Margaret Mead
(1901-1978, United States)
Margaret Mead is known for the approach called Culture and Personality. This approach answers the fundamental question in cultural anthropology of, “why are we the way we are?” by explaining the relationship between childrearing customs and human behaviors. She saw an individual as a product of culture that shape the person in unique manners. These cultural traits are learned by the individual as an infant, and they are reinterpreted and reinforced as the individual goes through its stages of life. In short, the differences between people in different societies are usually cultural differences imparted in childhood. This interaction between individual and culture is dynamic and a complex process by which humans learn to be humans.
Mead’s works had much in common. They were aimed at a popular audience as well as anthropologists and they were directly related to social problems in the United States. By using cross cultural data, Mead critiqued specific aspects of American life. One of her famous works was Coming of Age in Samoa, which argued that the turmoil associated with adolescence in the United States was not found in Samoa, and that therefore this adolescent confusion was a product of culture, not biology. In Samoa, adolescence was not a stressful period because in general Samoan society lacked stress. Since the transition from childhood to adulthood was easy and smooth in that society, the young did not suffer from tribulations. The implications of this research, and the argument that adolescent turmoil was not an inherent characteristic of the human condition, gave significance to Mead’s work.
This research was also a source of controversy 55 years later. In 1983 Derek Freeman published Margaret Mead and Samoa: The making and unmasking of an anthropological myth, in which he argued that Mead systematically distorted Samoan society. Based on his own research, Freeman depicted Samoan society as full of stress and competition. Even though Mead had passed away by then, Freeman’s view raised a serious debate that split anthropologists between Mead’s side and Freeman’s.
Not only an anthropologist, Mead was also a public character at that time. Her central concern, how a human infant is transformed into an adult member of a particular society, brought her to analyze parenting and child development. Her research had some influence on Dr. Spock’s writings on infant care, and consequently for the rearing of the post-world war II baby boomers.
Sources:
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Barfield, Thomas. 1996 The Dictionary of Anthropology. Malden: Blackwell.
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Moore, Jerry D. 1997 Visions of Culture: An Introduction to Anthropological Theories and Theorists. Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press.