Margaret Mead

Margaret Mead (December 16, 1901 – November 15, 1978) was an American cultural anthropologist, and a pioneer of feminist movement in America. When she died, she was the most famous anthropologist in the world, and it was through her work that many people learned about anthropology and its holistic vision of human beings.

Life

Margaret Mead was born on December 16, 1901 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the oldest of four children. Her father was a university professor and her mother a social activist. Margaret graduated from Barnard College in 1923, majoring in psychology, and enrolled in graduate school at Columbia University. It was at Columbia that she met Ruth Benedict, who persuaded Margaret to turn to anthropology. Benedict and Mead soon became rather intimate, sharing a lesbian relationship for 25 years. Despite marriages, affairs, and fieldwork that took them both to many different parts of the world, Mead and Benedict remained close (Lapsley 2001).

In 1923, Mead married Luther Cressman, a theology student. She traveled with him to Pogo Pogo, a Polynesian island, where she studied local customs, writing her first book in 1926, based on her findings. The couple could not have children, and that bothered Mead greatly, because she wanted to have a big family.

During a trip to Europe, Mead met Reo Fortune, a psychologist from New Zealand. She fell in love with him, divorced Luther and married Reo. The couple moved to New Guinea, where they spent several years. Mead studied child and adolescent development in Manus and Samoan cultures. In 1935, Mead divorced Fortune and was married for the third time, to Gregory Bateson. The couple spent four years, from 1936 to 1939 studying Indonesian cultures. Finally, in 1939, Mead's dream came true and she bore a child, Mary Catherine Bateson, who also became an anthropologist.

Mead received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1929, after conducting her fieldwork in Polynesia. In 1926, Mead joined the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, as assistant curator, eventually serving as its curator from 1961 to 1969. In addition, she taught at Columbia University, at New York University, Emory University, Yale University, and the University of Cincinnati. She founded the Department of Anthropology at Fordham University.

Mead received numerous honorary doctorates, and served as president of the American Anthropological Association, the Anthropological Film Institute, the Scientists Institute for Public Information, the Society for Applied Anthropology, and the American Association for Advancement in Science.

As a celebrity, Mead spoke out on a wide range of social issues including women's rights, parenting, racism, drug abuse, pollution. amd war. She firmly believed that human behavior was learned and so could be reshaped by a society determined to make changes for the better. In a time of pessimism about the future of human society, she became known for her optimistic view, expressed in her words: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world."

Mead broke her ankle in 1960 and, disliking the bent over posture caused by the use of a cane, she adopted a "thumb stick" obtained in London, which is taller and allowed her to walk upright. She continued to use it for the rest of her life, as her personal symbol of human plasticity and the capacity for change.

Mead continued to research and teach until she died in New York City on November 15, 1978, aged 76 from cancer. She was awarded the Presidentital Medal of Freedom, the United State's highest civilian honor, posthumously in 1979.

Work

Following the example of her instructor, Ruth Benedict, Mead concentrated her studies on problems of child rearing, personality, and culture. However, it was her work in cultural anthropology, especially of Polynesian cultures, that made her most famous. Her Coming of Age in Samoa (Mead 1928) is considered one of the classics in anthropological literature.

Coming of Age in Samoa

Coming of Age in Samoa, first published in 1928, was based upon Mead's findings that youth in Samoa were taught to grow together and strengthen each other's confidence. As a result, their community was much more tightly knit than that of other cultures, and the individuals themselves were more emotionally secure. In contrast, American youth were taught to compete against one another, leaving them isolated within their own cliques.

In the forward to Coming of Age in Samoa, Mead's advisor, Franz Boas, wrote of its significance:

Courtesy, modesty, good manners, conformity to definite ethical standards are universal, but what constitutes courtesy, modesty, good manners, and definite ethical standards is not universal. It is instructive to know that standards differ in the most unexpected ways.

Boas felt that a study of the problems faced by adolescents in another culture would be illuminating, especially due to the fact that so little was yet known about the subject. Mead herself described the goal of her research:

I have tried to answer the question which sent me to Samoa: Are the disturbances which vex our adolescents due to the nature of adolescence itself or to the civilization? Under different conditions does adolescence present a different picture?

She found that it did. (Mead 1928/2001 pp. 6-7)

Mead conducted her study among a small group of Samoans in a village of 600 people on the island of Tau, Samoa, of which she got to know, lived with, observed, and interviewed (through an interpreter) sixty-eight young women between the ages of 9 and 20. She concluded that the passage from childhood to adulthood (adolescence) in Samoa was a smooth transition, and not marked by the emotional or psychological distress, anxiety, or confusion seen in the United States. The book also put forward the thesis that teenagers are psychologically healthier if they engage in sexual activities with multiple partners before marriage.

As Boas and Mead expected, this book upset many Westerners when it first appeared in 1928. Many American readers felt shocked by her observation that young Samoan women deferred marriage for many years while enjoying casual sex, but eventually married, settled down, and successfully reared their own children. The book started many controversies, of which "Freeman-Mead" was the most famous.

