In her first study, Coming of Age in Samoa , she observed that Samoan children moved with relative ease into the adult world of sexuality and work, in contrast to children in the United States, where lingering Victorian restraints on sexual behavior and the increasing separation of children from the productive world made youth a needlessly difficult time. Describing the widely varying temperaments exhibited by men and women in different cultures, from the nurturing men of the Arapesh tribe to the violent women of the Mundugumor, Mead maintained that social convention, not biology, determines how people behave.
She thus entered the nature-nurture debate on the side of nurture. A decade later, Mead qualified her nature vs. She continued nevertheless to emphasize the possibility and wisdom of resisting traditional gender stereotypes. By the s Mead was widely regarded as a national oracle. She served as a curator at the Museum of Natural History from until her death and as an adjunct professor of anthropology at Columbia from , but she devoted the greater part of her professional life to writing and lecturing.
She was married three times to Luther Cressman, Reo Fortune and anthropologist Gregory Bateson and the mother of only one child, Mary Catherine Bateson, at a time when both divorce and only children were uncommon.
Nevertheless, she achieved fame as an expert on family life and child rearing. In such books as Culture and Commitment and her autobiographical Blackberry Winter , in magazine articles for Redbook , and in her lectures, Mead tried to persuade Americans that understanding the lives of other people could help them understand their own, that a greater ease with sexuality homosexual as well as heterosexual could enrich them, that motherhood and careers could and should go together and that building support networks for the overburdened nuclear family would bring greater well-being for all.
She died of pancreatic cancer on November 15, , and was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in She even appeared on a commemorative postage stamp in He pioneering anthropological work on sexuality, culture and childrearing continues to be influential today. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.
Just like everyone else. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. Gordan, Joan, ed. Margaret Mead: The complete bibliography, — The Hague: Mouton. This bibliography contains over fourteen hundred entries and includes name and subject indices, as well as a useful introduction by Mead herself.
It illustrates just how prolific Mead was an author. Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content on this page. Please subscribe or login. Oxford Bibliographies Online is available by subscription and perpetual access to institutions. For more information or to contact an Oxford Sales Representative click here. Not a member? Sign up for My OBO. Already a member? Publications Pages Publications Pages.
Mead did her undergraduate work at Barnard College, where she met Franz Boas, who she went on to do her anthropology Ph. She became a curator of ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History, where she published the bestselling book, Coming of Age in Samoa.
Mead was born on December 16, , in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Mead is credited with changing the way we study different human cultures. The daughter of a University of Pennsylvania economist and a feminist political activist, she graduated from Barnard College in , where she met Boas.
Studying with Boas, Mead went on to get a Ph. Mead was appointed an assistant curator of ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History in Altogether, she made 24 field trips among six South Pacific peoples.
Her later works included Male and Female and Growth and Culture , in which Mead argued that personality characteristics, especially as they differ between men and women, were shaped by cultural conditioning rather than heredity. Some critics called her fieldwork impressionistic, but her writings have proved enduring and have made anthropology accessible to a wider public.
Over the years, Mead became an in-demand lecturer, often tackling controversial social issues. She also wrote a column for Redbook magazine and was a popular interview subject on a wealth of topics.
0コメント