Margaret Mead

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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 1960s and the 1970s.<ref name="libraryofcongress">Template:Cite web</ref>

Mead's first ethnographic work, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), addressed adolescence and sexuality and catapulted her to national visibility. Her next work, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935), explored gender roles and personality based on fieldwork in Papua New Guinea. Mead later 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.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> 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.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Mead was a communicator of anthropology in modern American and Western culture and was often controversial as an academic.<ref name="SciAmeri">Template:Cite web</ref> Her reports detailing the attitudes towards sex in South Pacific and Southeast Asian traditional cultures influenced the 1960s sexual revolution.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> She was a proponent of broadening sexual conventions within the context of Western cultural traditions.

Early life and education

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,<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> was a sociologist who studied Italian immigrants.<ref name="unesco bio">Template:Cite web</ref> 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.<ref name="Howard">Howard, Jane. (1984). Margaret Mead: A Life, New York: Simon and Schuster.</ref>

Her family moved frequently and so her early education was directed by her grandmother until, at age 11, she was enrolled by her family at Buckingham Friends School in Lahaska, Pennsylvania.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Her family owned the Longland farm from 1912 to 1926.<ref name="arch">Template:Cite web Note: This includes Template:Cite web</ref> 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.<ref name="Mead">Template:Harvnb</ref> In doing so, she found the rituals of the Episcopal Church to fit the expression of religion she was seeking.<ref name="Mead" /> 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.<ref>Template:Cite encyclopedia</ref> Mead set out in 1925 to do fieldwork in Samoa.<ref>Mead 1977</ref> In 1926, she joined the American Museum of Natural History, New York City, as assistant curator.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1929.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Anthropological work

Methods

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.<ref name=":2">Template:Cite journal</ref>Template:Reference page

During fieldwork with Gregory Bateson in Bal 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.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

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.<ref name=":1">Template:Cite journal</ref> 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.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

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.<ref name=":1" />

Research fieldwork

Ink on paper drawing by artist I Ketut Ngéndon depicting anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson leaving Bali and heading for Papua New Guinea
Margaret Mead Field Visits, 1925–1977<ref>Template:Cite document</ref>
Year Field Visit
1925-1926 American Samoa (study of adolescent girls)
1928-1929 Manus, Admiralty Islands (with Reo Fortune, study of young children)
1930 Omaha (Umonhon) Tribe, Nebraska
1931-1933 New Guinea (study of Arapesh, Biwat, and Chambri people)
1936-1939 Bali and New Guinea (study of Iatmul people)
1953 Manus, Admiralty Islands (with Theodore and Lenora Schwartz)
1957-1958 Bali (with Ken Heyman)
1964-1965 Manus, Admiralty Islands
1967 Manus, Admiralty Islands; New Guinea
1971 Manus, Admiralty Islands; New Guinea and American Samoa
1973 Hoskins Bay, New Britain (study of Arapesh people)
1975 Manus, Admiralty Islands
1977 Bali

Coming of Age in Samoa (1928)

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Samoan girl, Template:Circa 1896

Mead's first ethnographic work described the life of Samoan girls and women on the island of Tau in the Manu'a Archipelago in 1926.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> The book includes analyses of how children were raised and educated, 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. In the foreword to Coming of Age in Samoa, Mead's advisor, Franz Boas, wrote of the book's significance:<ref>Franz Boas, "Preface" in Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa</ref>

Courtesy, modesty, good manners, conformity to definite ethical standards are universal, but what constitutes courtesy, modesty, very good manners, and definite ethical standards is not universal. It is instructive to know that standards differ in the most unexpected ways.

In this way, the book 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. Mead believed childhood, adolescence, gender, and sex relations were largely driven by cultural practices and expressions.

Mead's findings suggested that the community ignores both boys and girls until they are about 15 or 16. Before then, children have little social standing within the community. 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 and adultery. 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. 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.

