Margaret Mead

Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead, and Reo Fortune, Sydney, July 1933.
Born	December 16, 1901(1901-12-16) Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US
Died	November 15, 1978(1978-11-15) (aged 76) New York City, US

Margaret Mead was an American cultural anthropologist, who was frequently a featured author and speaker in the mass media throughout the 1960s and 1970s. She earned her bachelor degree at Barnard College in New York City, and her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University. She was both a popularizer of the insights of anthropology into modern American and Western culture and a respected, if controversial, academic anthropologist. Mead was married three times. Her first husband (1923–1928) was American Luther Cressman, a theology student at the time. Her second husband was New Zealander Reo Fortune, a Cambridge graduate (1928–1935). Her third and longest-lasting marriage (1936–1950) was to the British Anthropologist Gregory Bateson with whom she had a daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson. Through the mass media—first newspapers and magazines, then radio and television, and finally through film and the Internet—Margaret Mead acquired a legendary, even mythic status in American culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Along with her third husband, anthropologist Gregory Bateson, Mead was a pioneer in the use of film and photography in her ethnographic research. Mead’s use of photography and film in her research helped to underscore the importance of visual evidence in ethnographic research as well as the value of images in conveying crosscultural information to the public. Not only was Mead one of the earliest anthropologists to integrate visual methods into her research, she was also one of the first anthropologists to focus on the study of visual communication, including nonverbal communication, kinesics (the study of body motion), and proxemics (the study of territoriality and personal space), and she pioneered teaching anthropology courses on culture and communication (both verbal and visual)

Books

As a sole author (selection)

• 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)
• Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years (1972; autobiography)

As editor or coauthor

• Cultural Patterns and Technical Change, editor (1953)
• Primitive Heritage: An Anthropological Anthology, edited with Nicholas Calas (1953)
• An Anthropologist at Work, editor (1959, reprinted 1966; a volume of Ruth Benedict's writings)
• The Study of Culture At A Distance, edited with Rhoda Metraux, 1953
• Themes in French Culture, with Rhoda Metraux, 1954
• The Wagon and the Star: A Study of American Community Initiative, co-authored with Muriel Whitbeck Brown, 1966
• A Rap on Race, with James Baldwin, 1971
• A Way of Seeing, with Rhoda Metraux, 1975

Articles

• Margaret Mead, 'L'Anthropologie visuelle dans une discipline verbale', in: Claudine de France (s. dir.), Pour une Anthropologie visuelle, Paris-La Haye-New York, Mouton & EHESS, 1979, 169 p. (Cahiers de L'Homme, n.s., XIX) [1].

Legacy

Mead’s relationship to ethnographic film (and to the American Museum of Natural History) is symbolized by the museum’s use of her name and image for their annual showcase of new documentary film and video. The 'Margaret Mead Film Festival' began in 1976 in commemoration of Mead’s seventy-fifth birthday and has grown in size and importance during the past thirty years.

Literature

• Lenora Foerstel, Confronting the Margaret Mead Legacy Scholarship, Empire, and the South Pacific, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1922.
• Maureen A. Molloy, On Creating a Usable Culture, Margaret Mead and the Emergence of American Cosmopolitanism, 2008.
• Nancy C. Lutkehaus, Margaret Mead. The Making of an American Icon, 2008.

External links

• Mead at National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoir