Margaret Mead
 Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead, and Reo Fortune, Sydney, July 1933. | |
| Born |
December 16, 1901 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US |
|---|---|
| Died |
November 15, 1978 (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.
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
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.