In 1970, National Educational Television produced a documentary in commemoration of the 40th anniversary Mead's first expedition to New Guinea. Through the eyes of Mead on her final visit to the village of Peri, the film records how the role of the anthropologist has changed in the forty years since 1928.<ref>Template:Citation</ref>

Mead, Template:Circa 1950

Criticism by Derek Freeman

After her death, Mead's Samoan research was criticized by the anthropologist Derek Freeman, who published a book arguing against many of Mead's conclusions in Coming of Age in Samoa.<ref>Derek Freeman (1983). Margaret Mead and Samoa. Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press. Template:ISBN.</ref> Freeman argued that Mead had misunderstood Samoan culture when she argued that Samoan culture did not place many restrictions on youths' sexual explorations. Freeman argued instead that Samoan culture prized female chastity and virginity and that Mead had been misled by her female Samoan informants. Freeman found that the Samoan islanders whom Mead had depicted in such utopian terms were intensely competitive and had murder and rape rates higher than those in the United States. Furthermore, the men were intensely sexually jealous, which contrasted sharply with Mead's depiction of "free love" among the Samoans.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

Freeman's book was controversial in its turn and was met with considerable backlash and harsh criticism from the anthropology community, but it was received enthusiastically by communities of scientists who believed that sexual mores were more or less universal across cultures.<ref>Template:Cite video</ref><ref>Template:Cite video</ref> Later in 1983, a special session of Mead's supporters in the American Anthropological Association (to which Freeman was not invited) declared it to be "poorly written, unscientific, irresponsible and misleading."<ref name="shawnyt">Template:Cite news</ref> Some anthropologists who studied Samoan culture argued in favor of Freeman's findings and contradicted those of Mead, but others argued that Freeman's work did not invalidate Mead's work because Samoan culture had been changed by the integration of Christianity in the decades between Mead's and Freeman's fieldwork periods.<ref>Template:Cite video</ref>

Eleanor Leacock traveled to Samoa in 1985 and undertook research among the youth living in urban areas. The research results indicate that the assertions of Derek Freeman were seriously flawed. Leacock pointed out that Mead's famous Samoan fieldwork was undertaken on an outer island that had not been colonialized. Freeman, meanwhile, had undertaken fieldwork in an urban slum plagued by drug abuse, structural unemployment, and gang violence.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

Mead was careful to shield the identity of all her subjects for confidentiality, but Freeman found and interviewed one of her original participants, and Freeman reported that she admitted to having willfully misled Mead. She said that she and her friends were having fun with Mead and telling her stories.<ref>Template:Cite video</ref>

In 1996, the author Martin Orans examined Mead's notes preserved at the Library of Congress and credits her for leaving all of her recorded data available to the general public. Orans points out that Freeman's basic criticisms, that Mead was duped by ceremonial virgin Fa'apua'a Fa'amu, who later swore to Freeman that she had played a joke on Mead, were equivocal for several reasons. Mead was well aware of the forms and frequency of Samoan joking, she provided a careful account of the sexual restrictions on ceremonial virgins that corresponds to Fa'apua'a Fa'auma'a's account to Freeman, and Mead's notes make clear that she had reached her conclusions about Samoan sexuality before meeting Fa'apua'a Fa'amu. Orans points out that Mead's data support several different conclusions and that Mead's conclusions hinge on an interpretive, rather than positivist, approach to culture. Orans went on to point out concerning Mead's work elsewhere that her own notes do not support her published conclusive claims. Evaluating Mead's work in Samoa from a positivist stance, Orans's assessment of the controversy was that Mead did not formulate her research agenda in scientific terms and that "her work may properly be damned with the harshest scientific criticism of all, that it is 'not even wrong'."<ref name="orans">Orans, Martin (1996), Not Even Wrong: Margaret Mead, Derek Freeman, and the Samoans.</ref>Template:Page needed

On the whole, anthropologists have rejected the notion that Mead's conclusions rested on the validity of a single interview with a single person and find instead that Mead based her conclusions on the sum of her observations and interviews during her time in Samoa and that the status of the single interview did not falsify her work.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Others such as Orans maintained that even though Freeman's critique was invalid, Mead's study was not sufficiently scientifically rigorous to support the conclusions she drew.<ref name="orans" />Template:Page needed

In 1999, Freeman published another book, The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis of Her Samoan Research, including previously unavailable material. In his obituary in The New York Times, John Shaw stated that Freeman's thesis, though upsetting many, had by the time of his death generally gained widespread acceptance.<ref name="shawnyt" /> Recent work has nonetheless challenged Freeman's critique.<ref>Paul Shankman,[The Trashing of Margaret Mead: Anatomy of an Anthropological Controversy,] University of Wisconsin Press, 2009 esp. pp. 47–71.</ref> A frequent criticism of Freeman is that he regularly misrepresented Mead's research and views.<ref name="ReferenceA">Shankman, Paul 2009 The Trashing of Margaret Mead: Anatomy of an Anthropological Controversy. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press</ref>Template:Page needed<ref>See Appell 1984, Brady 1991, Feinberg 1988, Leacock 1988, Levy 1984, Marshall 1993, Nardi 1984, Patience and Smith 1986, Paxman 1988, Scheper-Hughes 1984, Shankman 1996, Young and Juan 1985</ref> In a 2009 evaluation of the debate, anthropologist Paul Shankman concluded:<ref name="ReferenceA"/>

There is now a large body of criticism of Freeman's work from a number of perspectives in which Mead, Samoa, and anthropology appear in a very different light than they do in Freeman's work. Indeed, the immense significance that Freeman gave his critique looks like 'much ado about nothing' to many of his critics.

