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55-564: The Archives started in 1975 as the National Anthropological Film Center (NAFC) by creating and collecting films of anthropological research. The NAFC was founded through the advocacy of notable anthropologists and filmmakers Margaret Mead , John Marshall , Timothy Asch , and Jay Ruby . The first director of the NAFC, E. Richard Sorenson, promoted anthropological film as a scientific research tool. The center received funding from

110-402: A Daughter's Eye , Mary Catherine Bateson strongly implies that the relationship between Benedict and Mead was partly sexual. Mead never openly identified herself as lesbian or bisexual . In her writings, she proposed that it is to be expected that an individual's sexual orientation may evolve throughout life. She spent her last years in a close personal and professional collaboration with

165-602: A Western context. Despite its feminist roots, Mead's work on women and men was also criticized by Betty Friedan on the basis that it contributes to infantilizing women. In 1926, there was much debate about race and intelligence . Mead felt the methodologies involved in the experimental psychology research supporting arguments of racial superiority in intelligence were substantially flawed. In "The Methodology of Racial Testing: Its Significance for Sociology," Mead proposes that there are three problems with testing for racial differences in intelligence. First, there are concerns with

220-542: A broad range of documentary , travelogue , ethnographic film and amateur genres from 1908 to the present. Collections include more than 250,000 photographs , fieldnotes and shot logs and field audio recordings . The HSFA holds the major ethnographic film collections of John Marshall 's films with Ju/'hoan Bushmen ( !Kung ), Timothy Asch and Napoleon Chagnon 's films of the Yanomami of Brazil, Jorge Preloran 's work, and films by David and Judith MacDougall. Directors of

275-504: A close friend of her instructor Ruth Benedict . However, Sapir's conservative stances about marriage and women's roles were unacceptable to Mead, and as Mead left to do field work in Samoa , they separated permanently. Mead received news of Sapir's remarriage while she was living in Samoa. There, she later burned their correspondence on a beach. Between 1925 and 1926, she was in Samoa from where on

330-528: A considerable part in the drafting of the 1979 American Episcopal Book of Common Prayer . In the 1967 musical Hair , her name is given to a transvestite "tourist" disturbing the show with the song "My Conviction." In 1976, Mead was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame . Buckingham Friends School Buckingham Friends School , an independent Quaker school in Lahaska , Pennsylvania

385-504: A different cultural pattern. In brief, her comparative study revealed a full range of contrasting gender roles: Deborah Gewertz (1981) studied the Chambri (called Tchambuli by Mead) in 1974–1975 and found no evidence of such gender roles. Gewertz states that as far back in history as there is evidence (1850s), Chambri men dominated the women, controlled their produce, and made all important political decisions. In later years, there has been

440-807: A diligent search for societies in which women dominate men or for signs of such past societies, but none has been found (Bamberger 1974). Jessie Bernard criticised Mead's interpretations of her findings and argued that Mead's descriptions were subjective. Bernard argues that Mead claimed the Mundugumor women were temperamentally identical to men, but her reports indicate that there were in fact sex differences; Mundugumor women hazed each other less than men hazed each other and made efforts to make themselves physically desirable to others, married women had fewer affairs than married men, women were not taught to use weapons, women were used less as hostages and Mundugumor men engaged in physical fights more often than women. In contrast,

495-452: A positivist stance, Orans's assessment of the controversy was that Mead did not formulate her research agenda in scientific terms and that "her work may properly be damned with the harshest scientific criticism of all, that it is ' not even wrong '." On the whole, anthropologists have rejected the notion that Mead's conclusions rested on the validity of a single interview with a single person and find instead that Mead based her conclusions on

550-729: A very different light than they do in Freeman's work. Indeed, the immense significance that Freeman gave his critique looks like 'much ado about nothing' to many of his critics. While nurture-oriented anthropologists are more inclined to agree with Mead's conclusions, some non-anthropologists who take a nature-oriented approach follow Freeman's lead, such as Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker , biologist Richard Dawkins , evolutionary psychologist David Buss , science writer Matt Ridley , classicist Mary Lefkowitz . In her 2015 book Galileo's Middle Finger , Alice Dreger argues that Freeman's accusations were unfounded and misleading. A detailed review of

