Margaret Mead (December 16, 1901 – November 15, 1978) was an Americancultural anthropologist, author and speaker, who appeared frequently in the mass media during the mid-twentieth century.[1]
Mead's first ethnographic work,Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), addressed adolescence and sexuality and catapulted her to national visibility. Her bookSex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935), explored gender roles and personality based on fieldwork in Papua New Guinea. Mead also conducted fieldwork with the Omaha people; in Manus, Papua New Guinea; and in Bali. She wroteKeep Your Powder Dry, an ethnographic examination of American life, in the hopes of supporting mobilization forWorld War II. She coordinated two comparative studies on modern cultures in the 1950s, while focusing her own work on Russia. Her later work included returns to Papua New Guinea, Bali, and Samoa for longitudinal studies.[2] She was curator ofethnology at theAmerican Museum of Natural History from 1946 to 1969. Mead served as president of theAmerican Association for the Advancement of Science in 1975.[3]
According to anthropologist Paul Shankman, "Mead was anthropology’s most significant public voice during the twentieth century."[4] She is regarded as a founding figure inpublic anthropology[4][5] andvisual anthropology.[6] Her ethnography of theSouth Pacific andMelanesia has been subject to vigorous academic debate.[7][8][9] From the 1920s to the 1960s, her fieldwork was widely discussed in the press[10] and she wrote a monthly column inRedbook magazine co-authored with partnerRhoda Métraux.[4] Her reports detailing the attitudes towards sex in South Pacific and Southeast Asian traditional cultures influenced the 1960ssexual revolution.[11] Mead's association withcultural relativism and the sexual revolution led to sharp criticism from conservatives.[12]
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,[13] was a sociologist who studied Italian immigrants.[14] 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.[15]
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.[16] Her family owned theLongland farm from 1912 to 1926.[17] 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.[18] In doing so, she found the rituals of theEpiscopal Church to fit the expression of religion she was seeking.[18] Mead studied one year, 1919, atDePauw University, then transferred toBarnard College.
As an ethnographer, Mead's primary research method wasparticipant observation through living in communities for extended periods of time. Beginning with her first field study in Samoa, she often concentrated her research on childhood, adolescence, sexuality, and kinship. In examining these topics, Mead created multivocal ethnographies that considered the lives of women and men, girls and boys alongside one another.[7]: 711–712
During fieldwork withGregory Bateson in Bali in the 1930s, she used still and motion photography extensively, creating one of the earliest film archives of anthropological research. Mead and Bateson's subsequent culture-at-a-distance work also involved studying films to characterize foreign cultures. These innovations led to her being called the "mother" of visual anthropology.[6]
During World War II, Mead turned her attention to studying her own American culture and to conducting studies of national character, which she envisioned as being important both for the war effort and for an internationalist future after the war. She organized, along with Ruth Benedict until her death in 1948, the Columbia University project Research in Contemporary Culture. These studies involved reviewing cultural materials and interviewing nationals of the culture under study, methods more accessible under wartime conditions.[23] The method and numerous studies conducted under it were published inThe Study of Culture at a Distance (1953), edited by Mead and Rhoda Métraux.[24]
Mead was also concerned with studying social change and modernization, particularly in the context of prior research. She conducted return field visits of her own and oriented new ethnographers in Bali, Manus, the Admiralty Islands, New Guinea, and Samoa.[23]
Ink on paper drawing by artist I Ketut Ngéndon depicting anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson leaving Bali and heading for Papua New Guinea
Mead's first ethnographic work described the life of Samoan girls and women on the island ofTaʻū in theManu'a Archipelago ofAmerican Samoa in 1926.[26] The book includes analyses of how children were raised and educated, household structure, 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.
