Pioneering anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote a great deal on enculturation and gender in her research. Mead was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on December 16, 1901, and grew up in a progressive home that valued education and tolerance. Her early exposure to a wide range of viewpoints and cultural practices prepared her for her subsequent studies in anthropology. During her time as a student at Barnard College, Mead was inspired to pursue an interest in anthropology by Franz Boas, who is widely recognized as the founder of American anthropology (Quental, Rojas Gaviria and del Bucchia, 2023). Boas’s focus significantly impacted Mead’s method of anthropology on cultural relativism, which holds that civilizations should be studied in the context of their circumstances without passing judgment.
Historical Context
The field in which she staged her life as a play was marked by a strong social and intellectual turbulence that expressed itself in the early twentieth century. The transformation taking place in Western societies due to the advancements in industries, urbanization, and female emancipation were occurring at a quick pace (Best and Gibbons, 2022). Besides, colonialism and greater global engagement led to an interest in and watching other cultures and their amazing customs.
Mead’s Work on Gender and Enculturation
Among Mead’s key works, “Coming of Age in Samoa” (1928) proved the dominance of Western thinking about gender and sexuality through her fieldwork in Samoa. It resulted in difficulties in understanding people in different cultures. In her argument, she claimed that the primary cultural factors were responsible for the human behaviour that is mostly displayed via gender roles and sex practices. Most of these are not biological (Quental, Rojas Gaviria and del Bucchia, 2023). This finding proved the whole idea of a universal pattern of behaviour and pointed out the utility of cultural elements. Mead’s research became a benchmark for the role of culture in the identity formation process, and it included field investigations in some societies of her interest, such as New Guinea and Bali. Her studies showed different options for gender roles and norms depending on various cultures, which point to the relevance of socialization and the influence of the environment on people’s behaviour.
Personal Life and Ethnographic Fieldwork
Mead’s personal life was significantly impacted by her anthropological fieldwork experiences, which also provided valuable insights for her scholarly work. Her observations of many cultural customs put traditional Western notions of marriage, relationships, and childrearing to the test. Her views of humanity, characteristic of her anthropological work, are revealed by her often nonconforming lifestyle (Best and Gibbons, 2022). She was involved with different wives and partners, and even in some cases, her marital and relationship model did not comply with classic Western norms, which demonstrated her belief in the adaptability of the human mind and simultaneously emphasized the necessity of the sociocultural context in the shaping of the human interaction.
The fieldwork Margaret Mead did spurred a strong drive for justice and getting people to act on social issues. Skillfully mixing her anthropological knowledge with social norms that perpetuate hierarchies and discrimination, especially women, was her greatest interest, according to her. Mead serves as a rule for transforming error and incorrect attitudes into bringing people together with people from different cultural backgrounds (Quental, Rojas Gaviria and del Bucchia, 2023). She not only participated in an academic debate but also helped in the realization of true societal change. In particular, she emphasized the need to consider the bedrock of injustices and limited access to opportunities for part of our society. Her dedication to advocating for equality endures beyond the class as a definition that anthropology is capable of having a positive and equalizing effect on societies.
In summary, Margaret Mead’s commitment to understanding the cultural variety and challenging Western beliefs about human behaviour drove her work on gender and enculturation. Her anthropological fieldwork shaped her relationships, views, and actions for social change, in addition to making a significant contribution to the discipline of anthropology.
Bibliography
Best, Deborah L., and Judith L. Gibbons. “Women Across the History of Cross-Cultural Psychology: Research and Leadership.” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 53, no. 7-8 (2022): 976-992.
Quental, Camilla, Pilar Rojas Gaviria, and Céline del Bucchia. “The dialectic of (menopause) zest: Breaking the mold of organizational irrelevance.” Gender, Work & Organization 30, no. 5 (2023): 1816-1838.
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