605-710: Is credited with the pluralization of the term " semiotics ". In 1948 Mead was quoted in News Chronicle as supporting the deployment of Iban mercenaries to the Malayan Emergency , arguing that using Ibans (Dyaks) who enjoyed headhunting was no worse than deploying white troops who had been taught that killing was wrong. In later life, Mead was a mentor to many young anthropologists and sociologists, including Jean Houston , author Gail Sheehy , John Langston Gwaltney , Roger Sandall , filmmaker Timothy Asch , and anthropologist Susan C. Scrimshaw , who later received

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660-727: Is mentioned in her 1984 biography by Jane Howard . On Manus, she studied the Manus people of the south coast village of Peri. "Over the next five decades Mead would come back oftener to Peri than to any other field site of her career.' Mead has been credited with persuading the American Jewish Committee to sponsor a project to study European Jewish villages, shtetls , in which a team of researchers would conduct mass interviews with Jewish immigrants living in New York City. The resulting book, widely cited for decades, allegedly created

715-594: Is still much cultural variation throughout Melanesia, especially in the large island of New Guinea . Moreover, anthropologists often overlook the significance of networks of political influence among females. The formal male-dominated institutions typical of some areas of high population density were not, for example, present in the same way in Oksapmin , West Sepik Province , a more sparsely-populated area. Cultural patterns there were different from, say, Mount Hagen . They were closer to those described by Mead. Mead stated that

770-479: The American Museum of Natural History , New York City, as assistant curator. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1929. Mead was married three times. After a six-year engagement, she married her first husband (1923–1928), Luther Cressman , an American theology student who later became an anthropologist. Before departing for Samoa in 1925, Mead had a short affair with the linguist Edward Sapir ,

825-610: The Arapesh people , also in the Sepik, were pacifists , but she noted that they on occasion engage in warfare. Her observations about the sharing of garden plots among the Arapesh, the egalitarian emphasis in child rearing, and her documentation of predominantly peaceful relations among relatives are very different from the "big man" displays of dominance that were documented in more stratified New Guinea cultures, such as by Andrew Strathern . They are

880-532: The Jewish mother stereotype , a mother intensely loving but controlling to the point of smothering and engendering guilt in her children through the suffering she professed to undertake for their sakes. Mead worked for the RAND Corporation, a US Air Force military-funded private research organization, from 1948 to 1950 to study Russian culture and attitudes toward authority. As an Anglican Christian, Mead played

935-967: The National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Institutes of Health . In 1981, the NAFC was renamed the Human Studies Film Archives and became part of the Department of Anthropology at the National Museum of Natural History . Today, HSFA collections and resources support research on specific cultures and communities, the development of ethnographic film, and the broad study of visual culture. HSFA collections comprise more than 8 million feet of film and almost one thousand hours of video recordings. These visual research resources, along with related documentary material encompass

990-541: The Society for Applied Anthropology in 1950 and of the American Anthropological Association in 1960. In the mid-1960s, Mead joined forces with the communications theorist Rudolf Modley in jointly establishing an organization called Glyphs Inc., whose goal was to create a universal graphic symbol language to be understood by any members of culture, no matter how "primitive." In the 1960s, Mead served as

1045-600: The 1985 Margaret Mead Award for her research on cultural factors affecting public health delivery. In 1972, Mead was one of the two rapporteurs from NGOs to the UN Conference on the Human Environment. In 1976, she was a key participant at UN Habitat I , the first UN forum on human settlements. Mead died of pancreatic cancer on November 15, 1978, and is buried at Trinity Episcopal Church Cemetery, Buckingham , Pennsylvania. Mead's first ethnographic work described

1100-564: The Arapesh were also described as equal in temperament, but Bernard states that Mead's own writings indicate that men physically fought over women, yet women did not fight over men. The Arapesh also seemed to have some conception of sex differences in temperament, as they would sometimes describe a woman as acting like a particularly quarrelsome man. Bernard also questioned if the behaviour of men and women in those societies differed as much from Western behaviour as Mead claimed. Bernard argued that some of her descriptions could be equally descriptive of

1155-721: The Axis powers to try and foster peace between the two sides. She was curator of ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History from 1946 to 1969. She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1948, the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1975, and the American Philosophical Society in 1977. She taught at The New School and Columbia University, where she

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1210-599: The National Anthropological Film Center/Human Studies Film Archives have included: E. Richard Sorenson (1975-) Robert Leopold Jake Homiak (-2018) This article related to a film organization is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . This Smithsonian Institution article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Margaret Mead This is an accepted version of this page Margaret Mead (December 16, 1901 – November 15, 1978)