Coming of Age 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. In her introduction, Mead notes that American and European psychologists, educators, and philosophers have argued that the turmoil of adolescence in their societies is driven by biology. Her book takes a skeptical approach to the idea that
The physical changes which are going on in the bodies of your boys and girls have their definite psychological accompaniments. You can no more evade one than you can the other your daughter's body changes from the body of a child to the body of a woman, so inevitably will her spirit change, and that stormily.[27]: 11
Mead instead believed childhood, adolescence, gender, and sex relations were largely driven by cultural practices and expressions. By conducting fieldwork in what she called a "simpler society" and among "primitive groups who have had thousands of years of historical development along completely different lines from our own," she sought to find a comparative case to answer the questions: "Are the disturbances which vex our adolescents due to the nature of adolescence itself or to the civilisation? Under different conditions does adolescence present a different picture?"[27]: 14, 17
Much of Mead's text is devoted to describing the life course of Samoans, with a particular emphasis on girls and women. Mead stated that the community ignores both boys and girls until age 15 or 16, giving them little social standing but also effectively greater freedom.[27]: 64 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 among unmarried young people and adultery.[27]: 76 Mead describes the psychology of the individual Samoan as being simpler, more honest, and less driven by sexualneuroses than the West. She describes Samoans as being much more comfortable with issues such asmenstruation and more casual aboutnon-monogamous sexual relations.[29] 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. The exceptions to these practices include women married to chiefs and young women who hold the title oftaupo, a ceremonial princess, whose virginity was required.[27]: 38–46, 61–69
Derek Freeman, a New Zealand anthropologist became the most prominent critic ofComing of Age in Samoa, publishing two books attacking her findings in 1983 and 1998. Freeman had lived in Samoa from 1940 to 1943,[30] and studied missionary records from Samoa during his doctoral training at Cambridge.[31] In 1965, he began fieldwork in Samoa, motivated in part by skepticism of Mead's research.[32] He criticized Mead's work in a 1968 paper to the Australian Association of Social Anthropology, arguing that Mead had mischaracterized Samoa as a sexually liberated society when in fact it was characterized by sexual repression and violence and adolescent delinquency.[33] The anthropological community has rejected Freeman's harshest criticisms, but theMead–Freeman controversy greatly tarnished Mead's public image and played a part in debates about cultural relativism, multiculturalism, and nature and nurture.[10]: 242–252
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.[34]
In 1928–29, Mead and Fortune visitedManus (in theAdmiralty Islands) for six months, 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 on Shallalou Island. Her research resulted inGrowing Up in New Guinea (1930) and a technical study titled, "Kinship in the Admiralty Islands" (1934); Fortune publishedManusReligion (1935). "Over the next five decades Mead would come back oftener to Peri than to any other field site of her career.'[15][35]: 117
Mead wrote a study of social changes in Peri between her two field visits of 1928–29 and June to December 1953, published asNew Lives for Old (1956). Mead saw her return visit as a chance to study the impact of technological change, including the replacement of traditional architecture with "American-style" housing, and social transformation.[36]: 132–35 [37] Between the two visits, there had been several major social changes: The people of Manus became Catholics around 1930.[38]: 219 Next, the Admiralty and Solomon Islands were occupied by the Japanese and then made into a strategic location for the American military and over a million soldiers had deployed through them.[38]: 219 [36]: 132–35 Finally, Manus society was roiled by the Paliau Movement, which called for a New Way (Tok Pisin:Nufela Fasin), which repudiated many forms of traditional culture, innovated a new form of Christianity, and instituted village assemblies.[39] The movement's leader, Paliau Moloat, advocated in 1953 for unity among villages and ethnic groups, working for village development rather than for Europeans, and eventual independence for Papua New Guinea.[40] InNew Lives for Old, Mead interpreted the movement's millenarian religious component, "The Noise" as a component of the society's modernization:
the movement led by the native leader Paliau, which attempted to understand and incorporate the values and institutions of the Western world, to build a real modern culture of its own, complete with democratic government, schools, clinic, universal suffrage, money, individual and community responsibility, was the stuff out of which abiding, steady social change comes. Counterpointed to this, facilitating and retarding, was a nativistic cult, a 'cargo cult' called in Manus The Noise, in which men shook like leaves in the grip of a religious revelation that promised them all the blessings of civilization, at once, without an effort on their part except the destruction of everything they still possessed.
