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Other authors named Margaret:
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Author's popularity: 2
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Popularity: 1
Vote: | A city is a place where there is no need to wait for next week to get the answer to a question, to taste the food of any country, to find new voices to listen to and familiar ones to listen to again. |
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Vote: | A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has. |
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Vote: | Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else. |
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Vote: | And when our baby stirs and struggles to be born it compels humility: what we began is now its own. |
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Vote: | Anthropology demands the open-mindedness with which one must look and listen, record in astonishment and wonder that which one would not have been able to guess. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | As long as any adult thinks that he, like the parents and teachers of old, can become introspective, invoking his own youth to understand the youth before him, he is lost. |
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Vote: | Because of their agelong training in human relations-for that is what feminine intuition really is-women have a special contribution to make to any group enterprise. |
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Vote: | Every time we liberate a woman, we liberate a man. |
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Vote: | Fathers are biological necessities, but social accidents. |
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Vote: | For the very first time the young are seeing history being made before it is censored by their elders. |
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Vote: | Having two bathrooms ruined the capacity to co-operate. |
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Vote: | I had no reason to doubt that brains were suitable for a woman. And as I had my father's kind of mind-which was also his mother's-I learned that the mind is not sex-typed. |
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Vote: | I must admit that I personally measure success in terms of the contributions an individual makes to her or his fellow human beings. |
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Vote: | I was brought up to believe that the only thing worth doing was to add to the sum of accurate information in the world. |
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Vote: | If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse human gift will find a fitting place. |
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Vote: | Instead of being presented with stereotypes by age, sex, color, class, or religion, children must have the opportunity to learn that within each range, some people are loathsome and some are delightful. |
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Vote: | Instead of needing lots of children, we need high-quality children. |
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Vote: | It is an open question whether any behavior based on fear of eternal punishment can be regarded as ethical or should be regarded as merely cowardly. |
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Vote: | It may be necessary temporarily to accept a lesser evil, but one must never label a necessary evil as good. |
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Vote: | Life in the twentieth century is like a parachute jump: you have to get it right the first time. |
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Vote: | Man's role is uncertain, undefined, and perhaps unnecessary. |
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Vote: | Never believe that a few caring people can't change the world. For, indeed, that's all who ever have. |
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Vote: | Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has. |
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Vote: | Nobody has ever before asked the nuclear family to live all by itself in a box the way we do. With no relatives, no support, we've put it in an impossible situation. |
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Vote: | Of all the peoples whom I have studied, from city dwellers to cliff dwellers, I always find that at least 50 percent would prefer to have at least one jungle between themselves and their mothers-in-law. |
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Vote: | One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are when you don't come home at night. |
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Vote: | Our humanity rests upon a series of learned behaviors, woven together into patterns that are infinitely fragile and never directly inherited. |
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Vote: | People in America, of course, live in all sorts of fashions, because they are foreigners, or unlucky, or depraved, or without ambition; people live like that, but Americans live in white detached houses with green shutters. Rigidly, blindly, the dream takes precedence. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Prayer does not use up artificial energy, doesn't burn up any fossil fuel, doesn't pollute. Neither does song, neither does love, neither does the dance. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Sooner or later I'm going to die, but I'm not going to retire. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Thanks to television, for the first time the young are seeing history made before it is censored by their elders. |
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Vote: | The negative cautions of science are never popular. If the experimentalist would not commit himself, the social philosopher, the preacher, and the pedagogue tried the harder to give a short-cut answer. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | The pains of childbirth were altogether different from the enveloping effects of other kinds of pain. These were pains one could follow with one's mind. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | The solution to adult problems tomorrow depends on large measure upon how our children grow up today. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | The way to do fieldwork is never to come up for air until it is all over. |
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Vote: | To cherish the life of the world. |
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Vote: | We are now at a point where we must educate our children in what no one knew yesterday, and prepare our schools for what no one knows yet. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | We have nowhere else to go... this is all we have. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | We won't have a society if we destroy the environment. |
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Vote: | What people say, what people do, and what they say they do are entirely different things. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Women want mediocre men, and men are working to be as mediocre as possible. |
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Biography
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Margaret Mead (December 16, 1901 – November 15, 1978) was an American cultural anthropologist.
She was born in Philadelphia and raised in nearby Doylestown by 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.)
There has been controversy surrounding her work, especially her premiere work, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), based on research she conducted as a graduate student, but her position as a pioneering anthropologist--one who wrote clearly and vividly enough for the general public to read and learn from her works--remains firm.
She died in New York on 15 November 1978, aged 76.
Coming of Age in Samoa In the foreword to the Coming of Age in Samoa, Mead's advisor, Franz Boas, wrote of its significance thatBoas 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 as "unavoidable periods of adjustment." Boas felt that a study of the problems faced by adolescents in another culture would be illuminating.
And so, when Mead herself described the point of her research she wrote: "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 civilisation? Under different conditions does adolescence present a different picture?" She found that it did. (See pp. 6-7, American Museum of Natural History edition of 1973.)
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.
She concluded that the passage from childhood to adulthood--the period of "adolescence"--in Samoa was a smooth transition and not marked by the emotional or psychological distress, anxiety, or confusion seen in the United States. [See Perey]
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 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".
In 1983, five years after Mead had died, 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 Christianity. 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 also that one of Freeman's interviewees gave her born-again faith as her reason for admitting to the past 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 Association 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 1999 publication of The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis of Her Samoan Research.
...(more on Wikipedia)
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Margaret Mead".
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