Margaret Mead

Childhood

Margaret Mead (December 16, 1901, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US- November 15, 1978, New York City, US) was an American mathematical psychologist who was born in a household of social scientists with roots in the Midwest.

Education

Most of Margaret's schooling was done at home because of the family's frequent movements from one place to another. She had a total of six years of formal schooling but most of her knowledge came from her family members.

In 1919, Mead joined the DePauw University, studied there for a year, and then transferred to Barnard College from where she graduated in 1923.

In 1924, she earned her Master of Arts degree from Columbia University. There she was greatly influenced by anthropologists Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict.

In 1925, Mead went for an expedition to Samoa. She received her Doctor of Philosophy degree from Columbia University in 1929.

Scientific Achievements

In 1925, Margaret Mead journeyed to the South Pacific territory of American Samoa. She sought to discover whether adolescence was a universally traumatic and stressful time due to biological factors or whether the experience of adolescence depended on one's cultural upbringing. After spending about nine months observing and interviewing Samoans, as well as administering psychological tests, Mead concluded that adolescence was not a stressful time for girls in Samoa because Samoan cultural patterns were very different from those in the United States.

Her findings were published in Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), a vivid, descriptive account of Samoan adolescent life that became tremendously popular.

In 1926, on returning from the field Mead became an assistant curator at the American Museum of Natural History, where she remained, becoming an associate curator in 1942, curator of ethnology in 1964, and, eventually, curator emeritus in 1969. Her goal in going to the museum was "to make Americans understand cultural anthropology as well as they understood archaeology."

In 1928, Mead left for New Guinea. Her project was the study of the thought of young children, testing some of the then-current theories. Her study of children's thought in its sociocultural context is described in Growing Up in New Guinea (1930). She later returned to the village of Peri, where this study was made, after twenty-five years, when the children she had known in 1929 were leaders of a community going through the difficulties of change to modern life. She described this change, with flashbacks to the earlier days, in New Lives for Old (1956).

Mead's interest in psychiatry had turned her attention to the problem of the cultural context of schizophrenia. With this in mind she went to Bali, a society were going into a trance and other forms of dissociation are culturally approved and encouraged. The Balinese study was especially noteworthy for the development of new field techniques.

“Children must be thought how to think, not what to think.”

In 1948, Mead was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
From 1954 to 1978, she taught at The New School and Columbia University as an adjunct professor. She was a professor of anthropology and chair of the Division of Social Sciences at Fordham University's Lincoln Center campus from 1968 to 1970.

In 1970, she was awarded the Kalinga Prize for the Popularization of Science by the UNESCO. In 1976, Mead was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.

Margaret Mead died of pancreatic cancer on November 15, 1978, and was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1979. She even appeared on a commemorative postage stamp in 1998. An impact crater on Venus named in honor of Margaret Mead.

Books

Coming of Age in Samoa (1928)

Growing Up in New Guinea (1930)

The Changing Culture of an Indian Tribe (1932)

Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935)

And Keep Your Powder Dry: An Anthropologist Looks at America (1942)

Male and Female (1949)

New Lives for Old: Cultural Transformation in Manus, (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)