 117
Mead has been credited with persuading theAmerican Jewish Committee to sponsor a project to study European Jewish villages,shtetls, in which a team of researchers would conduct mass interviews with Jewish immigrants living in New York City. The resulting book, widely cited for decades, allegedly created theJewish mother stereotype, a mother 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.[74]
Mead worked for theRAND Corporation, a US Air Force military-funded private research organization, from 1948 to 1950 to study Russian culture and attitudes toward authority.[75]
On January 19, 1979, U.S. PresidentJimmy Carter announced that he was awarding thePresidential Medal of Freedom posthumously to Mead. UN AmbassadorAndrew Young presented the award to Mead's daughter at a special program honoring her contributions that was sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History, where she spent many years of her career. The citation read:[78]
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.
In 1979, theSupersisters trading card set was produced and distributed; one of the cards featured Mead's name and picture.[79]
The 2014 novelEuphoria[85] byLily King is a fictionalized account of Mead's love/marital relationships with fellow anthropologistsReo Fortune andGregory Bateson in New Guinea before World War II.[86]
^Baatz, Simon (1990). "Knowledge, Culture, and Science in the Metropolis: The New York Academy of Sciences, 1817–1970".Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.584:1–256.doi:10.1111/nyas.1990.584.issue-1.PMID2200324.
^Foerster H. von, Mead M. & Teuber H. L. (1953) A note from the editors. In: Cybernetics: Circular causal and feedback mechanisms in biological and social systems, transactions of the eighth conference, March 15–16, 1951. Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, New York: xi–xx.https://cepa.info/2709
^Mead, M. (1968). The cybernetics of cybernetics. In H. von Foerster, J. D. White, L. J. Peterson, & J. K. Russell (Eds.), Purposive Systems (pp. 1–11). Spartan Books.
^Wilson, Scott.Resting Places: The Burial Sites of More Than 14,000 Famous Persons, 3d ed.: 2 (Kindle Location 31891). McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers. Kindle Edition.
^Buss, David M. (2019).Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind. Routledge. p. 26.ISBN978-1-138-08861-0.
^Frank Heimans (1987).Margaret Mead and Samoa. Event occurs at 20:25.Roger Fox, Professor of Anthropology, Rutgers: '[What Freeman did was to] attack the goddess... she couldn't be wrong because if she was wrong then the doctrine was wrong and the whole liberal humanitarian scheme was wrong.'
^Frank Heimans (1987).Margaret Mead and Samoa. Event occurs at 21:20.Marc Swartz, Professor of Anthropology, University of California, San Diego: "one of the leading anthropologists came out immediately after Derek's book was out and said I haven't read the book but I know he's wrong."
^Frank Heimans (1987).Margaret Mead and Samoa. Event occurs at 26:125.Anthropologists Richard Goodman and Tim Omera talk about their work in Samoa and how it supports Freeman's findings
^Andrew Lyons; Harriet Lyons; Robert J. Gordon, eds. (2010).Fifty Key Anthropologists. Taylor & Francis. p. 124.ISBN9781136880124.
^Frank Heimans (1987).Margaret Mead and Samoa. Event occurs at 41:20.We girls would pinch each other and tell her we were out with the boys. We were only joking but she took it seriously. As you know, Samoan girls are terrific liars and love making fun of people, but Margaret thought it was all true.
^abOrans, Martin (1996),Not Even Wrong: Margaret Mead, Derek Freeman, and the Samoans.
^Shankman, Paul (December 3, 2009).The Trashing of Margaret Mead. The University of Wisconsin Press. p. 113.ISBN978-0-299-23454-6.
^Paul Shankman,[The Trashing of Margaret Mead: Anatomy of an Anthropological Controversy,] University of Wisconsin Press, 2009 esp. pp. 47–71.
^abShankman, Paul 2009The Trashing of Margaret Mead: Anatomy of an Anthropological Controversy. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press
^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, Young and Juan 1985
^abMead, Margaret (2003).Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1st Perennial ed.). New York: Perennial an impr. of HarperCollins Publ.ISBN978-0-06-093495-8.
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