Margaret Mead
Margaret Mead
Margaret Meadwas an American cultural anthropologist who featured frequently as an author and speaker in the mass media during the 1960s and 1970s. She earned her bachelor's degree at Barnard College in New York City and her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth16 December 1901
CityPhiladelphia, PA
CountryUnited States of America
people groups underestimate
Never underestimate that a small group of people can hold up a liquor license. Sometimes, it's the only thing that can.
sex order differences
Standardized personality differences between the sexes are of this order, cultural creations to which each generation, male and female, is trained to conform.
civilization answers vex
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 civilization? Under different conditions does adolescence present a different picture?
reflection ideas political
For Immanuel Kant, the term anthropology embraced all the human sciences, and laid the foundation of familiar knowledge we need, to build solidly grounded ideas about the moral and political demands of human life. Margaret Mead saw mid-twentieth-century anthropology as engaged in a project no less ambitious than Kant's own, and her Terry Lectures on Continuities in Cultural Evolution provide an excellent point to enter into her reflections.
growing-up questioning grows
We grow up never questioning that which is unquestioned around us.
education learning men
Man's most human characteristic is not his ability to learn, which he shares with many other species, but his ability to teach and store what others have developed and taught him.
divorce assuming ends
I don't consider my marriages as failures! It's idiotic to assume that because a marriage ends, it's failed.
sex culture docile
[Mead described the Arapesh as a culture in which both sexes were] placid and contented, unaggressive and noninitiatory, noncompetitive and responsive, warm, docile, and trusting.
teacher teaching adults
In every human society of which we have any record, there are those who teach and those who learn, for learning a way of life is implicit in all human culture as we know it. But the separation of the teacher's role from the role of all adults who inducted the young into the habitual behavior of the group, was a comparatively late invention. Furthermore, when we do find explicit and defined teaching, in primitive societies we find it tied in with a sense of the rareness or the precariousness of some human tradition.
loyalty laughter hate
Laughter is man's most distinctive emotional expression. Man shares the capacity for love and hate, anger and fear, loyalty and grief, with other living creatures. But humour, which has an intellectual as well as an emotional element belongs to man
progress twenties wells
We women are doing pretty well. We're almost back to where we were in the twenties. (1976
girl men boys
[Mead saw at least two major problems in dating. First, it encourages men and women to define heterosexual relationships as situational, rather than ongoing] You "have a date," you "go out with a date," you "groan because there isn't a decent date in town." A situation defined as containing a girl or boy of the right social background, the right degree of popularity, a little higher than your own
behavior given learned-behavior
Learned behaviors have replaced the biologically given ones.
uplifting determination work
I learned the value of hard work by working hard.