專八人文知識需知的美國名人--瑪格麗特.米德
Margaret Mead (December 16, 1901 – November 15, 1978)was an American cultural anthropologist, who was frequently afeatured writer and speaker in the mass media throughout the1960s and 1970s.
She was both a popularizer of the insights of anthropology into modern American and Westernculture, and also a respected, if controversial, academic anthropologist. Her reports about theattitudes towards sex in South Pacific and Southeast Asian traditional cultures amply informed the1960s sexual revolution. Mead was a champion of broadened sexual mores within a context oftraditional western religious life.
An Anglican Christian, she played a considerable part in the drafting of the 1979 American EpiscopalBook of Common Prayer.
Birth, early family life and education
Mead was the first of five children, born into a Quaker family, and raised in Doylestown,Pennsylvania. Her father, Edward Sherwood Mead, was a professor of finance at the WhartonSchool of the University of Pennsylvania, and her mother, Emily Fogg Mead,was a sociologist whostudied Italian immigrants. Her sister Katharine (1906-1907) died at the age of nine months. Thiswas a traumatic event for Mead, who had named this baby, and thoughts of her lost sisterpermeated her daydreams for many years.Her family moved frequently, so her early educationalternated between home-schooling and traditional schools. Margaret studied one year, 1919, atDePauw University, then transferred to Barnard College where she earned her Bachelor's degree in1923.
She studied with Professor Franz Boas and Dr. Ruth Benedict at Columbia University before earningher Master's in 1924. Mead set out in 1925 to do fieldwork in Polynesia. In 1926, she joined theAmerican Museum of Natural History, New York City, as assistant curator. She received her Ph.D.from Columbia University in 1929.
Both of Mead's surviving sisters were married to famous men. Elizabeth Mead (1909-1983), anartist and teacher, married cartoonist William Steig, and Priscilla Mead (1911-1959) married authorLeo Rosten. Mead also had a brother.
Career and later life
During World War II, Mead served as executive secretary of the National Research Council'sCommittee on Food Habits. She served as curator of ethnology at the American Museum ofNatural History from 1946 to 1969. She taught at The New School and Columbia University, whereshe was an adjunct professor from 1954 to 1978. She was a professor of anthropology and chairof the Division of Social Sciences at Fordham University's Lincoln Center campus from 1968 to1970, founding their anthropology department. Following the Ruth Benedict's example, Meadfocused her research on problems of child rearing, personality, and culture. She served asPresident of the American Anthropological Association in 1960. She held various positions in theAmerican Association for the Advancement of Science, notably president in 1975 and chair of theexecutive committee of the board of directors in 1976.
Mead was featured on two record albums published by Folkways Records. The first, released in1959, 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.
In later life, Mead was a mentor to many young anthropologists and sociologists, including JeanHouston.
Mead died of pancreatic cancer on November 15, 1978. She was buried at Trinity EpiscopalChurch in Buckingham, Pennsylvania
Work
Coming of Age in Samoa
Main article: Coming of Age in Samoa
Samoan girl, c. 1896In the foreword to Coming of Age in Samoa, Mead's advisor, Franz Boas,wrote of its significance:
"Courtesy, modesty, good manners, conformity to definite ethical standards are universal, butwhat constitutes courtesy, modesty, very good manners, and definite ethical standards is notuniversal. It is instructive to know that standards differ in the most unexpected ways."
Boas went on to point out that at the time of publication, many Americans had begun to discussthe problems faced by young people (particularly women) as they pass through adolescence as"unavoidable periods of adjustment". Boas felt that a study of the problems faced by adolescentsin another culture would be illuminating.
And so, as Mead herself described the goal of her research: "I have tried to answer the questionwhich sent me to Samoa: Are the disturbances which vex our adolescents due to the nature ofadolescence itself or to the civilization? Under different conditions does adolescence present adifferent picture?" To answer this question, she conducted her study among a small group ofSamoans — a village of 600 people on the island of Ta‘u — in which she got to know, live with,observe, and interview through an interpreter 68 young women between the ages of 9 and 20.She concluded that the passage from childhood to adulthood — adolescence — in Samoa was asmooth transition and not marked by the emotional or psychological distress, anxiety, orconfusion seen in the United States.
As Boas and Mead expected, this book upset many Westerners when it first appeared in 1928.Many American readers were shocked by her observation of incest that was common in theSamoan culture and that young Samoan women deferred marriage for many years while enjoyingcasual sex but eventually married, settled down, and successfully reared their own children.[citationneeded]
In 1983, five years after Mead had died, New Zealand anthropologist Derek Freeman publishedMargaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth, in which hechallenged Mead's major findings about sexuality in Samoan society, citing statements of hersurviving informants' claiming that she had coaxed them into giving her the answers she wanted.After years of discussion, many anthropologists concluded that the truth would probably never beknown, although most published accounts of the debate have also raised serious questions aboutFreeman's critique.
Other research areas
Mead has been credited with persuading the American Jewish Committee to sponsor a project tostudy European Jewish villages, shtetls, in which a team of researchers would conduct massinterviews with Jewish immigrants living in New York City. The resulting book, widely cited fordecades, allegedly created the Jewish mother stereotype, a mother intensely loving but controllingto the point of smothering, and engendering guilt in her children through the suffering sheprofessed to undertake for their sakes.
She also cofounded the Parapsychological Association, a group advocating for the advancementof parapsychology and psychical research.
她的著作《薩摩亞人的成年》使人類學顯出了它的意義，也引起了人們的爭論。
With Coming of Age in Samoa, she made anthropology relevant—and controversial.