1265-564: The Samoan islanders whom Mead had depicted in such utopian terms were intensely competitive and had murder and rape rates higher than those in the United States. Furthermore, the men were intensely sexually jealous, which contrasted sharply with Mead's depiction of "free love" among the Samoans. Freeman's book was controversial in its turn and was met with considerable backlash and harsh criticism from

1320-758: The Vice President of the New York Academy of Sciences . She held various positions in the American Association for the Advancement of Science , notably president in 1975 and chair of the executive committee of the board of directors in 1976. She was a recognizable figure in academia and usually wore a distinctive cape and carried a walking stick. Mead was a key participant in the Macy conferences on cybernetics and an editor of their proceedings. Mead's address to

1375-459: The ability to validly equate one's test score with what Mead refers to as racial admixture or how much Negro or Indian blood an individual possesses. She also considers whether that information is relevant when interpreting IQ scores. Mead remarks that a genealogical method could be considered valid if it could be "subjected to extensive verification." In addition, the experiment would need a steady control group to establish whether racial admixture

1430-418: The anthropologist Rhoda Metraux with whom she lived from 1955 until her death in 1978. Letters between the two published in 2006 with the permission of Mead's daughter clearly express a romantic relationship. Mead had two sisters, Elizabeth and Priscilla, and a brother, Richard. Elizabeth Mead (1909–1983), an artist and teacher, married the cartoonist William Steig , and Priscilla Mead (1911–1959) married

1485-617: The anthropology community, but it was received enthusiastically by communities of scientists who believed that sexual mores were more or less universal across cultures. Later in 1983, a special session of Mead's supporters in the American Anthropological Association (to which Freeman was not invited) declared it to be "poorly written, unscientific, irresponsible and misleading." Some anthropologists who studied Samoan culture argued in favor of Freeman's findings and contradicted those of Mead, but others argued that Freeman's work did not invalidate Mead's work because Samoan culture had been changed by

1540-574: The author Leo Rosten . Mead's brother, Richard, was a professor. Mead was also the aunt of Jeremy Steig . During World War II, Mead along with other social scientist like Gregory Bateson and Ruth Benedict, took on several different responsibilities. In 1940, Mead joined the Committee for National Morale. In 1941, she also contributed to an essay that was released in the Applied Anthropology, which created strategies to help produce propaganda with

1595-465: The biggest problem of all. Similarly, Stephen J. Gould finds three main problems with intelligence testing in his 1981 book The Mismeasure of Man that relate to Mead's view of the problem of determining whether there are racial differences in intelligence. In 1929, Mead and Fortune visited Manus , now the northernmost province of Papua New Guinea, and traveled there by boat from Rabaul . She amply describes her stay there in her autobiography, and it

1650-427: The community. Mead also found that marriage is regarded as a social and economic arrangement in which wealth, rank, and job skills of the husband and wife are taken into consideration. Aside from marriage, Mead identified two types of sex relations: love affairs and adultery. The exceptions to these practices include women married to chiefs and young women who hold the title of taupo, a ceremonial princess, whose virginity

1705-563: The controversy by Paul Shankman, published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2009, supports the contention that Mead's research was essentially correct and concludes that Freeman cherry-picked his data and misrepresented both Mead and Samoan culture. A survey of 301 anthropology faculty in the United States in 2016 had two thirds agreeing with a statement that Mead "romanticizes the sexual freedom of Samoan adolescents" and half agreeing that it

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1760-413: The foreword to Coming of Age in Samoa , Mead's advisor, Franz Boas , wrote of the book's significance: Courtesy, modesty, good manners, conformity to definite ethical standards are universal, but what constitutes courtesy, modesty, very good manners, and definite ethical standards is not universal. It is instructive to know that standards differ in the most unexpected ways. In this way, the book tackled

1815-939: The general public. Orans points out that Freeman's basic criticisms, that Mead was duped by ceremonial virgin Fa'apua'a Fa'amu, who later swore to Freeman that she had played a joke on Mead, were equivocal for several reasons. Mead was well aware of the forms and frequency of Samoan joking, she provided a careful account of the sexual restrictions on ceremonial virgins that corresponds to Fa'apua'a Fa'auma'a's account to Freeman, and Mead's notes make clear that she had reached her conclusions about Samoan sexuality before meeting Fa'apua'a Fa'amu. Orans points out that Mead's data support several different conclusions and that Mead's conclusions hinge on an interpretive , rather than positivist , approach to culture. Orans went on to point out concerning Mead's work elsewhere that her own notes do not support her published conclusive claims. Evaluating Mead's work in Samoa from

