Socialization as Cultural Communication: Development of a Theme in the Work of Margaret Mead

University of California Press

Anthropologist, psychologist, teacher, lecturer, writer and observer of change in our time, Margaret Mead was born on December 16, 1901, in Philadelphia. She received her B.A. degree in 1923 from Barnard College, her M.A. degree a year later from Columbia University, and her Ph.D. in 1929, also from Columbia. Dr. Mead has been honored many times for her work and holds twenty honorary doctorates, including an honorary Doctor of Science awarded by Harvard in 1973, as well as many prizes and awards, among them The American Museum of Natural History Gold Medal, awarded in 1969. In 1975 alone, Dr. Mead was granted the Woman of Conscience Award from the National Council of Women; the Medal for Distinguished Service at Teacher's College, Columbia University; the Ceres Medal from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, and an honorary doctorate from The Philippine Women's University, Manila.

Dr. Mead began her career at The American Museum of Natural History in 1926 as assistant curator of ethnology in the Anthropology Department while completing her graduate work with the late Drs. Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict. In 1942 Dr. Mead was named associate curator; in 1964 she was appointed curator; and she is now curator emeritus of ethnology.

For several years, Dr. Mead was engrossed in the creation and installation of the Hall of Peoples of the Pacific at the Museum, which opened to the public in the spring of 1971. Dr. Mead's office

and staff at the Museum served as the center for this project, as it does for most of Dr. Mead's work. The office complex consists of several rooms tucked away in a tower of the 106-year-old institution. From this office, her assistants coordinate a complicated calendar of appointments with scientists from around the world. Speaking engagements are kept in disciplined order and writing obligations and classes are scheduled. The rooms are literally a mine of information because of the complete files Dr. Mead keeps of all her past research and all her writings, plus the thousands of books on all the subjects with which Dr. Mead concerns herself.

Dr. Mead began her field work in the Pacific in 1925 when, as a fellow of the National Research Council, she made a study of adolescent girls in Samoa. This research led to her first book, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928). In 1928–29, as a fellow of the Social Science Research Council, Dr. Mead studied the children of Manus, one of the Admiralty Islands, and in 1930 she did research with an American Indian group. During 1931–33, Dr. Mead studied the relationship between sex and temperament among the Arapesh, Mundugumor, and Tchambuli peoples of New Guinea, which resulted in her book, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935). This was followed by field work in Bali and New Guinea (1936–39).

After twenty-five years' absence, Dr. Mead revisited the Admiralty Islands in 1953 to study changes occuring there as the Manus people were in the process of becoming part of the mid-twentieth-century world. Dr. Mead went back to the Admiralty Islands to continue her work in 1964, 1965, 1971, 1975 and in 1967 to make a film. During one of her recent field trips in the spring of 1973, she returned to New Guinea, to revisit a mountain Arapesh group. During her lifelong study of the peoples of the Pacific, Dr. Mead has had to learn to use seven languages of the area.

Dr. Mead's field work and research into both Western and non-Western societies have resulted in an enormous amount of writing, including 24 books she has authored and another 18 she either co-authored or co-edited. She has also written a large number of scientific papers, monographs, journal articles and popular articles, including a regular column in Redbook magazine.

Dr. Mead has also written and narrated various films, including the series "Films on Character Formation in Different Cultures,"

produced with Gregory Bateson and distributed by the New York University Film Library. Other films have been "Four Families" (1959, National Film Board of Canada), "Margaret Mead's New Guinea Journal" (1968, National Educational Television), and "New Lives for Old" (1960, The Horizon for Science Series of the Educational Testing Service of Princeton, New Jersey).

In recent years, Dr. Mead has studied contemporary Western culture in the light of knowledge gained during field work in small, homogeneous and stable societies. She has focused her work on problems of education and culture; the relationship between character and social forms; personality and culture; culture change; the cultural aspects of nutrition, mental hygiene and family life; cross-national relationships; national character; and problems of the environment, food, population and human settlements in a global context.

Dr. Mead's comments on social change and the difference between generations have stimulated wide interest on both sides of the "generation gap," and her defense of change in Culture and Commitment (1970) has gotten people on both sides of the "gap" to look at social change with more understanding. (This may have influenced Time Magazine's choice of Dr. Mead as "Mother of the World" in 1969). In 1971 Dr. Mead published A Rap on Race: A Dialogue with James Baldwin . Two recent books are Twentienth Century Faith: Hope and Survival and her autobiography called Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years, both published in 1972. A biography of Ruth Benedict by Dr. Mead was published in 1974 by Columbia University Press. Dr. Mead has recently completed her new book with photographer Ken Heyman, entitled World Enough: Rethinking the Future, which was published in 1975 by Little, Brown & Co.

Among Dr. Mead's many interests are the study of culture building, cultural change, and ekistics—the study of human settlements. Dr. Mead was a founder of the World Society for Ekistics, of which she was president from 1969 to 1971. Dr. Mead has held offices with many organizations: in the past, she has been president of the World Federation for Mental Health, the Society for Applied Anthropology, the American Anthropological Association, the Scientists' Institute for Public Information and the Society for General Systems Research; vice-president of the New York Academy of Sciences,

and a member of the Board of Trustees of Hampton Institute and the Menninger Foundation. She is currently Chairman of the Board of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and secretary of the Institute for Intercultural Studies.

Among her academic affiliations, Dr. Mead is adjunct professor of anthropology at Columbia University, and visiting professor of anthropology in the Department of Psychiatry, College of Medicine, University of Cincinnati. She was Fogarty Scholar-in-Residence at the National Institutes of Health in 1973. From September, 1969, to June, 1971, Dr. Mead was chairwoman of the Social Science Division and professor of anthropology at Fordham University in New York City.

Excerpted from Socialization as Cultural Communication: Development of a Theme in the Work of Margaret Meadby Theodore Schwartz, editor Copyright © 1980 by Theodore Schwartz, editor. Excerpted by permission.
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