Freeman-Mead Controversy

Derek Freeman, an anthropologist from New Zealand, was inspired by Mead's work, and travelled to Samoa to follow up on her findings. He published his refutation of her work, Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth in 1983, five years after Mead had died. In this book, he reported that Mead had been misled in the extreme by the two girls whom she spoke to, and at worst was fabricating her whole research:

... while traveling around the islands with two teenage girls, she had the opportunity to question them privately about their sex lives and those of their friends... Mead kept prodding the girls. She did not want to hear about traditional taboos or Christian restraints. She wanted to hear about frolicking on the beach. The girls had no idea what Mead was up to. They didn't know she was an anthropologist or what one even was. But what they did know and enjoy was the "recreational lying" common among Samoan girls. Eager to please, they proceeded to spin the kind of yarns that Mead wanted to hear. Pinching each other all the way, they filled Mead's head with wild tales of nocturnal liaisons under the palm trees. (Freeman 1983)

However, it should be acknowledged that Freeman's account has been challenged as being ideologically driven to support his own theoretical viewpoint (sociobiology), and that considerable controversy remains over the veracity, or otherwise, of both Mead's and Freeman's account. Lowell Holmes (1987) completed a much less publicized study, and later commented that

Mead was better able to identify with, and therefore establish rapport with, adolescents and young adults on issues of sexuality than either I (at age 29, married with a wife and child) or Freeman, ten years my senior. (Holmes & Holmes 1992).

Anthropologists also criticized Freeman on methodological and empirical grounds. For example, Freeman conflated publicly articulated ideals with behavioral norms. While many Samoan women would admit in public that it is ideal to remain a virgin, in practice they engaged in high levels of premarital sex and boasted about their sexual affairs amongst themselves (Shore 1982 pp. 229-230). Freeman's own data supported Mead's conclusions: in a western Samoan village he documented that 20 percent of 15 year-olds, 30 percent of 16 year-olds, and 40 percent of 17 year-olds had engaged in pre-marital sex (Freeman 1983 pp. 238-240). Freeman was also accused of having the same ethnocentric sexual point of view as the people Boas and Mead once shocked. The American Anthropological Association declared Freeman's Margaret Mead and Samoa "poorly written, unscientific, irresponsible and misleading."

In the years that followed, anthropologists vigorously debated these issues but generally supported the critique of Freeman (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, and Young and Juan 1985).

Mead's research in other societies

Mead's work on the Manus of New Guinea, Growing Up in New Guinea (Mead 1930), refuted the notion that "primitive" people are like children, at an earlier stage of psychological development. Based on her findings, she argued that human development depends on the social environment, reflecting her belief in cultural determinism.

Another extremely influential book was Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (Mead 1935). In this, she argued that gender roles differ in different societies, and thus depend at least as much on culture as biology. This became a major cornerstone of the women's liberation movement, since it claimed that females were dominant in the Tchambuli (now spelled Chambri) tribe of Papua New Guinea, without causing any societal problems.

She also found that the Arapesh, both men and women, were pacifists, and lived in a cooperative society, sharing garden plots, with an egalitarian emphasis in child-rearing, and predominantly peaceful relations among family members. Among the Mundugumor, however, the opposite was true: both men and women were warlike in temperament.

When comparing Arapesh, Mundugumor, and the Tchambuli cultures, Mead concluded that cultures mold human behavior. While in the Arapesh culture both women and men were cooperative, in Mundugumor they were both rather aggressive, and in the Thambuli culture the women had dominant role in the society. Mead thus coined her famous statement: "human nature is malleable."

Legacy

Mead contribution to the development of modern anthropological theory was great. She was one of the first to suggest that masculinity and femininity reflect cultural conditioning, and that the gender differences are not entirely biologically determined. Through her work, often provocative and controversial, Mead managed to awake and revive the scholastic discussion in different scientific circles. Her views on gender roles were quite radical for the time she lived in, but they led toward breaking of many taboos that existed in mid 20th-century American society. Although she did not like to be called feminist, Mead can be considered one of the pioneers of the feminist movement.

The U.S. Post Office issued a Mead Commemorative Stamp in 1998 as part of its "Celebrate the Century" series.

The extensive collection of notes, manuscripts, photographs, recordings, and other materials that Mead preserved are housed in the Library of Congress, and available to scholars interested in evaluating and building on her research. To commemorate the 100th anniversary of her birth, the Library of Congress prepared an exhibition to document major themes in Mead's life and work.

