Margaret Mead (December 16, 1901 – November 15, 1978) was an American cultural anthropologist, author and speaker, who appeared frequently in the mass media during the mid-twentieth century.
Mead's first ethnographic work, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), addressed adolescence and sexuality and catapulted her to national visibility. Her book Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935), explored gender roles and personality based on fieldwork in Papua New Guinea. Mead also conducted fieldwork with the Omaha people; in Manus, Papua New Guinea; and in Bali. She wrote Keep Your Powder Dry, an ethnographic examination of American life, in the hopes of supporting mobilization for World War II. She coordinated two comparative studies on modern cultures in the 1950s, while focusing her own work on Russia. Her later work included returns to Papua New Guinea, Bali, and Samoa for longitudinal studies. She was curator of ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History from 1946 to 1969. Mead served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1975.
According to anthropologist Paul Shankman, "Mead was anthropology's most significant public voice during the twentieth century." She is regarded as a founding figure in public anthropology and visual anthropology. Her ethnography of the South Pacific and Melanesia has been subject to vigorous academic debate. From the 1920s to the 1960s, her fieldwork was widely discussed in the press and she wrote a monthly column in Redbook magazine co-authored with partner Rhoda Métraux. Her reports detailing the attitudes towards sex in South Pacific and Southeast Asian traditional cultures influenced the 1960s sexual revolution. Mead's association with cultural relativism and the sexual revolution led to sharp criticism from conservatives.
Margaret Mead, the first of five children, was born in Philadelphia but raised in nearby Doylestown, Pennsylvania. Her father, Edward Sherwood Mead, was a professor of finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and her mother, Emily (née Fogg) Mead, was a sociologist who studied Italian immigrants. Her sister Katharine (1906–1907) died at the age of nine months. That was a traumatic event for Mead, who had named the girl, and thoughts of her lost sister permeated her daydreams for many years.
Her family moved frequently and so her early education was directed by her grandmother. From 1902-1912, they lived in Hammonton, New Jersey, where her mother conducted her dissertation research on Italian immigrants in the area. From 1912-1926, her family owned the Longland farm, and Margaret was enrolled at Buckingham Friends School in Lahaska, Pennsylvania. Born into a family of various religious outlooks, she searched for a form of religion that gave an expression of the faith with which she had been formally acquainted, Christianity. In doing so, she found the rituals of the Episcopal Church to fit the expression of religion she was seeking. Mead studied one year, 1919, at DePauw University, then transferred to Barnard College.
Mead earned her bachelor's degree from Barnard in 1923, began studying with professors Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict at Columbia University, and earned her master's degree in 1924. Mead set out in 1925 to do fieldwork in Samoa. In 1926, she joined the American Museum of Natural History, New York City, as assistant curator. She earned her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1929.
As an ethnographer, Mead's primary research method was participant observation through living in communities for extended periods of time. Beginning with her first field study in Samoa, she often concentrated her research on childhood, adolescence, sexuality, and kinship. In examining these topics, Mead created multivocal ethnographies that considered the lives of women and men, girls and boys alongside one another.
During fieldwork with Gregory Bateson in Bali in the 1930s, she used still and motion photography extensively, creating one of the earliest film archives of anthropological research. Mead and Bateson's subsequent culture-at-a-distance work also involved studying films to characterize foreign cultures. These innovations led to her being called the "mother" of visual anthropology.
During World War II, Mead turned her attention to studying her own American culture and to conducting studies of national character, which she envisioned as being important both for the war effort and for an internationalist future after the war. She organized, along with Ruth Benedict until her death in 1948, the Columbia University project Research in Contemporary Culture. These studies involved reviewing cultural materials and interviewing nationals of the culture under study, methods more accessible under wartime conditions. The method and numerous studies conducted under it were published in The Study of Culture at a Distance (1953), edited by Mead and Rhoda Métraux.
Mead was also concerned with studying social change and modernization, particularly in the context of prior research. She conducted return field visits of her own and oriented new ethnographers in Bali, Manus, the Admiralty Islands, New Guinea, and Samoa.
Samoa: Coming of Age in Samoa (1928)
Mead's first ethnographic work described the life of Samoan girls and women on the island of Taʻū in the Manu'a Archipelago of American Samoa in 1926. The book includes analyses of how children were raised and educated, household structure, sex relations, dance, development of personality, conflict, and how women matured into old age. Mead explicitly sought to contrast adolescence in Samoa with that in America, which she characterized as difficult, constrained, and awkward.
Coming of Age tackled the question of nature versus nurture, whether adolescence and its associated developments were a difficult biological transition for all humans or whether they were cultural processes shaped in particular societies. In her introduction, Mead notes that American and European psychologists, educators, and philosophers have argued that the turmoil of adolescence in their societies is driven by biology. Her book takes a skeptical approach to the idea that The physical changes which are going on in the bodies of your boys and girls have their definite psychological accompaniments. You can no more evade one than you can the other your daughter's body changes from the body of a child to the body of a woman, so inevitably will her spirit change, and that stormily. Mead instead believed childhood, adolescence, gender, and sex relations were largely driven by cultural practices and expressions. By conducting fieldwork in what she called a "simpler society" and among "primitive groups who have had thousands of years of historical development along completely different lines from our own," she sought to find a comparative case to answer the questions: "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?"
Much of Mead's text is devoted to describing the life course of Samoans, with a particular emphasis on girls and women. Mead stated that the community ignores both boys and girls until age 15 or 16, giving them little social standing but also effectively greater freedom. Mead also found that marriage is regarded as a social and economic arrangement in which wealth, rank, and job skills of the husband and wife are taken into consideration.
Aside from marriage, Mead identified two types of sex relations: love affairs among unmarried young people and adultery. Mead describes the psychology of the individual Samoan as being simpler, more honest, and less driven by sexual neuroses than the West. She describes Samoans as being much more comfortable with issues such as menstruation and more casual about non-monogamous sexual relations. Mead described Samoan youth as often having free, experimental, and open sexual relationships, including homosexual relationships, which was at odds with mainstream American norms around sexuality. The exceptions to these practices include women married to chiefs and young women who hold the title of taupo, a ceremonial princess, whose virginity was required.