Word: anthropologist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...teacher have proved to be more accurate. A half-century later, just before her death in 1978, Margaret Mead had become so famous that a lot of people who read her column in Redbook or saw her on the Tonight show did not even know that she was an anthropologist. She was simply Margaret Mead, a celebrity, as bursting with opinions as Norman Mailer, as free with advice as Ann Landers...
Biographer Jane Howard (A Different Woman, Families) spent five years studying the making of Margaret Mead. Mead's only child, Mary Catherine Bateson, has, like most children, gone through a lifetime trying to understand her mother and her father, British Anthropologist Gregory Bateson. Both women have produced fascinating portraits of a stubbornly enigmatic subject...
Even as a young woman of 27, about to earn her first fame as the author of Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), Mead seemed an odd sort of anthropologist. She was a city person, passionately attached to Manhattan, who positively disliked the country. She became claustrophobic in native huts. She had little taste for artifacts. Her passion was for collecting people. From the time she took charge of her playmates' games, Mead proved a relentless organizer of others, regardless of their sex. In college, she formed the "Ash Can Cats," her first extended family, and bound these classmates...
...with colleagues, she was scarcely less demanding of her friends. People she had not seen for a while were subjected to "marathons of conversation, often exhausting." From Samoa to Greenwich Village, it seemed, she was everybody's mother-an irony not lost on Mary Catherine Bateson, now an anthropologist herself, who judged Mead to be "less than fully nurturant" when it came to her own daughter. Bateson expresses bittersweet amusement at her mother's boast that when Baby Cathy was six weeks old, "we let the nurse go and took care of her ourselves for a whole weekend...
...will those future generations that Mead so maternally cared about view her? These two books make the controversy started since her death by the anthropologist Derek Freeman, a professor in Australia, seem a bit beside the point. Did, as Freeman argues, Mead misread her celebrated Samoans? Were they as marvelously gentle as she thought them to be? Mead's conclusion, or wish, may have been less a matter of scholarship or research than of character. More evangelist than scientist, she appeared to believe that the ultimate purpose of anthropology is to increase a sense of life's possibilities...