Margaret Mead Biografia

Margaret Mead. Biografia

Margaret Mead was arguably the most renowned anthropologist of all time, contributing to the development of the discipline, as well as, introducing its insights to thousands of people outside the academy. Her work continues to contribute to the understanding of people around the world today. A prolific writer, she produced 44 books and more than 1,000 articles. Her publishings were translated into many languages.
The oldest of four children, Mead was born on December 16, 1901 in Philadelphia. She was a graduate of Barnard College and received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1929. While attending Barnard, she developed a keen interest in anthropology. It was there she met Ruth Benedict and Franz Boas, who became intellectual influences on Mead at Columbia. Boaz supervised her first research in Samoa.
Mead focused on child-rearing and personality in Samoa, New Guinea, and Bali resulting in such ethnographies as Coming of Age in Samoa in 1928 and Growing Up in New Guinea in 1930. In Bali she pioneered the use of photography for anthropological research, taking over 30,000 photographs of the Balinese.
Margaret Mead held positions with the American Museum of Natural History from 1926, and retired as emeritus curator of ethnology in 1969. She held prominent positions in various organizations and received numerous awards. Mead served as president of the Society for Applied Anthropology, the World Federation of Mental Health, and the American Anthropological Association. She was the first woman anthropologist to become president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously in 1979.
"Maggie was a short little lady with immense courage-a first of a kind-took nothing for granted and wrote copiously of her field experience. She could be disarmingly friendly one minute and put you in your place the next" (Andrew Whiteford, Ph.D., 1999).
In recent years, some of Mead's early research on Samoa has been questioned, most notably by Australian anthropologist Derek Freeman, who argues that she was wrong about Samoan norms on sexuality. Nevertheless, her life-time achievements eclipse the controversy surrounding her earliest fieldwork. We celebrate Margaret Mead, a woman anthropologist who was a strong proponent of women's rights, who shone a light of understanding on human nature, and a clear and forceful entity who provided much knowledge to the field of anthropology and psychology.