Margaret Mead (1901 – 1978)
American cultural anthropologist, who was frequently a featured writer and speaker in the mass media throughout the 1960s and 1970s.
In the modern world we have invented ways of speeding up invention, and people's lives change so fast that a person is born into one kind of world, grows up in another, and by the time his children are growing up, lives in still a different world.
[Our goal was to] translate aspects of culture never successfully recorded by the scientist, although often caught by the artist, into some form of communication sufficiently clear and sufficiently unequivocal to satisfy the requirements of scientific enquiry.
Opposing its closed circle of affection to a forbidding world of the strong ties between parent and children, ties which an active personal relation from birth until death?... Perhaps these are too heavy prices to pay for a specialization of emotions which might be bought about the other ways, notable through coeducation. And with such a question in our minds its interesting to note that a larger family community, in which there are several adult men and women, seems to ensure the child against the development of the crippling attitudes which have been labelled Oedipus complexes, the Electra complexes, and so on.
They draw back into themselves, and are thrown back on their own bodies for gratification. The men become narcissistic and uncertain of the power of any woman, no matter how strange and beautiful, to arouse their desire, but the women remain continually receptive to male advances.
Today our approaches to children are fragmented and partial. Those who care for well children know little of children who are sick. The deep knowledge that comes from the intensive attempt to cure is separated from the knowledge of those whose main task is to teach.
The solution to adult problems tomorrow depends on large measure upon how our children grow up today.
If a society insists that warfare is the major occupation for the male sex, it is therefore insisting that all male children display bravery and pugnacity. Even if the insistence upon the differential bravery of men and women is not made articulate, the difference in occupation makes this point implicitly. When, however, a society goes further and defines men as brave and women as timorous, when men are forbidden to show fear and women are indulged in the most flagrant display of fear, a more explicit element enters in. Originally two variations of human temperament, a hatred of fear or willingness to display fear, they have been socially translated into inalienable aspects of the personalities of the two sexes. And to that defined sex-personality every child will be educated, if a boy, to suppress fear, if a girl, to show it.
Anthropology demands the open-mindedness with which one must look and listen, record in astonishment and wonder that which one would not have been able to guess.
[Partly as a consequence of male authority] prestige value always attaches to the activities of men.
Of all the peoples whom I have studied, from city dwellers to cliff dwellers, I always find that at least 50 percent would prefer to have at least one jungle between themselves and their mothers-in-law.
Life in the twentieth century is like a parachute jump: you have to get it right the first time.
A city is a place where there is no need to wait for next week to get the answer to a question, to taste the food of any country, to find new voices to listen to and familiar ones to listen to again.
At times it may be necessary temporarily to accept a lesser evil, but one must never label a necessary evil as good.
Cultural systems will be treated as extensions of the power to learn, store, and transmit information, and the evolution of culture as dependent upon the biological development of these abilities and the cultural developments that actualize them. Man's increasing mastery over the natural world, with its increments of available energy use, can be seen from this point of view as one consequence of his capacity to learn, invent, borrow, store, and transmit the necessary technological and political inventions for the changes of scale involved in increasing utilization of energy. Instead of focusing attention on discontinuities — the invention of tool-making tools, the invention of agriculture, the invention of writing, and the invention of invention as a conscious pursuit—this discussion will focus on the continuities involved and on the extent to which older forms of communication, energy use, and social organization also undergo transformation in the course of cultural evolution.
If one cannot state a matter clearly enough so that even an intelligent twelve-year-old can understand it, one should remain within the cloistered walls of the university and laboratory until one gets a better grasp of one's subject matter.
The institution of marriage in all societies is a pattern within which the strains put by civilization on males and females alike must be resolved, a pattern within which men must learn, in return for a variety of elaborate rewards, new forms in which sexual spontaneity is still possible, and women must learn to discipline their receptivity to a thousand other considerations.
The Samoan puts the burden of amatory success upon the man and believes that women need more initiating, more time for maturing of sexual feeling. A man who fails to satisfy a woman is looked upon as a clumsy, inept blunderer.
General systems theory, in a sense, is no news at all, as Von Foerster found out when he attempted to organize a conference of general systems people and anthropologists. In a sense, the situation is comparable to that found by the Committee for the Study of Mankind, in which a committee that included Robert Redfidd tried to get each discipline to consider its relationship to the concept of Mankind. Anthropologists replied, "we are related already," and so they were. Something similar may be said of attempts to date in mathematical anthropology. The kind of information that a computer program can finally provide, on a level of a particular culture, is simply a reflection of how detailed field work has been done, and to the careful field worker, on kinship, for example, it provides no illumination.
It is an open question whether any behavior based on fear of eternal punishment can be regarded as ethical or should be regarded as merely cowardly.
Female animals defending their young are notoriously ferocious and lack the playful delight in combat which characterizes the mock combats of males of the same species. There seems very little ground for claiming that the mother of young children is more peaceful, more responsible, and more thoughtful for the welfare of the human race than is her husband or brother.