Margaret Mead
1901 - 1978

The American anthropologist Margaret Mead developed the field of
culture and personality research and was a dominant influence in
introducing the concept of culture into education, medicine, and
public policy.
Margaret
Mead was born in Philadelphia, Pa., on Dec. 16, 1901. She grew
up there in a liberal intellectual atmosphere. Her father,
Edward Sherwood Mead, was a professor in the Wharton School of
Finance and Commerce and the founder of the University of
Pennsylvania's evening school and extension program. Her mother,
Emily Fogg Mead, was a sociologist and an early advocate of
woman's rights.
In 1919 Mead entered DePauw University but transferred after a
year to Barnard College, where she majored in psychology. In her
senior year she had a course in anthropology with Franz Boas
which she later described as the most influential event in her
life, since it was then that she decided to become an
anthropologist. She graduated from Barnard in 1923. In the same
year she married Luther Cressman and entered the anthropology
department of Columbia University.
The Columbia department at this time consisted of Boas, who
taught everything, and Ruth Benedict, his only assistant. The
catastrophe of World War I and the dislocations that followed it
had had their impact on the developing discipline of
anthropology. Anthropologists began to ask how their knowledge
of the nature of humankind might be used to illuminate
contemporary problems. At the same time the influence of Sigmund
Freud was beginning to be felt in all the behavioral sciences.
The atmosphere in the Columbia department was charged with
intellectual excitement, and whole new perspectives for
anthropology were opening up.
Early Fieldwork
Mead completed her studies in 1925 and set off for a year's
fieldwork in Samoa in the face of opposition from older
colleagues worried about sending a young woman alone to a
Pacific island. Her problem was to study the life of adolescent
girls. She learned the native language (one of seven she
eventually mastered) and lived in a Samoan household as "one of
the girls." She found that young Samoan girls experience none of
the tensions American and European adolescents suffer from, and
she demonstrated the kind of social arrangements that make this
easy transition to adulthood possible.
On returning from the field Mead became assistant curator of
ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History, where she
remained, eventually becoming curator and, in 1969, curator
emeritus. Her mandate in going to the museum was "to make
Americans understand cultural anthropology as well as they
understood archaeology."
When Mead wrote Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), her publisher,
concerned that the book fell into no conventional category,
asked for a chapter on what the work's significance would be for
Americans. The result was the final chapter, "Education for
Choice," which set the basic theme for much of her lifework.
In 1928, after completing a technical monograph, The Social
Organization of Manuá, Mead left for New Guinea, this time with
Reo Fortune, an anthropologist from New Zealand whom she had
married that year. Her project was the study of the thought of
young children, testing some of the then current theories. Her
study of children's thought in its socio-cultural context is
described in Growing Up in New Guinea (1930). She later returned
to the village of Peri, where this study was made, after 25
years, when the children she had known in 1929 were leaders of a
community going through the difficulties of transition to modern
life. She described this transition, with flashbacks to the
earlier days, in New Lives for Old (1956).
New Field Methods
Mead's interest in psychiatry had turned her attention to the
problem of the cultural context of schizophrenia, and with this
in mind she went to Bali, a society where trance and other forms
of dissociation are culturally sanctioned. She was now married
to Gregory Bateson, a British anthropologist whom she had met in
New Guinea. The Balinese study was especially noteworthy for
development of new field techniques. The extensive use of film
made it possible to record and analyze significant minutiae of
behaviour that escape the pencil-and-paper ethnographer. Of the
38,000 photographs which Mead and Bateson brought back, 759 were
selected for Balinese Character (1942), a joint study with
Bateson. This publication marks a major innovation in the
recording and presentation of ethnological data and may prove in
the long run to be one of her most significant contributions to
the science of anthropology.
Studies Relevant to the "Public Good"
Largely through the work of Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, the
relevance of anthropology to problems of public policy was
recognized to a degree, though somewhat belatedly. When World
War II brought the United States into contact with allies,
enemies, and peoples just emerging from colonialism, the need to
understand many lifestyles became apparent. Mead conducted a
nationwide study of American food habits prior to the
introduction of rationing. Later she was sent to England to try
to explain to the British the habits of the American soldiers
who were suddenly thrust among them. After the war she worked as
director of Research in Contemporary Cultures, a cross-cultural,
trans-disciplinary project applying the insights and some of the
methods of anthropology to the study of complex modern cultures.
An overall view of the methods and some of the insights gained
is contained in The Study of Cultures at a Distance (1953).
For the theoretical basis of her work in the field of culture
and personality Margaret Mead drew heavily on psychology,
especially learning theory and psychoanalysis. In return she
contributed significantly to the development of psychoanalytic
theory by emphasizing the importance of culture in personality
development. She served on many national and international
committees for mental health and was instrumental in introducing
the study of culture into training programs for physicians and
social workers.
In the 1960s Mead became deeply concerned with the unrest among
the young. Her close contact with students gave her special
insight into the unmet needs of youth - for better education,
for autonomy, for an effective voice in decisions that affect
their lives in a world which adults seem no longer able to
control. Some of her views on these problems are set forth in
Culture and Commitment (1970). Her thoughts on human survival
under the threats of war, over-population, and degradation of
the environment are contained in A Way of Seeing (1970).
Ever since Margaret Mead taught a class of young working women
in 1926, she became deeply involved in education, both in the
universities and in interpreting the lessons of anthropology to
the general public. She joined the anthropology department at
Columbia University in 1947 and also taught at Fordham
University and the universities of Cincinnati and Topeka. She
also lectured to people all over America and Europe. Mead died
in 1978 and was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of
Freedom.
Margaret Mead was a dominant force in developing the field of
culture and personality and the related field of national
character research. Stated briefly, her theoretical position is
based on the assumption that an individual matures within a
cultural context which includes an ideological system, the
expectations of others, and techniques of socialization which
condition not only outward responses but also inner psychic
structure. Mead was criticized by certain other social
scientists on methodological and conceptual grounds. She was
criticized for neglecting quantitative methods in favor of depth
analysis and for what has been called "anecdotal" handling of
data. On the theoretical side she was accused of applying
concepts of individual psychology to the analysis of social
process while ignoring historical and economic factors. But
since her concern lay with predicting the behavior of
individuals within a given social context and not with the
origin of institutions, the criticism is irrelevant.
There is no question that Mead was one of the leading American
intellectuals of the 20th century. Through her best-selling
books, her public lecturing, and her popular column in Redbook
magazine, Mead popularized anthropology in the United States.
She also provided American women with a role model, encouraging
them to pursue professional careers previously closed to women
while at the same time championing their roles as mothers.
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