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Margaret Mead ( December 16 1901 - November 15 1978) was an American cultural anthropologist.
She was born in Philadelphia to a university professor father and a social activist mother. She graduated from Barnard College in 1923 and received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1929. She set out in 1925 to do her field work in Polynesia. In 1926 Mead joined the American Museum of Natural History, New York City, as assistant curator, eventually serving as its curator of ethnology from 1946 to 1969. In addition, she taught at Columbia University as adjunct professor starting in 1954. Following the example of her instructor Ruth Benedict, Mead concentrated her studies on problems of child rearing, personality, and culture. (Source: The Columbia Encyclopedia, Fifth Edition, 1993.)
Today Mead is probably most famous for the controversy surrounding her work, especially her premiere work, Coming of Age in Samoa ( 1928), based on research she conducted as a graduate student.
She died in New York on 15 November 1978, aged 76.
In the Foreword to the Coming of Age in Samoa, Mead's advisor, Franz Boas, wrote of its significance that
Boas went on to point out that at the time of publication, many Americans had begun to discuss the problems faced by young people (especially women) as they pass through adolescence. Boas felt that a study of the problems faced by adolescents in another culture would be illuminating.
Mead conducted her study among a small group of Samoans -- 600 people -- in which she got to know, lived with, observed, and interviewed (through an interpreter) the sixty-eight young women between the ages of 9 and 20. When her study 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. Moreover, Mead concluded that the passage from childhood to adulthood was not full of emotional or psychological distress, anxiety, or confusion, but on the contrary rather easy.
As Boas and Mead expected, this book upset many Westerners. The book continues to have this effect on many readers, and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (a politically conservative United States organization) recently declared Coming of Age in Samoa the "worst book of the 20th century".
Five years after Mead died in 1983Events January January 1 Beat Raaflaub became Basel Boys Choir's new conductor January 1 the ARPANET officially changes to use the Internet Protocol, creating the Internet. January 1 compulsory wearing of seat belts becomes law in the UK. January 2 The mu Derek Freeman published Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth, in which he challenged all of Mead's major findings. Freeman based his critique on his own four years of field experience in Samoa and on recent interviews with Mead's surviving informants. According to Freeman, these women denied having engaged in casual sex as young women, and claimed that they had lied to Mead.
After an initial flurry of discussion, most anthropologists concluded that the absolute truth would probably never be known. Many, however, find Freeman's critique highly questionable. First, these critics have speculated that he waited until Mead died before publishing his critique so that she would not be able to respond. Second, they pointed out that Mead's original informants were now old women, grandmothers, and had converted to ChristianityChristian cross and its many variations are widely recognized as an ancient Christian symbol. Christianity is an Abrahamic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as described in the New Testament. Although Christians generally chara. They further pointed out that Samoan culture had changed considerably in the decades following Mead's original research, that after intense missionary activity many Samoans had come to adopt the same puritanical sexual standards as the Americans who were once so shocked by Mead's book. They suggested that such women, in this new context, were unlikely to speak frankly about their adolescent behavior. (Note, however, that one of Freeman's interviewees gave her born-again faith as the reason for coming clean about her deception.) Finally, they suggested that these women would not be as forthright and honest about their sexuality when speaking to an elderly man, as they would have been speaking to a young woman. Many anthropologists also accuse Freeman of having the same ethnocentric sexual puritanism as the people Boas and Mead once shocked. In 1983, the American Anthropological AssociationAmerican Anthropological Association was founded in 1902 and claims to be, "the world's largest professional organization of individuals interested in anthropology". A number of ideologically polarized debates within the discipline of anthropology have pr passed a motion declaring Freeman's Margaret Mead and Samoa "poorly written, unscientific, irresponsible, and misleading." (Freeman 1999, cited by Pinker 2002, p. 115.)
Freeman continued to argue his case in the 1999For the album by Prince, see 1999 (album 1999 is a common year starting on Friday (see link for calendar), and was designated the International Year of Older Persons by the UN. Events Kosovo War Former child star Gary Coleman files for bankruptcy Y2K prep publication of The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis of Her Samoan Research. Judging from reader reviews on Amazon.comcom is an American electronic commerce company based in Seattle, Washington. It was one of the first major companies to sell goods over the Internet. Amazon also owns Alexa Internet, a9. com, and the Internet Movie Database (IMDb). Launched in 1995, Amazo, the book has not changed many minds in the Mead vs. Freeman controversy.
Another extremely influential book by Mead was "Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies." This became a major cornerstone of the women's liberation movement, since it claimed that females are dominant in the Tchambuli tribes of the South Sea islands, without causing any special problems. However, looking up Tchambuli (sometimes spelled Chambri or Chimbu) in the Encyclopedia Britannica and other such modern references, the reader finds that later anthropological studies do not confirm this, and that males are dominant in Melanesia, except for the belief that some female witches have special taboo powers. (See also Gender Relations in Melanesian Culture, in the Encyc. Britannica.) Also, Mead claimed that the Arapesh people were pacifists, but later studies did not confirm this.
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