1870-637: The inaugural conference of the American Society for Cybernetics was instrumental in the development of second-order cybernetics . Mead was featured on two record albums published by Folkways Records . The first, released in 1959, An Interview With Margaret Mead , explored the topics of morals and anthropology. In 1971, she was included in a compilation of talks by prominent women, But the Women Rose, Vol. 2: Voices of Women in American History . She

1925-558: The integration of Christianity in the decades between Mead's and Freeman's fieldwork periods. Eleanor Leacock traveled to Samoa in 1985 and undertook research among the youth living in urban areas . The research results indicate that the assertions of Derek Freeman were seriously flawed. Leacock pointed out that Mead's famous Samoan fieldwork was undertaken on an outer island that had not been colonialized. Freeman, meanwhile, had undertaken fieldwork in an urban slum plagued by drug abuse, structural unemployment, and gang violence. Mead

1980-535: The intent of raising national morale. In 1942, Mead served as the executive director of the Committee on Food Habits of the National Research Council, which served to gather data on American citizens ability to get food and their overall diet during the war. During World War II, Mead also served on the Institute for Intercultural Studies (IIS), whose prime objective was to research the “national character” of

2035-498: The life of Samoan girls and women on the island of Tau in the Manu'a Archipelago in 1926. The book includes analyses of how children were raised and educated, sex relations, dance, development of personality, conflict, and how women matured into old age. Mead explicitly sought to contrast adolescence in Samoa with that in America, which she characterized as difficult, constrained, and awkward. In

2090-502: The question of nature versus nurture, whether adolescence and its associated developments were a difficult biological transition for all humans or whether they were cultural processes shaped in particular societies. Mead believed childhood, adolescence, gender, and sex relations were largely driven by cultural practices and expressions. Mead's findings suggested that the community ignores both boys and girls until they are about 15 or 16. Before then, children have little social standing within

2145-419: The return boat she met Reo Fortune , a New Zealander headed to Cambridge , England, to study psychology . They were married in 1928, after Mead's divorce from Cressman. Mead dismissively characterized her union with her first husband as "my student marriage" in her 1972 autobiography Blackberry Winter , a sobriquet with which Cressman took vigorous issue. Mead's third and longest-lasting marriage (1936–1950)

2200-498: The rituals of the Episcopal Church to fit the expression of religion she was seeking. Mead studied one year, 1919, at DePauw University , then transferred to Barnard College . Mead earned her bachelor's degree from Barnard in 1923, began studying with professors Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict at Columbia University , and earned her master's degree in 1924. Mead set out in 1925 to do fieldwork in Samoa . In 1926, she joined

2255-659: The sum of her observations and interviews during her time in Samoa and that the status of the single interview did not falsify her work. Others such as Orans maintained that even though Freeman's critique was invalid, Mead's study was not sufficiently scientifically rigorous to support the conclusions she drew. In 1999, Freeman published another book, The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis of Her Samoan Research , including previously unavailable material. In his obituary in The New York Times , John Shaw stated that Freeman's thesis, though upsetting many, had by

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2310-435: The time of his death generally gained widespread acceptance. Recent work has nonetheless challenged Freeman's critique. A frequent criticism of Freeman is that he regularly misrepresented Mead's research and views. In a 2009 evaluation of the debate, anthropologist Paul Shankman concluded: There is now a large body of criticism of Freeman's work from a number of perspectives in which Mead, Samoa, and anthropology appear in

2365-675: The village of Peri, the film records how the role of the anthropologist has changed in the forty years since 1928. After her death, Mead's Samoan research was criticized by the anthropologist Derek Freeman , who published a book arguing against many of Mead's conclusions in Coming of Age in Samoa . Freeman argued that Mead had misunderstood Samoan culture when she argued that Samoan culture did not place many restrictions on youths' sexual explorations. Freeman argued instead that Samoan culture prized female chastity and virginity and that Mead had been misled by her female Samoan informants. Freeman found that

2420-465: Was Benjamin Spock , whose subsequent writings on child rearing incorporated some of Mead's own practices and beliefs acquired from her ethnological field observations which she shared with him; in particular, breastfeeding on the baby's demand, rather than by a schedule. Mead also had an exceptionally close relationship with Ruth Benedict , one of her instructors. In her memoir about her parents, With