While nurture-oriented anthropologists are more inclined to agree with Mead's conclusions, some non-anthropologists who take a nature-oriented approach follow Freeman's lead, such as Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, biologist Richard Dawkins, evolutionary psychologist David Buss, science writer Matt Ridley, classicist Mary Lefkowitz<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>Template:Page needed.

In her 2015 book Galileo's Middle Finger, Alice Dreger argues that Freeman's accusations were unfounded and misleading. A detailed review of the controversy by Paul Shankman, published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2009, supports the contention that Mead's research was essentially correct and concludes that Freeman cherry-picked his data and misrepresented both Mead and Samoan culture.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>Template:Page needed<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

A survey of 301 anthropology faculty in the United States in 2016 had two thirds agreeing with a statement that Mead "romanticizes the sexual freedom of Samoan adolescents" and half agreeing that it was ideologically motivated.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

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Other research areas

In 1926, there was much debate about race and intelligence. Mead felt the methodologies involved in the experimental psychology research supporting arguments of racial superiority in intelligence were substantially flawed. In "The Methodology of Racial Testing: Its Significance for Sociology," Mead proposes that there are three problems with testing for racial differences in intelligence. First, there are concerns with the ability to validly equate one's test score with what Mead refers to as racial admixture or how much Negro or Indian blood an individual possesses. She also considers whether that information is relevant when interpreting IQ scores. Mead remarks that a genealogical method could be considered valid if it could be "subjected to extensive verification." In addition, the experiment would need a steady control group to establish whether racial admixture was actually affecting intelligence scores. Next, Mead argues that it is difficult to measure the effect that social status has on the results of a person's intelligence test. She meant that environment (family structure, socioeconomic status, and exposure to language, etc.) has too much influence on an individual to attribute inferior scores solely to a physical characteristic such as race. Then, Mead adds that language barriers sometimes create the biggest problem of all. Similarly, Stephen J. Gould finds three main problems with intelligence testing in his 1981 book The Mismeasure of Man that relate to Mead's view of the problem of determining whether there are racial differences in intelligence.<ref>Mead, Margaret, "The Methodology of Racial Testing: Its Significance for Sociology" American Journal of Sociology 31, no. 5 (March 1926): 657–667.</ref><ref>Gould, Stephen J. The Mismeasure of Man, New York City: W. W. Norton & Company, 1981.</ref>

In 1929, Mead and Fortune visited Manus, now the northernmost province of Papua New Guinea, and traveled there by boat from Rabaul. She amply describes her stay there in her autobiography, and it is mentioned in her 1984 biography by Jane Howard. On Manus, she studied the Manus people of the south coast village of Peri. "Over the next five decades Mead would come back oftener to Peri than to any other field site of her career.'<ref name="Howard" /><ref> Jane Howard, Margaret Mead: A Life (1984), New York: Simon and Schuster.</ref>Template:Rp

Mead has been credited with persuading the American Jewish Committee to sponsor a project to study European Jewish villages, shtetls, in which a team of researchers would conduct mass interviews with Jewish immigrants living in New York City. The resulting book, widely cited for decades, allegedly created the Jewish mother stereotype, a mother intensely loving but controlling to the point of smothering and engendering guilt in her children through the suffering she professed to undertake for their sakes.<ref>"The Jewish Mother Template:Webarchive", Slate, June 13, 2007, p. 3</ref>

Mead worked for the RAND Corporation, a US Air Force military-funded private research organization, from 1948 to 1950 to study Russian culture and attitudes toward authority.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> File:Trance and Dance in Bali.webm As an Anglican Christian, Mead played a considerable part in the drafting of the 1979 American Episcopal Book of Common Prayer.<ref name="Howard"/>Template:Rp