Bibliography

• Margaret Mead. (1953). Primitive Heritage: An Anthropological Anthology, Random House
• Margaret Mead. (1959). People and Places. Bantam Books. ISBN 055306312X
• Margaret Mead. (1969). The Changing Culture of an Indian Tribe Ams Press, (original work published 1932). ISBN 0404505651
• Margaret Mead. (1974). Culture and Commitment. Vintage/Ebury, (original work published 1970). ISBN 0370013328
• Margaret Mead. (1974). A Way of Seeing. Morrow. ISBN 0688053262
• Margaret Mead. (1980). An Anthropologist at Work. Avon, (original work published 1959). ISBN 0380010224
• Margaret Mead. (1985). Cultural Patterns and Technical Change. Greenwood Press, (original work published 1953). ISBN 0313248397
• Margaret Mead. (1995). Blackberry Winter. Kodansha America, (original work published 1972). ISBN 156836069X
• Margaret Mead. (2001). Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation . Harper Perennial Modern Classics, (original work published 1928). ISBN 0688050336
• Margaret Mead. (2001). Growing Up in New Guinea: A Comparative Study of Primitive Education. Harper Perennial Modern Classics, (original work published 1930). ISBN 0688178111
• Margaret Mead. (2001). Male and Female. Harper Perennial. (original work published 1949). ISBN 0060934964
• Margaret Mead. (2001). New Lives for Old: Cultural Transformation in Manus, 1928-1953. Harper Perennial, (original work published 1956). ISBN 0060958065
• Margaret Mead. (2001). Sex and Temperament: In Three Primitive Societies. Harper Perennial, (original work published 1935). ISBN 0060934956
• Margaret Mead & Rhoda Metraux. (2000). The Study of Culture At A Distance. Berghahn Books, (original work published 1953). ISBN 1571812164
• Margaret Mead & Rhoda Metraux. (2001). Themes in French Culture: A Preface to a Study of French Community. Berghahn Books, (original work published 1954). ISBN 1571818146
• Margaret Mead & Stephen Toumlin. (1999). Continuities in Cultural Evolution. Transaction Publishers, (original work published 1964). ISBN 0765806045

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Gregory Acciaioli. (1983). Fact and Context in Etnography: The Samoa Controversy. Canberra Anthropology (special issue) 6(1), 1-97.
• George Appell. (1984). Freeman's Refutation of Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa: The Implications for Anthropological Inquiry. Eastern Anthropology 37, 183-214.
• Ivan Brady. (1991). The Samoa Reader: Last Word or Lost Horizon?. Current Anthropology, 32, 263-282.
• Hiram Caton. (Ed., 1990). The Samoa Reader: Anthropologists Take Stock. University Press of America. ISBN 0819177202.
• Richard Feinberg. (1988). Margaret Mead and Samoa: Coming of Age in Fact and Fiction. American Anthropologist, 90, 656-663
• Derek Freeman. (1983). Margaret Mead and Samoa. Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-54830-2.
• Derek Freeman. (1999). The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis of Her Samoan Research. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press. ISBN 0813336937.
• Lowell D. Holmes. (1987). Quest for the Real Samoa: The Mead/Freeman Controversy and Beyond. South Hadley: Bergin and Garvey. ISBN 0897891104
• Holmes, L.D. and Holmes, E.R, Samoan Village Then And Now, Harcourt Brace, 1992
• Hilary Lapsley. (2001). Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict: The Kinship of Women. University of Massachusetts Press. ISBN 155849295X
• Eleanor Leacock. (1988). Anthropologists in Search of a Culture: Margaret Mead, Derek Freeman and All the Rest of Us. Central Issues in Anthropology 8(1), 3-20.
• Robert Levy. (1984). Mead, Freeman, and Samoa: The Problem of Seeing Things as They Are, Ethos 12, 85-92
• Jeannette Mageo. (1988). Mālosi: A Psychological Exploration of Mead's and Freeman's Work and of Samoan Aggression. Pacific Studies, 11(2), 25-65
• Mac Marshall. (1993). "The Wizard from Oz Meets the Wicked Witch of the East: Freeman, Mead, and Ethnographic Authority. American Ethnologist, 20(3), 604-617.
• Bonnie Nardi. (1984). The Height of Her Powers: Margaret Mead's Samoa. Feminist Studies 10, 323-337.
• Allan Patience and Josephy Smith. (1986). Derek Freemanin Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of a Biobehavioral Myth. American Anthropologist, 88, 157-162.
• David B. Paxman. (1988). Freeman, Mead, and the Eighteenth-Century Controversy over Polynesian Society. Pacific Studies, 1(3), 1-19
• Roger Sandall. (2001). The Culture Cult: Designer Tribalism and Other Essays. ISBN 0813338638
• Nancy Scheper-Hughes. (1984). The Margaret Mead Controversy: Culture, Biology, and Anthropological Inquiry. Human Organization, 43(1), 85-93.
• Paul Shankman. (1996). The History of Samoan Sexual Conduct and the Mead-Freeman Controversy. American Anthropologist, 98(3), 555-567.
• Bradd Shore. (1982). Sala'ilua: A Samoan Mystery. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 0231053827
• R.E. Young and S. Juan. (1985). Freeman's Margaret Mead Myth: The Ideological Virginity of Anthropologists. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology. 21, 64-81.

External links

• Creative Intelligence: Female ("The Silent Revolution: Creative Man In Contemporary Society" Talk at UC Berkeley, 1962 (online audio file)
• The Institute for Intercultural Studies - ethnographic institute founded by Mead, with resources relating to Mead's work
• Margaret Mead biography at IIS
• Library of Congress, Margaret Mead: Human Nature and the Power of Culture
• Correspondence between Margaret Mead and Franz Boas during Mead’s 1925-26 Samoan research project

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