Margaret Mead

Margaret Mead was an American cultural anthropologist whose studies of adolescence, gender, and social life in the Pacific made anthropology widely influential.

Coming of Age in Samoa: Margaret Mead’s 1928 ethnography argues that Samoan adolescence differs from adolescence in the United States. This book made her account of Samoan adolescence her most famous case.
Cultural determinism: The view that learned cultural patterns strongly shape human behavior and social roles. Mead’s ethnographies foregrounded cultural variation in traits often treated as natural.
Franz Boas: A German-born American anthropologist who established cultural relativism and trained generations of U.S. anthropologists. Boas supervised Mead at Columbia and encouraged her research on adolescence.
Cultural relativism: The principle that beliefs and practices should be understood in their cultural contexts rather than judged by another society’s standards. Mead’s comparisons popularized the idea that social norms vary across cultures.
The Mead–Freeman controversy: A long-running scholarly dispute over Margaret Mead’s account of Samoan adolescence and Derek Freeman’s criticisms of it. The controversy tests how far her conclusions were supported by field evidence.
Growing Up in New Guinea: Margaret Mead’s 1930 ethnography compares childhood and personality formation in three Manus communities. It extended her study of how child-rearing and social life shape development.
Participant observation: A research method in which investigators take part in everyday life while observing a community. Her fieldwork relied on sustained observation within the communities she studied.
Ruth Benedict: An American anthropologist whose work examined cultural patterns and influenced the culture-and-personality school. Benedict was Mead’s mentor, colleague, and close intellectual collaborator.
American Museum of Natural History: A museum in New York City with major collections and research programs in anthropology and natural history. Mead worked there for decades and became a prominent public interpreter of anthropology.
Fa’apua’a Fa’amu: A Samoan woman whom Derek Freeman identified as one of the informants who had spoken with Mead. Her later account became central to arguments about Mead’s interviews and Samoan joking practices.

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