Margaret Mead

The legendary Margaret Mead established the importance and relevance of anthropology in the public mind and presented to Americans the view that theirs was among many cultures. She was at once shaped by the influences in the American intellectual community of the 1920s and, in turn, she was later to contribute to the image that the world has of the South Pacific. Moreover, Mead and her followers promoted sensationalized and inaccurate depictions of Pacific peoples as primitives defined primarily by sexuality or cannibalism. This book reveals the consequences of such Western condescension and integrates the views of U.S. and Pacific scholars in a historic critique of the products connected to the ethnographic enterprise in the Pacific. Destined to be highly controversial, this collection of articles provides for the first time a multicultural perspective on Margaret Mead's impact on Western anthropology and her views of colonialism, imperialism, and strategic and business interests in the South Pacific as well as Southeast Asia. The contributors, most of them active supporters of a nuclear-free and independent Pacific, use different styles and discourses to observe that it is only in the anthropological imagination that Pacific cultures are exotic paradises and sites of clan warfare. The authors demonstrate how these societies are still portrayed out of context with certain crucial issues ignored by Western scholars, for example, unemployment, colonialism, nuclear testing, and radiation poisoning. As such, the participants go beyond postmodernism and merely talking about the relationship between who "sees" and what is seen, by affirming the relevance of indigenous Pacific concepts as anew way to link scholarship and accountability. Acknowledging anthropology's contribution to stereotypes of savagery and exoticism, the contributors propose a global anthropology that is non-hierarchical, advocacy based, and

In The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead, Derek Freeman conducts a detailed historical analysis of Margaret Mead's Samoan researches and of her training in New York by Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict. By examining hitherto unpublished correspondence between Mead, her mentor Boas, and others -- as well as the sworn testimony of Fa'apua'a Fa'am, one of Mead's traveling companions of 1926 -- Freeman provides compelling evidence that one of the most influential anthropological studies of the twentieth century was unwittingly based on the mischievous joking of the investigator's informants. But The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead goes beyond a historical account of how the hoax took place; it is an examination of how Mead's Boasian training set her up to be hoaxed -- and set others up to accept her conclusions.

Biosociology is an emerging paradigm seeking to understand human behavior by integrating relevant insights from the natural sciences into traditional sociological thinking. Biosociology posits no ultimate causes of human behavior, rather it seeks to understand how biological factors interact with other factors to produce observed behavior. The book presents a brief introduction to biophysical systems that are important to the understanding of human behavior - genetics, neurophysiology, and the autonomic and endocrine systems. These systems are explored in the contexts of sociological importance, such as socialization, learning, gender roles, gender differences, sexuality, the family, deviance, and criminality.

Newman reinterprets an important moment in the history of the American women's movement. She traces the intellectual roots of the women's movement back to its beginnings, and reveals how it took on racial overtones. The study reveals that the white, middle-class women who were explicitly and implicitly influenced by the American offshoots of Darwin laid the intellectual groundwork for the social movements that followed.

This book tells the story of the extraordinary friendship between renowned anthropologists Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict. First as mentor and protegee, later as colleagues and lovers, these two remarkable yet temperamentally different women forged a bond that endured for twenty-five years, defying convention as well as easy categorization.

Drawing on a broad range of sources, including recently released correspondence between Mead and Benedict, Hilary Lapsley reconstructs this complex relationship and situates it in the context of its time. She explores the ways in which Mead's and Benedict's professional work grew out of concerns in their own lives -- about sexuality and friendship, identity and difference. Lapsley also shows how Mead and Benedict used their anthropological studies to call attention to the cultural foundations of American life, Benedict seeking to make the world more tolerant of deviance and Mead to liberate the individual from the artificial constraints of gender and race.

Overall, the book charts the course of a relationship that persisted in the face of numerous obstacles, including separations of long duration, the competing claims of other partners, secrecy about lesbianism, the tensions of professional rivalry, and the clash of different personalities.