Mead was joined by researchers Theodore and Lenora Schwartz,[36]: 132–35 and Leonora Foerstel.[40]: 62 Schwartz published his own analysis of the Paliau Movement in 1962,[38] which Peter Worsley describes as much more perceptive than Mead's.[41]
Beginning with a village meeting she led in December 1953, Mead conducted studies of the physical body types (or "somatypes") of villagers, with the assistance of Theodore Schwartz and Foerstel in 1954 and of Schwartz, and Barbara Heath in 1968.[40]: 65–67 [42] The studies required photographing villagers of all ages in the nude, and Foerstel records that "the villagers were told that an examination of their physical types would enhance human knowledge."[40]: 65 In theory and in publications, the studies made use of Jim Tanner and W.H. Sheldon's notions of body types defined by endomorphy, mesomorphy, and ectomorphy.[40]: 66 Foerstel, writing in the 1980s, objected to the lack of consent and intrusion involved in this research. She noted that consent was sought from Australian colonial authorities, but not the villagers themselves:
Although the Manus villagers were cooperative, their permission for the testing was not solicited. In retrospect, I am somewhat shocked at the submissive compliance with which the villagers accepted their intrusive anthropologists. If villagers complained, we certainly did not hear about it, and perhaps for that reason, we did not question our own behavior.[40]: 67
Writing in 1970, Mead stood by the utility of these studies, "In 1953, I could explain somatotype photography within the range of a medical understanding, and the study of change in general as 'United Nations business' where records of how they, the Manus, had accomplished a desired change would be useful to other developing peoples."[43]: 55
Omaha:The changing culture of an Indian tribe (1931)
Mead and her husband Reo Fortune conducted fieldwork among theOmaha people from June to October 1930.[44] Fortune openly presented himself as a anthropological reasearcher, tracking the comparative question of why Omaha culture lacks the trance-based visions that are significant in surrounding cultures. Mead presented herself only as the wife of an anthropologist, while clandestinely gathering fieldnotes on the lives of Omaha women and girls. She described this method as necessary to access the information she gathered, and in turn claimed she had an ethical obligation to anonymize her uninformed research subjects.[45]
InThe changing culture of an Indian tribe, the Omaha are pseudonymized as "The Antlers." Mead's work was concerned with "culture change" under the influence of the United States, and her assessment of the process was overwhelmingly negative: her work refers to the Omaha as "a broken culture."[44]: xiii Mead's work charted the impact theDawes Act, which subdivided Indian land into parcels that could be sold: "Since 1920, conditions have been getting steadily worse on the reservation. ... Each such sale makes one or more persons pensioners on their relatives and doubly impoverishes the tribe as a group. ... [T]he land, given to their grandfathers as a perpetual economic basis for their existence, is irretrievably lost and nothing remains in its place.”"[44]: 46–47, 53 [46]
Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935)
Mead undertook fieldwork in the Sepik River watershed of New Guinea with her husband Reo Fortune from 1931 to 1933. The main result of her ethnographic fieldwork wasSex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies. In the book, Mead profiled threeNew Guinea cultures with distinct gender systems, and explored the question of what happens when an individual’s emotional disposition is at odds with society’s gender expectations.
The focus of the book is temperament, that is patterns of personality and emotions, and "with the cultural assumptions that certain temperamental attitudes are 'naturally' masculine and others 'naturally' feminine."[47]: xxi The three societies in question were all in theSepik River basin ofPapua New Guinea: the Mountain Arapesh people, theMundugumor (or Biwat) people, the Tchambuli (now spelledChambri) people. Mead describes how "each tribe has certain definite attitudes towards temperament, a theory of what human beings, either men or women or both, are naturally like, a norm in terms of which to judge and condemn those individuals who deviate from it."[48]: xxi
Mead concluded that:
If those temperamental attitudes which we have traditionally regarded as feminine—such as passivity, responsiveness, and a willingness to cherish children—can so easily be set up as the masculine pattern in one tribe, and in another be outlawed for the majority of the women as well as for the majority of men, we no longer have any basis for regarding such aspects of behavior as sex-linked.[49]: 279–280
The book is divided into four parts, covering "the Mountain-Dwelling Arapesh," "the River-Dwelling Mundugumor," and the "Lake-Dwelling Tchambuli," and finally in Part Four, analyzing the socialization into gendered temperament across these societies and in the West. Mead's characterizations of each of the three peoples has been subject to vigorous scholarly debate, including by her research collaborator and ex-husband Reo Fortune (on the Arapesh), Nancy McDowell (on the Mundugumor), and Deborah Gewertz and Frederick Errington (on the Tchambuli),[51]
From 1936 to 1938, Mead and Gregory Bateson conducted fieldwork inBali, mostly in the village of Bajoeng Gede. They also worked from a former Rajah's palace in Bangli, and from a custom-built "pavilion in the courtyard of a Buddhistic Brahman family in the village of Batoean." Balinese culture is heavily influenced by external cultures of IndianHinduism,China, andJava, but Mead and Bateson sought a field site that would give them access to the "cultural base upon which various intrusive elements had been progressively grafted over the centuries."[52]: xiv Bajoeng Gede, which is located nearKintamani in Bangli District, seemed to them lacking in Hindu cultural imports, had only a handful of literate record keepers, and by elaborate Balinese standards, relatively simple ritual life.[52]: xiii In Bangli, they were interested in the ruling case and in Batoean, they researched both the Brahman family and the Brahman and casteless painters in an art school.
Mead and Bateson collaborated in extensive photographic documentation in Bali, with Mead writing simultaneous notes while Bateson operated the camera.[10]: 177 They amassed 25,000 photographs and over 20,000 feet of film[10]: 177 [53] and completed seven short films including:
Karba’s First Years: A Study of Balinese Childhood, 1952, 20 minutes.
Mead and Bateson publishedBalinese Character: A Photographic Analysis, which included 100 photographs, in 1942.[52] Mead undertook a second analysis with Frances Cooke Macgregor, Grow and Culture: A Photographic Study of Balinese Childhood, published in 1951.
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.[54][55]
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.[56]
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.[57]
Mead was married to men three times and had significant romantic relationships outside of marriage, including to at least two women. After a six-year engagement,[58] she married her first husband (1923–1928),Luther Cressman, an American theology student who later became an anthropologist. 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.[59]
Before departing for Samoa in 1925, Mead had a short affair with the linguistEdward Sapir. 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.[60]
During the same period, she began a romantic relationship with her instructorRuth Benedict, a close friend of Sapir. 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.[61]: 117–118 In her biography of the two women, Lois Banner writes that Mead and Benedict had become lovers by late 1924 and that Benedict then "characterize[d] Mead [as] her daughter and protégée in anthropology, her partner, lover, and best friend."[62]: 226 Mead and Benedict lived together for two months in summer 1928 and shared a Washington, DC, house during World War II as Mead commuted from her home in New York City to work for the federal government.[62]: 276
On her 1926 return voyage from fieldwork in Samoa, Mead metReo Fortune, a New Zealander headed toCambridge, England, to studypsychology.[63] At Cambridge University, Fortune soon switched to the discipline of anthropology under the mentorship of Colonel T.C. Hodson and completed a thesis, "On Imitative Magic" in 1927.[64] Fortune conducted fieldwork in theD’Entrecasteaux Archipelago from October 1927 to , eventually resulting inSorcerers of Dobu (1932). They were married in New Zealand in 1928, after Mead's divorce from Cressman. Mead and Fortune conducted joint fieldwork with the Omaha people in Nebraska and in New Guinea, where Mead was collecting data forSex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies. It was during this fieldwork that the two of them met Gregory Bateson.[65] Unlike her other husbands, Fortune was decidedly monogamous in his orientation and troubled by Mead's other romantic connections.[65]: 70 Mead described their marriage as troubled by Fortune's professional competitiveness, his “puritanical jealousy," and ultimately his physical violence against her.[65]: 66, 110
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.[15]: 428
She spent her last years in a close personal and professional collaboration with the anthropologistRhoda Metraux. Métraux had worked with Mead when the latter headed the National Research Council's Committee on Food Habits during World War II. By 1947 or 1948, they were romantically involved.[36]: 90–91 Mead and Métraux shared homes—in Greenwich Village (1955–66) and on Central Park West (1966–78)—until Mead's death.[66]Letters between the two published in 2006 with the permission of Mead's daughter[67] clearly express a romantic relationship.[68]
Privately and at times in her scholarship, Mead espoused free-love, drawing inspiration from Havelock Ellis'sThe Art of Love and Edward Carpenter'sLove's Coming of Age. Her marriage to Cressman involved agreement to divorce on demand and the freedom for both parties to have affairs.[62] As quoted by Sapir, Mead stated, "It would be an insult to both me and my husband to expect marital fidelity on the part of either of us."[69]: 60 In 1926, Mead described her "belief that one can love several people and that demonstrative affection has its place in different types of relationship."[70]: 62 Her marriage to Bateson was likewise an open one.[71] Biographer Jane Howard attributes to a close friend of Mead the observation that Mead "fell in love with women's souls and men's bodies. She was spiritually homosexual, psychologically bisexual, and physically heterosexual. She had affairs with both men and women—though never with two men or two women at the same time."[69]: 367
