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.
What is Margaret Mead best known for?
Margaret Mead was an American anthropologist best known for
her studies of the peoples of Oceania
. She also commented on a wide array of societal issues, such as women’s rights, nuclear proliferation, race relations, environmental pollution, and world hunger.
What were the main findings of Margaret Mead’s research?
Mead found a different pattern of male and female behavior in each of the cultures she
studied, all different from gender role expectations in the United States at that time. She found among the Arapesh a temperament for both males and females that was gentle, responsive, and cooperative.
What theory did Margaret Mead discover?
Mead’s famous
theory of imprinting
found that children learn by watching adult behavior. A decade later, Mead qualified her nature vs. nurture stance somewhat in Male and Female (1949), in which she analyzed the ways in which motherhood serves to reinforce male and female roles in all societies.
What research methods did Margaret Mead use?
Mead pioneered fieldwork on topics such as childhood, adolescence, and gender and was a founding figure in culture and personality studies. She advanced fieldwork methods through the use of
photographs, film, and psychological testing
, as well as the use of teams of male and female researchers.
What did Mead say about gender roles?
Mead saw that, in the cultures she studied, male and female behaviors differed from one another, and differed from the gender roles in the US. She saw
that women were dominant in societies in the Tchambuli Lake region
with men less responsible and more emotionally dependent.
How did Margaret Mead prefer to learn about cultures?
The people there planted a coconut tree in her memory
. Margaret Mead would have liked that. As a young woman, she had studied the life and traditions of the village. Miz Mead received such honors because she added greatly to public knowledge of cultures and traditions in developing areas.
What did Margaret Mead conclude from her studies?
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.
How does Margaret Mead define culture?
For instance, Margaret Mead has de- fined ‘culture’ as follows: Culture
means human culture
, the complex whole of traditional behavior which. has been developed by the human race and is successively learned by each genera- tion. (
Who is the most famous anthropologist?
- Franz Boas (1858 – 1942) …
- Bronislaw Malinowski (1884 – 1942) …
- Margaret Mead (1901 – 1978) …
- Ruth Benedict (1877 – 1948) …
- Ralph Linton (1893 – 1953) …
- Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908 – 2009)
Is Margaret Mead a sociologist?
Margaret Mead was born on December 16, 1901 in Philadelphia. Her father was an economics professor at the Wharton School of Business and
her mother was a sociologist
. … Mead continued her education at Columbia University, earning her master’s degree in 1924 and her PhD in 1929.
What made Mead a controversial figure in the field of anthropology?
In addition to becoming widely recognized, Mead became an increasingly controversial figure during this period and was criticized by some people, including other anthropologists,
for offering her views on many different contemporary topics outside the scope of her research or expertise
.
What is the Mead vs Freeman controversy mainly about?
In 1983, Dr. Freeman charged that Dr. Mead’s influential 1928 account, ”Coming of Age in Samoa,” was
mistaken and misleading in its depiction of uncomplicated sexual freedom there and that it had been shaped to support academic theory rather
than to report the realities of Pacific island society.
What was Margaret Mead criticized for?
Feminist pioneer Betty Friedan criticized Mead for “
reinforcing traditional stereotypes of women and limiting women’s choices
,” he writes.
Why is Franz Boas important?
Franz Boas is regarded as both the
“father of modern anthropology”
and the “father of American anthropology.” He was the first to apply the scientific method to anthropology, emphasizing a research- first method of generating theories.
