Mead, Margaret

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The most celebrated anthropologist of the twentieth century, Margaret Mead (1901–1978) was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on December 16, and died in New York City on November 15. Her career began with a shift from psychology when Ruth Benedict (1887–1948) and Franz Boas (1858–1942), two of her teachers at Columbia, attracted her with Benedict's challenge that they had "nothing to offer but an opportunity to do work that matters." Bridging these two fields, Mead became a founder of the culture and personality school of anthropology; she was deeply committed to making anthropological knowledge matter—especially in a world of rapid scientific and technological change.

Mead's career took off when she went to Samoa at age twenty-three to study adolescent girls and to explore whether the emotional strains of adolescence were uniform across cultures or varied depending on socialization and experience. This led to her first book, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), a bestseller that gave many readers their first awareness that their assumptions about human behavior might not always apply. Although this book was caricatured and attacked by the anthropologist Derek Freeman in 1983, twenty years of debate has affirmed her descriptions, showing that Freeman's insistence on the biological determination of variations observed fifty years after Mead's work in other areas of Samoa supplemented but could not refute Mead's basic emphasis on learned—and therefore potentially variable—behavior.

Mead's subsequent fieldwork up until World War II took her to four different New Guinea societies and to the Omaha tribe of Nebraska with her second husband, Reo Fortune, and then to Bali and another New Guinea society, the Iatmul, with her third husband, the anthropologist and ecological thinker Gregory Bateson. During this period, she focused primarily on child rearing and personality development and secondarily on gender differences, where she pioneered the comparative study of gender roles. Her work appeared both in further trade books such as Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935) and in detailed technical monographs such as The Mountain Arapesh (published in three parts, 1938–1949), establishing the pattern of applying her findings in the field to the dilemmas of industrialized society, and writing in several genres for different audiences. She also innovated in methodology, beginning the use of projective tests in fieldwork and, with Bateson, invented a new technique of visual anthropology exemplified in Balinese Character (1942). Her fieldwork archives are available at the Library of Congress.

World War II led Mead and other social scientists to focus on industrialized nations as part of the war effort. Mead collaborated with Benedict in developing the application of anthropology to contemporary cultures made inaccessible by war and political conflict, primarily through the Columbia University Research in Contemporary Cultures project. This methodology, described in The Study of Culture at a Distance (1953), which led to multiple publications by many authors, involved the creation of interdisciplinary and intercultural teams not unlike contemporary focus groups, and the analysis of literary and artistic materials in ways that anticipated contemporary cultural studies. Mead founded the Institute for Intercultural Studies in New York in 1944 to house these projects and a variety of later activities.

The war had precipitated rapid and often devastating culture change, and Mead's postwar focus was on change, particularly the possibilities of purposive culture change. In 1953 she returned to Pere, a Manus village in the Admiralty Islands (now part of Papua New Guinea) she had studied with Fortune, to analyze the effects of the war on a community with little previous outside contact. In Manus, she found that a charismatic leader had promoted the choice of integration into the outside world and the villagers were positive about change rather than demoralized by it; that rapid change is sometimes preferable to gradual change; and that children could play a key transformative role (Mead 1956). Mead was one of those who introduced the concept of "culture" into the thinking of readers, with profound intellectual and ethical results, but her emphasis on purposive culture change reaffirmed ethical issues avoided by some cultural relativists, and she insisted that many human institutions, such as those of warfare and racism, be seen as human inventions that could be modified or replaced, rather than as "natural" and unavoidable. Her understanding of the role of individuals and groups in the remaking of Manus society was key to her book Continuities in Cultural Evolution (1964), best summarized in her often quoted phrase, "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world."

Mead believed that the understanding of cultural diversity offered a new kind of freedom to human societies, and she worked tirelessly and skillfully to disseminate anthropological ideas, lectured widely, published profusely, and was quick to understand the possibilities of new media. Unlike many academics, she saw communicating to the public as a professional obligation of comparable intellectual integrity to her more narrow professional writing. She also taught for many years at Columbia University and the New School for Social Research. At the same time, Mead worked with colleagues in other fields who kept her close to new developments in biology and neurology. She was an active member of the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics and on Group Process in the postwar period and of the World Federation for Mental Health. She was associated for more than fifty years with the American Museum of Natural History, serving in her later years as its Curator of Ethnology. She served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Anthropological Association, and was a founder of the Scientists' Institute for Public Information. She received twenty-eight honorary degrees, more than forty academic and scientific awards, and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom following her death in 1978.

Cultural Lag;; Modernization.

Banner, Lois W. (2003). Intertwined Lives: Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Their Circle. New York: Knopf. A scholarly examination of Mead's early personal and professional relationships.

Bateson, Mary Catherine. (1984). With a Daughter's Eye: A Memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. New York: Harper Collins.

Côté, James E. (1994). Adolescent Storm and Stress: An Evaluation of the Mead/Freeman Controversy. Hillsdale, NJ: L. Erlbaum. One of many scholarly refutations of the Freeman attacks.

Freeman, Derek (1983). Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Mead, Margaret. (1928 [2001]). Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization. New York: Perennial Classics.

Mead, Margaret. (1934 [2001]). Kinship in the Admiralty Islands. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.

Mead, Margaret. (1935 [2001]). Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies. New York: HarperCollins.

Mead, Margaret. (1938 [2002]). The Mountain Arapesh, 2 Vol. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.

Mead, Margaret. (1942 [2000]). And Keep Your Powder Dry: An Anthropologist Looks at America. New York: Berghahn Books. Written as a contribution to the war effort.

Mead, Margaret. (1956 [2001]). New Lives for Old: Cultural Transformation—Manus, 1928–1953. New York: Perennial.

Mead, Margaret. (1964 [1999]). Continuities in Cultural Evolution. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Includes Mead's theoretical discussion of the role of small groups in cultural change.

Mead, Margaret. (1972 [1995]). Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years. New York: Kodansha. Mead's partial autobiography.

Mead, Margaret. (2004). The World Ahead: An Anthropologist Anticipates the Future, ed. Robert B. Textor. New York: Berghahn Books. A selection of Mead's writings about the future.

Mead, Margaret, and Gregory Bateson. (1942). Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis. New York: New York Academy of Sciences.

Mead, Margaret, and Rhoda Metraux, eds. (1953 [2000]). The Study of Culture at a Distance. New York: Berghahn Books. A manual developed from research in contemporary cultures.

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