Personal life

Dr. Margaret Mead, Australia, September 1951

Mead was married three times. After a six-year engagement,<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> she married her first husband (1923–1928), Luther Cressman, an American theology student who later became an anthropologist. Before departing for Samoa in 1925, Mead had a short affair with the linguist Edward Sapir, a close friend of her instructor Ruth Benedict. However, Sapir's conservative stances about marriage and women's roles were unacceptable to Mead, and as Mead left to do field work in Samoa, they separated permanently. Mead received news of Sapir's remarriage while she was living in Samoa. There, she later burned their correspondence on a beach.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Between 1925 and 1926, she was in Samoa from where on the return boat she met Reo Fortune, a New Zealander headed to Cambridge, England, to study psychology.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> They were married in 1928, after Mead's divorce from Cressman. Mead dismissively characterized her union with her first husband as "my student marriage" in her 1972 autobiography Blackberry Winter, a sobriquet with which Cressman took vigorous issue. Mead's third and longest-lasting marriage (1936–1950) was to the British anthropologist Gregory Bateson with whom she had a daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson, who would also become an anthropologist. She readily acknowledged that Bateson was the husband she loved the most. She was devastated when he left her and remained his loving friend ever afterward. She kept his photograph by her bedside wherever she traveled, including beside her hospital deathbed.<ref name="Howard" /> Template:Rp

Mead also had an exceptionally close relationship with Ruth Benedict, one of her instructors. In her memoir about her parents, With a Daughter's Eye, Mary Catherine Bateson strongly implies that the relationship between Benedict and Mead was partly sexual.<ref name="MCBateson">Bateson 1984; Lapsley 1999.</ref>Template:Rp In her biography of the two women, Lois Banner writes that Mead and Benedict had become lovers by late 1924 and that Benedict then "characterize[d] Mead [as] her daughter and protégée in anthropology, her partner, lover, and best friend."<ref name="Banner">Template:Cite book</ref>Template:Reference page Mead and Benedict lived together for two months in summer 1928 and shared a Washington, DC, house during World War II as Mead commuted from her home in New York City to work for the federal government.<ref name="Banner" />Template:Reference page

She spent her last years in a close personal and professional collaboration with the anthropologist Rhoda Metraux. Métraux had worked with Mead when the latter headed the National Research Council's Committee on Food Habits during World War II. By 1947 or 1948, they were romantically involved.<ref name=":3" />Template:Rp Mead and Métraux shared homes—in Greenwich Village (1955–66) and on Central Park West (1966–78)—until Mead's death.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Letters between the two published in 2006 with the permission of Mead's daughter<ref>Caffey and Francis 2006.</ref> clearly express a romantic relationship.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Privately and at times in her scholarship, Mead espoused free-love, drawing inspiration from Havelock Ellis's The Art of Love and Edward Carpenter's Love's Coming of Age. Her marriage to Cressman involved agreement to divorce on demand and the freedom for both parties to have affairs.<ref name="Banner" /> As quoted by Sapir, Mead stated, "It would be an insult to both me and my husband to expect marital fidelity on the part of either of us."<ref name="Howard1984" /><ref>Template:Cite book</ref>Template:Rp In 1926, Mead described her "belief that one can love several people and that demonstrative affection has its place in different types of relationship."<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>Template:Reference page Her marriage to Bateson was likewise an open one.<ref>"These were not just tolerated affairs, but elements in what today would be described as an open practice of polyamory. Sexual jealousy was simplyn to something Margaret Mead trafficked in." Template:Cite book</ref> Biographer Jane Howard attributes to a close friend of Mead the observation that Mead "fell in love with women's souls and men's bodies. She was spiritually homosexual, psychologically bisexual, and physically heterosexual. She had affairs with both men and women—though never with two men or two women at the same time."<ref name="Howard1984" />Template:Rp

Mead never openly identified herself as lesbian or bisexual. In correspondence, Mead described her self as a "mixed type" with attractions to both men and women, and in a 1928 letter to Benedict described seeking a "perfect balance" between her "two loves" to Benedict and her husband Fortune.<ref name="Banner" />Template:Rp In the public conversation that became known as "A Rap on Race," Mead rejected James Baldwin's invitation to describe herself as "an exile" like him, a suggestion that biographer Benjamin Breen and scholar Jean Walton have described as a chance to reveal her bisexuality.<ref name=":3">Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Template:Cite book</ref>Template:Rp In her writings, she proposed that it is to be expected that an individual's sexual orientation may evolve throughout life.<ref name="MCBateson" /> Speaking at a public conference in 1974, Mead suggested that youthful homosexuality, followed by heterosexuality in middle adulthood, and then by late life homosexuality would be ideal for society.<ref name="Howard1984" />Template:Rp In a Redbook column, co-authored with Metraux, Mead wrote, "What is new is not bisexuality, but rather the widening of our awareness and acceptance of human capacities for sexual love."<ref name="Howard1984" />Template:Rp

