What is the contribution of Margaret Mead in anthropology?
Margaret Mead. As an anthropologist, Mead was best known for her studies of the nonliterate peoples of Oceania, especially with regard to various aspects of psychology and culture—the cultural conditioning of sexual behaviour, natural character, and culture change.
What is the contribution of Margaret Mead in sociology?
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. In addition, Margaret Mead was the first anthropologist to study child-rearing practices and learning theory within social groups.
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.
What 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 conclusions did Margaret Mead discover at the end of her study?
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.
What compelled Margaret Mead to become an anthropologist?
Mead began as an English major but decided to study psychology instead. After taking classes in anthropology with Franz Boas (1858–1942), often considered the “father of modern American anthropology,” and his teaching assistant, Ruth Benedict (1887–1948), she decided to become an anthropologist.
How did Margaret Mead learn about the people she studied?
During the summer of 1930, Mead and Fortune did fieldwork among the Omaha Native American people. Mead realized from this first experience studying a non-Oceanic culture that there was a connection between the anthropological approach used to study a culture and the characteristics of the culture studied.
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 central insight did anthropologist Margaret Mead achieve as a result of her research on gender in New Guinea?
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 is culture according to Margaret Mead?
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 discredited Margaret Mead?
Derek Freeman
Prof. Derek Freeman, who challenged Margaret Mead’s famous account of adolescent sexuality in Samoa, provoking a fierce anthropological controversy, died July 6 in Canberra, Australia. He was 84. Dr.
What was the main research problem Côté 2000 526 Mead sought to address through her research in 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.
Who was the anthropologist Margaret Mead met in Australia?
Mead Responds to Freeman One of the most prominent critics of Coming of Age in Samoa was New Zealand-born anthropologist Derek Freeman (1916–2001). In 1964, Mead and Freeman met in Australia and discussed disparities in their research. They continued to correspond until her death.
What did Margaret Mead do for a living?
She would become a founding member of the Society for Applied Anthropology and spent much of her career addressing important domestic issues in America. Mead was also an interdisciplinary scholar, networking broadly across disciplinary boundaries and organizing conferences.
How did Margaret Mead describe coming of age in Samoa?
Coming of Age in Samoa. Based on her study of 68 girls in three villages in the western part of Ta’u island, Mead reported that adolescence was not a stressful time, compared with the expectation of adolescent “storm and stress” in Western societies. She attributed this difference to cultural factors.
Where did Margaret Mead study the adolescent girl?
Some critics of Mead’s Samoan field study have objected to her choice of housing on the island of Ta’u, where she conducted her study of adolescent girls. She chose to live in the naval dispensary with an American family rather than in a Samoan household.