by Remy Gr

Created on: July 09, 2009

Margaret Mead was the most renowned anthropologist of the twentieth century who was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on December 16, 1901. She grew up there in a liberal intellectual atmosphere. Her father, Edward Sherwood Mead, was a professor in the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce and the founder of the University of Pennsylvania's evening school and extension program. Her mother, Emily Fogg Mead, was a sociologist and an early advocate of woman's rights.

Writer and sociologist Mary Pipher, in her book Another Country: Navigating the Emotional Terrain of Our Elders (Riverhead Books, 1999) says, "Margaret Mead defined an ideal community as one that has a place for every human gift. An ideal community would somehow keep the best of the old ways and add the best of the new. We would have a mixing of races, generations, and viewpoints. We could enjoy the intellectual and cultural stimulation of cities and the safety of friendly neighborhoods. We would have privacy and potluck dinners, freedom and civic responsibility. All the adults would take responsibility to help all the children. We would have connection without clannishness, accountability without autocratic control. The ideal community would support individual growth and development and foster loyalty and commitment to the common good." Definitely, mead brought a revolution in American society and peoples perspectives in various fields. She gained fame and respect from all the sociologists of the world.

She majored in psychology in Barnard College. In her senior year, she had a course in anthropology with Franz Boas, which she later described as the most influential event in her life, since it was then that she decided to become an anthropologist. Later, Margaret Mead began her career as an anthropologist with a shift from psychology. Mead became a founder of the culture and personality school of anthropology. She was deeply committed to making anthropological knowledge matter, especially in a world of rapid scientific and technological change.

After graduating from the Barnard College in 1923, she married Luther Cressman and entered the anthropology department of Columbia University. At the same time, the catastrophe of World War I and its results had their impact on the developing discipline of anthropology. Anthropologists began to ask how their knowledge of the nature of humankind might be used to illuminate contemporary problems. At the same time, the influence of Sigmund Freud was

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