2475-489: Was a professor of finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania , and her mother, Emily (née Fogg) Mead, was a sociologist who studied Italian immigrants. Her sister Katharine (1906–1907) died at the age of nine months. That was a traumatic event for Mead, who had named the girl, and thoughts of her lost sister permeated her daydreams for many years. Her family moved frequently and so her early education

2530-450: Was actually affecting intelligence scores. Next, Mead argues that it is difficult to measure the effect that social status has on the results of a person's intelligence test. She meant that environment (family structure, socioeconomic status, and exposure to language, etc.) has too much influence on an individual to attribute inferior scores solely to a physical characteristic such as race. Then, Mead adds that language barriers sometimes create

2585-449: Was an American cultural anthropologist , author and speaker, who appeared frequently in the mass media during the 1960s and the 1970s. She earned her bachelor's degree at Barnard College of Columbia University and her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia. Mead served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1975. Mead was a communicator of anthropology in modern American and Western culture and

2640-605: Was an adjunct professor from 1954 to 1978 and a professor of anthropology and chair of the Division of Social Sciences at Fordham University 's Lincoln Center campus from 1968 to 1970, founding their anthropology department. In 1970, she joined the faculty of the University of Rhode Island as a Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Anthropology. Following Ruth Benedict's example, Mead focused her research on problems of child rearing, personality, and culture. She served as president of

2695-561: Was careful to shield the identity of all her subjects for confidentiality, but Freeman found and interviewed one of her original participants, and Freeman reported that she admitted to having willfully misled Mead. She said that she and her friends were having fun with Mead and telling her stories. In 1996, the author Martin Orans examined Mead's notes preserved at the Library of Congress and credits her for leaving all of her recorded data available to

2750-453: Was directed by her grandmother until, at age 11, she was enrolled by her family at Buckingham Friends School in Lahaska , Pennsylvania. Her family owned the Longland farm from 1912 to 1926. Born into a family of various religious outlooks, she searched for a form of religion that gave an expression of the faith with which she had been formally acquainted, Christianity. In doing so, she found

2805-921: Was founded in 1794. The current Quaker Meetinghouse was built in 1768. An addition was put on in the 1930s, followed by the gymnasium in 1955 and the lower school building. Another addition was built in 2002/2003. In 2015, the Lower School was fully renovated. The school provides for grades K-8. The JEM (Joint Environmental Mission) program started in 1991. It is a foreign exchange program with an environmental theme. The exchange includes schools in St. Petersburg, Russia ; Belgaum , India ; Honolulu , Hawaii ; Ngong Hills, Kenya; Melbourne, Australia ; Nanchang, China ; Montmorillon, France ; and Rio Blanco, Amazon Rainforest, Ecuador . The first school partnership began with School #213 in Saint Petersburg , Russia. Every 4–5 years

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2860-731: Was ideologically motivated. Mead's Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies became influential within the feminist movement since it claimed that females are dominant in the Tchambuli (now spelled Chambri ) Lake region of the Sepik basin of Papua New Guinea (in the western Pacific) without causing any special problems. The lack of male dominance may have been the result of the Australian administration's outlawing of warfare. According to contemporary research, males are dominant throughout Melanesia . Others have argued that there

2915-558: Was often controversial as an academic. Her reports detailing the attitudes towards sex in South Pacific and Southeast Asian traditional cultures influenced the 1960s sexual revolution . She was a proponent of broadening sexual conventions within the context of Western cultural traditions. Margaret Mead, the first of five children, was born in Philadelphia but raised in nearby Doylestown, Pennsylvania . Her father, Edward Sherwood Mead,

2970-406: Was required. Mead described Samoan youth as often having free, experimental, and open sexual relationships, including homosexual relationships, which was at odds with mainstream American norms around sexuality. In 1970, National Educational Television produced a documentary in commemoration of the 40th anniversary Mead's first expedition to New Guinea. Through the eyes of Mead on her final visit to

3025-483: Was to the British anthropologist Gregory Bateson with whom she had a daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson , who would also become an anthropologist. She readily acknowledged that Bateson was the husband she loved the most. She was devastated when he left her and remained his loving friend ever afterward. She kept his photograph by her bedside wherever she traveled, including beside her hospital deathbed. Mead's pediatrician

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