Mead's pediatrician was Benjamin Spock,<ref name="libraryofcongress" /> whose subsequent writings on child rearing incorporated some of Mead's own practices and beliefs acquired from her ethnological field observations which she shared with him; in particular, breastfeeding on the baby's demand, rather than by a schedule.<ref>Moore 2004: 105.</ref>

Margaret Mead (1972)

Mead had two sisters, Elizabeth and Priscilla, and a brother, Richard. Elizabeth Mead (1909–1983), an artist and teacher, married the cartoonist William Steig, and Priscilla Mead (1911–1959) married the author Leo Rosten.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Mead's brother, Richard, was a professor. Mead was also the aunt of Jeremy Steig.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

Career and later life

Mead at New York Academy of Sciences, 1968

During World War II, Mead along with other social scientists like Gregory Bateson and Ruth Benedict, took on several different responsibilities. In 1940, Mead joined the Committee for National Morale.<ref name=":0">Template:Cite journal</ref> In 1941, she also contributed to an essay that was released in the Applied Anthropology, which created strategies to help produce propaganda with the intent of raising national morale.<ref name=":0" /> In 1942, Mead served as the executive director of the Committee on Food Habits of the National Research Council, which served to gather data on American citizens ability to get food and their overall diet during the war.<ref name=":0" /> During World War II, Mead also served on the Institute for Intercultural Studies (IIS), whose prime objective was to research the “national character” of the Axis powers to try and foster peace between the two sides.<ref name=":0" /> She was curator of ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History from 1946 to 1969. She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1948,<ref name="AAAS">Template:Cite web</ref> the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1975,<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> and the American Philosophical Society in 1977.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> She taught at The New School and Columbia University, where she was an adjunct professor from 1954 to 1978 and a professor of anthropology and chair of the Division of Social Sciences at Fordham University's Lincoln Center campus from 1968 to 1970, founding their anthropology department. In 1970, she joined the faculty of the University of Rhode Island as a Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Anthropology.<ref>p. 94 in: Wheaton, J., and R. Vangermeersch, 1999. University of Rhode Island. Arcadia Publishing Company, Charleston, SC. Template:ISBN Web version.</ref>

Following Ruth Benedict's example, Mead focused her research on problems of child rearing, personality, and culture.<ref>The Columbia Encyclopedia, Fifth Edition, 1993.</ref> She served as president of the Society for Applied Anthropology in 1950<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> and of the American Anthropological Association in 1960. In the mid-1960s, Mead joined forces with the communications theorist Rudolf Modley in jointly establishing an organization called Glyphs Inc., whose goal was to create a universal graphic symbol language to be understood by any members of culture, no matter how "primitive."<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> In the 1960s, Mead served as the Vice President of the New York Academy of Sciences.<ref name="NYAS History">Template:Cite journal</ref> She held various positions in the American Association for the Advancement of Science, notably president in 1975 and chair of the executive committee of the board of directors in 1976.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> She was a recognizable figure in academia and usually wore a distinctive cape and carried a walking stick.<ref name="libraryofcongress" />

Mead was a key participant in the Macy conferences on cybernetics and an editor of their proceedings.<ref>Foerster H. von, Mead M. & Teuber H. L. (1953) A note from the editors. In: Cybernetics: Circular causal and feedback mechanisms in biological and social systems, transactions of the eighth conference, March 15–16, 1951. Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, New York: xi–xx. https://cepa.info/2709</ref> Mead's address to the inaugural conference of the American Society for Cybernetics was instrumental in the development of second-order cybernetics.<ref>Mead, M. (1968). The cybernetics of cybernetics. In H. von Foerster, J. D. White, L. J. Peterson, & J. K. Russell (Eds.), Purposive Systems (pp. 1–11). Spartan Books.</ref>

Mead was featured on two record albums published by Folkways Records. The first, released in 1959, An Interview With Margaret Mead, explored the topics of morals and anthropology. In 1971, she was included in a compilation of talks by prominent women, But the Women Rose, Vol. 2: Voices of Women in American History.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

She is credited with the pluralization of the term "semiotics".<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