Mead never openly identified herself aslesbian orbisexual. In correspondence, Mead described her self as a "mixed type" with attractions to both men and women, and in a 1928 letter to Benedict described seeking a "perfect balance" between her "two loves" to Benedict and her husband Fortune.[62]: 253 In the public conversation that became known as"A Rap on Race," Mead rejectedJames Baldwin's invitation to describe herself as "an exile" like him, a suggestion that biographer Benjamin Breen and scholar Jean Walton have described as a chance to reveal her bisexuality.[36][72]: 188–189 In her writings, she proposed that it is to be expected that an individual'ssexual orientation may evolve throughout life.[61] Speaking at a public conference in 1974, Mead suggested that youthful homosexuality, followed by heterosexuality in middle adulthood, and then by late life homosexuality would be ideal for society.[69]: 367 In aRedbook column, co-authored with Metraux, Mead wrote, "What is new is not bisexuality, but rather the widening of our awareness and acceptance of human capacities for sexual love."[69]: 367
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.[73]
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.[74] Mead's brother, Richard, was a professor. Mead was also the aunt ofJeremy Steig.[75]
During World War II, Mead along with other social scientists like Gregory Bateson and Ruth Benedict, took on several different responsibilities. In 1940, Mead joined the non-governmental Committee for National Morale.[76] In 1941, she published an essay inApplied Anthropology, which offered strategies to help produce propaganda with the intent of raising national morale.[76] From 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.[76] During the war, Mead also served on the Council on Intercultural Relations (later, 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 after the war.[76] In summer 1943, she traveled to Britain on a speaking tour on American culture funded by the Office of War Information. Drawing on experience on the tour, she wrote and publishedThe American Troops and the British Community, in part to explain American "courtship rituals" and dating to a British public increasingly affected by millions of American soldiers.[77][78] She also wrote a manual on using cultural knowledge in overseas undercover operations for theArmy Specialized Training Program.[79] Mead continued to establish a public voice, with her writing appearing inVogue,Mademoiselle, and theNew York Times.[76]
Following Ruth Benedict's example, Mead focused her research on problems of child rearing, personality, and culture.[84] She served as president of theSociety for Applied Anthropology in 1950[85] 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."[86] In the 1960s, Mead served as the Vice President of theNew York Academy of Sciences.[87] 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.[88] 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.[91]
She is credited with the pluralization of the term "semiotics".[92]
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.[93]
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.[99]
The American Museum of Natural History hosts an annualMargaret Mead Film Festival, featuring documentary films, including but not limited to those about scientific and ethnographic topics.[100] It was first held in 1976, in celebration of Mead's 75th birthday. As of 2025, it was described as the "longest running documentary showcase in the United States."[101]
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:[103]
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.
The 2014 novelEuphoria[111] 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.[112]
Margaret Mead's life is the subject of numerous books including:
Charles King'sGods of the Upper Air[113] profiles the work and impact of multiple members of the Franz Boas circle of anthropologists.
Mary Catherine Bateson's memoir of her parents,With a Daughter's Eye: A Memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson
Paul Shankman'sThe Trashing of Margaret Mead, on the posthumous Freeman controversy over her Samoa fieldwork.
Elesha Coffman'sMargaret Mead: A Twentieth-Century Faith,[114] which explores Mead's Christianity. Mead had once wrote, "Shorn of all the things in which I can’t believe—and don’t want to—an omnipotent God, immortality, and original sin—Christianity is still the most beautiful thing I know, and the fact that Jesus lived the most satisfactory justification of life.”
