Maureen A. Molloy
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- November 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780824831165
- eISBN:
- 9780824869236
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Hawai'i Press
- DOI:
- 10.21313/hawaii/9780824831165.001.0001
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Social and Cultural Anthropology
Margaret Mead's career took off in 1928 with the publication of Coming of Age in Samoa. Within ten years, she was the best-known academic in the United States, a role she enjoyed all of her life. ...
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Margaret Mead's career took off in 1928 with the publication of Coming of Age in Samoa. Within ten years, she was the best-known academic in the United States, a role she enjoyed all of her life. This book explores how Mead was influenced by, and influenced, the meanings of American culture and secured for herself a unique and enduring place in the American popular imagination. It considers this in relation to Mead's four popular ethnographies written between the wars, and the academic, middle-brow, and popular responses to them. The book argues that Mead was heavily influenced by the debates concerning the forging of a distinctive American culture that began around 1911 with the publication of George Santayana's The Genteel Tradition. The creation of a national culture would solve the problems of alienation and provincialism and establish a place for both native-born and immigrant communities. Mead drew on this vision of an “integrated culture” and used her “primitive societies” as exemplars of how cultures attained or failed to attain this ideal. Her ethnographies are really about “America,” the peoples she studied serving as the personifications of what were widely understood to be the dilemmas of American selfhood in a materialistic, individualistic society.Less
Margaret Mead's career took off in 1928 with the publication of Coming of Age in Samoa. Within ten years, she was the best-known academic in the United States, a role she enjoyed all of her life. This book explores how Mead was influenced by, and influenced, the meanings of American culture and secured for herself a unique and enduring place in the American popular imagination. It considers this in relation to Mead's four popular ethnographies written between the wars, and the academic, middle-brow, and popular responses to them. The book argues that Mead was heavily influenced by the debates concerning the forging of a distinctive American culture that began around 1911 with the publication of George Santayana's The Genteel Tradition. The creation of a national culture would solve the problems of alienation and provincialism and establish a place for both native-born and immigrant communities. Mead drew on this vision of an “integrated culture” and used her “primitive societies” as exemplars of how cultures attained or failed to attain this ideal. Her ethnographies are really about “America,” the peoples she studied serving as the personifications of what were widely understood to be the dilemmas of American selfhood in a materialistic, individualistic society.
