Paper 1: Margaret Mead
"I have spent most of my life studying the lives of other peoples -- faraway peoples -- so that Americans might better understand themselves." (Snider). This quote explains much about the anthropologist Margaret Mead. "As a scientist, an explorer, a writer, and a teacher, Mead brought the serious work of Anthropology into the public consciousness." (http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/expeditions/treasure _fossil/ Treasures/Margaret_Mead/mead.html?cults). She was a world-renowned anthropologist who brought much to the scientific community. Mead was born in December of 1901 into a Quaker family of a social science background with her father being an economics professor and her mother a sociologist. Margaret began her career in the fields of psychology and sociology with a Bachelors degree at Barnard College in New York. She studied under the great anthropologist Franz Boaz while at Barnard, and later went on to get her PhD from Columbia University. "For Mead, anthropology was an urgent calling, a way to bring new understandings of human behavior to bear on the future."
St. Margaret's Church
Margaret Mead, American cultural anthropologist
English: Title page of book Coming of Age in Samoa...(http://www.mead2001.org/ Biography.htm).
At the age of 23 Mead undertook a field study in Samoa in the South Pacific. While in Samoa, Mead studied adolescent girls of the Manu peoples. She studied this group of adolescents in relation to female adolescents in the United States. Her findings stated that rather that genetics, cultural is the most influence trait in developing personality. This experience led to Margaret Mead's first major work Coming of Age in Samoa soon after her return. With her second husband in 1929 Mead traveled to Manus Island in New Guinea. Here she studied the Arapesh, Mudugumor and Tchambuli cultures of New Guinea. Upon her studying each culture, she found that each was different in her study of sex roles among the cultures. Amongst the Arapesh culture, both genders were expected...