Benjamin Breen'sTripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science[115] on Mead and Bateson's intersections with both early experiments in psychedelic use and covert experimentation organized by the US government.
Deborah Blum'sComing of Age: The Sexual Awakening of Margaret Mead, covering Mead's education at Barnard/Columbia, her fieldwork in Samoa, and summer in Europe, and relationships with Cressman, Benedict, Sapir, and Fortune from 1921 to 1926.
Mead's life is also discussed in these scholarly works:
Jean Walton'sFair Sex, Savage Dreams: Race, Psychoanalysis, Sexual Difference devotes its last two chapters to Mead, with a lengthy interpretation of her conversation with James Baldwin inA Rap on Race.
Nancy Lutkehaus'sMargaret Mead: The Making of an American Icon[116], which intertwines her look at Mead with "the study of fame … as a particular social practice" and of "the meanings associated with her that transcend or go beyond Mead."
^Foerstel, Lenora; Gilliam, Angela (1992).Confronting the Margaret Mead legacy: Scholarship, empire, and the South Pacific. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.ISBN978-0-87722-886-8.
^Mead, Margaret; Métraux, Rhoda Bubendey; Métraux, Rhoda (2000).The Study of Culture at a Distance. Berghahn Books.ISBN978-1-57181-215-5.
^Library of Congress. Manuscript Division (2024). "Margaret Mead Papers and the South Pacific Ethnographic Archives: A Finding Aid to the Collection in the Library of Congress" (Document). Library of Congress.
^Mead, Margaret (2001).Coming of age in Samoa: A psychological study of primitive youth for western civilisation (First Perennial Classics ed.). New York: Perennial Classics.ISBN0-688-05033-6.OCLC44550546.
^ Samoans rate romantic fidelity in terms of days or weeks at most, and are inclined to scoff at tales of life-long devotion. They greeted the story of Romeo and Juliet with incredulous contempts.[28]: 155–156
^Hempenstall, Peter (2004). "Our Missionaries and Cultural Change in Samoa".The Journal of Pacific History. Vol. 39, No.2.39 (2):241–250.doi:10.1080/0022334042000250760.JSTOR25169695.
^Appell, George N. & T. N. Madan (1988). "Derek Freeman: Notes Towards and intellectual biography".Choice and morality in anthropological perspective: essays in honor of Derek Freeman. SUNY Press. pp. 3–27.
^Holmes, Lowell D. & Derek Freeman. "From the Holmes - Freeman correspondence". In Hiram Caton (ed.).The Samoa Reader: Anthropologists take stock. pp. 315–322.
^Jane Howard,Margaret Mead: A Life (1984), New York: Simon and Schuster.
^abcdeBreen, Benjamin (2024).Tripping on utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the troubled birth of psychedelic science. New York, NY: Grand Central Publishing, Hachette Book Group.ISBN978-1-5387-2237-4.
^Mead, Margaret (December 1, 1970)."Some cultural anthropological responses to technical assistance experience".Social Science Information.9 (6): 51.doi:10.1177/053901847000900603.ISSN0539-0184. RetrievedDecember 21, 2025.I became convinced that we needed a new theory of rapid cultural change which would include both the original isolated primitive recipient culture and the donor culture within one system and which would deal also with the problem of rapid change within one generation.
^abcSchwartz, Theodore (1962).The Paliau movement in the Admiralty Islands, 1946-1954. Anthropological papers of the American Museum of Natural History. Vol. 49, part 2. New York: American Museum of Natural History.
^Schwartz, Theodore; Smith, Michael French (July 1, 2021).Like Fire: The Paliau Movement and Millenarianism in Melanesia. ANU Press. pp. 1–7.ISBN978-1-76046-425-7.
^abcdefFoerstel, Lenora (1992). "Margaret Mead from a Cultural Historical Perspective". In Foerstel, Lenora; Gilliam, Angela (eds.).Confronting the Margaret Mead legacy: Scholarship, empire, and the South Pacific. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.ISBN978-0-87722-886-8.