In 1948 Mead was quoted in News Chronicle as supporting the deployment of Iban mercenaries to the Malayan Emergency, arguing that using Ibans (Dyaks) who enjoyed headhunting was no worse than deploying white troops who had been taught that killing was wrong.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

In later life, Mead was a mentor to many young anthropologists and sociologists, including Jean Houston, author Gail Sheehy,<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> John Langston Gwaltney,<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> Roger Sandall,<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> filmmaker Timothy Asch,<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> and anthropologist Susan C. Scrimshaw, who later received the 1985 Margaret Mead Award for her research on cultural factors affecting public health delivery.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref name="Howard" />Template:Rp

In 1972, Mead was one of the two rapporteurs from NGOs to the UN Conference on the Human Environment. In 1976, she was a key participant at UN Habitat I, the first UN forum on human settlements.

Mead died of pancreatic cancer on November 15, 1978, and is buried at Trinity Episcopal Church Cemetery, Buckingham, Pennsylvania.<ref>Wilson, Scott. Resting Places: The Burial Sites of More Than 14,000 Famous Persons, 3d ed.: 2 (Kindle Location 31891). McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers. Kindle Edition.</ref>

Legacy

Posthumous honors

The American Museum of Natural History hosts an annual Margaret Mead Film Festival, featuring documentary films, including but not limited to those about scientific and ethnographic topics.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> It was first held in 1976, in celebration of Mead's 75th birthday. As of 2025, it was described as the "longest running documentary showcase in the United States."<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

In 1976, Mead was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.<ref>National Women's Hall of Fame, Margaret Mead</ref>

On January 19, 1979, U.S. President Jimmy Carter announced that he was awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously to Mead. UN Ambassador Andrew Young presented the award to Mead's daughter at a special program honoring her contributions that was sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History, where she spent many years of her career. The citation read:<ref name="medal">Template:Cite web</ref>

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The Margaret Mead Award is awarded in her honor jointly by the Society for Applied Anthropology and the American Anthropological Association, for significant works in communicating anthropology to the general public.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

In addition, there are several schools named after Mead in the United States: a junior high school in Elk Grove Village, Illinois,<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> an elementary school in Sammamish, Washington<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> and another in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, New York.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

In the 1967 musical Hair, her name is given to a transvestite "tourist" disturbing the show with the song "My Conviction."<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

In 1979, the Supersisters trading card set was produced and distributed; one of the cards featured Mead's name and picture.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

The U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp of face value 32¢ on May 28, 1998, including Mead as part of 1920s in the Celebrate the Century stamp sheet series.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

The 2014 novel Euphoria<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> by Lily King is a fictionalized account of Mead's love/marital relationships with fellow anthropologists Reo Fortune and Gregory Bateson in New Guinea before World War II.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

Publications

Template:Incomplete list Note: See also Margaret Mead: The Complete Bibliography 1925–1975, Joan Gordan, ed., The Hague: Mouton.

As a sole author

  • Coming of Age in Samoa (1928)
  • Growing Up in New Guinea (1930)
  • The Changing Culture of an Indian Tribe (1932)<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
  • Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935)<ref name="Mead 2003">Template:Cite book</ref>
  • And Keep Your Powder Dry: An Anthropologist Looks at America (1942)
  • Male and Female (1949)
  • New Lives for Old: Cultural Transformation in Manus, 1928–1953 (1956)
  • People and Places (1959; a book for young readers)
  • Continuities in Cultural Evolution (1964)
  • Culture and Commitment (1970)
  • The Mountain Arapesh: Stream of Events in Alitoa (1971)
  • Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years (1972; autobiography)<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

As editor or coauthor

  • Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis, with Gregory Bateson, 1942, New York Academy of Sciences.
  • Soviet Attitudes Toward Authority (1951)
  • Cultural Patterns and Technical Change, editor (1953)
  • Primitive Heritage: An Anthropological Anthology, edited with Nicholas Calas (1953)
  • An Anthropologist at Work, editor (1959, reprinted 1966; a volume of Ruth Benedict's writings)
  • The Study of Culture at a Distance, edited with Rhoda Metraux, 1953
  • Themes in French Culture, with Rhoda Metraux, 1954
  • The Wagon and the Star: A Study of American Community Initiative co-authored with Muriel Whitbeck Brown, 1966
  • A Rap on Race, with James Baldwin, 1971
  • A Way of Seeing, with Rhoda Metraux, 1975

See also

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References

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Sources

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