^"I was asked to review Margaret Mead's (1956) study of the Paliau movement. It seemed to me so inadequate a work (unlike the splendid 1962 study by her colleague Theodore Schwartz) that I suggested to the editors that, instead, I write something more general about her work."Worsley, Peter (1992). "Foreword". In Foerstel, Lenora; Gilliam, Angela (eds.).Confronting the Margaret Mead legacy: Scholarship, empire, and the South Pacific. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. pp. x.ISBN978-0-87722-886-8.
^Carter, J. E. Lindsay; Heath, Barbara Honeyman (June 28, 1990).Somatotyping: Development and Applications. Cambridge University Press. p. 18.ISBN978-0-521-35117-1.
^"The Indians were not cognizant of the fact that any such investigation was being conducted, but believed that I was merely killing time in idle conversation or attendance at ceremonies. For the most part, no notes were taken in the informants' presence but conversations were written up immediately afterwards. The one exception to this was detailed reorganization of census material which the informant believed I was doing for another investigator. Such unawareness was essential to the successful prosecution of a study involving intimate details of contemporary life."Mead, Margaret (1966).The changing culture of an Indian tribe. New York: Capricorn Press. p. xxi. RetrievedJanuary 3, 2026.
^Fletcher, Alice C.; Scherer, Joanna Cohan; DeMallie, Raymond J. (2013). "Introduction".Life among the Indians: First Fieldwork among the Sioux and Omahas (1 ed.). Lincoln [Neb.]: UNP - Nebraska. p. 58-59.ISBN978-0-8032-4115-2.
^Mead, Margaret (1963).Sex and temperament in three primitive societies. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
^Mead, Margaret (1963).Sex and temperament in three primitive societies. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
^Mead, Margaret (1963).Sex and temperament in three primitive societies. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
^Marso, Lori J. (July 15, 2016).Fifty-One Key Feminist Thinkers. Routledge.ISBN978-1-317-19276-3.
^abcBateson, Gregory (1942).Balinese character: A photographic analysis. Special publications of the New York Academy of Sciences. Vol. II. New York: The New York Academy of Sciences.
^Thomas, Caroline (2011).The Sorcerers' Apprentice: A life of Reo Franklin Fortune, Anthropologist (Doctoral dissertation). University of Waikato.hdl:10289/5472.
^Coffman, Elesha J. (January 14, 2021).Margaret Mead: A Twentieth-Century Faith. Oxford: Oxford University Press.ISBN978-0-19-257187-8.
^"These were not just tolerated affairs, but elements in what today would be described as an open practice of polyamory. Sexual jealousy was simplyn to something Margaret Mead trafficked in."Breen, Benjamin (2024).Tripping on utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the troubled birth of psychedelic science (First ed.). New York, NY: Grand Central Publishing, Hachette Book Group. p. 81.ISBN978-1-5387-2237-4.
^Zeiger, Susan (March 1, 2010).Entangling Alliances: Foreign War Brides and American Soldiers in the Twentieth Century. NYU Press. pp. 84–85.ISBN978-0-8147-9725-9.
^Mead, Margaret (1944).The American troops and the British community; an examination of the relationship between the American troops and the British. London: Hutchinson.
^Price, David H. (June 9, 2008).Anthropological Intelligence: The Deployment and Neglect of American Anthropology in the Second World War. Duke University Press. pp. 81–83.ISBN978-0-8223-8912-5.
^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.
^King, Charles (2019).Gods of the upper air: how a circle of renegade anthropologists reinvented race, sex, and gender in the twentieth century (First ed.). New York: Doubleday.ISBN978-0-385-54219-7.
^Coffman, Elesha J. (January 14, 2021).Margaret Mead: A Twentieth-Century Faith. Oxford: Oxford University Press.ISBN978-0-19-257187-8.
^Breen, Benjamin (2024).Tripping on utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the troubled birth of psychedelic science (First ed.). New York, NY: Grand Central Publishing, Hachette Book Group.ISBN978-1-5387-2237-4.
^Lutkehaus, Nancy C. (2018).Margaret Mead: The Making of an American Icon. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.ISBN978-0-691-19027-3.
^The changing culture of an Indian tribe.OCLC847822.
^Mead, 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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