HAR is pleased to announce one of the latest releases from BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology: two articles (in English) on Margaret Mead’s fieldwork experience and its ethnographic outcomes.
Shankman, Paul, 2025. “The Forgotten Ethnographic Legacy of Margaret Mead (1925‑1930),” in BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.
Shankman, Paul, 2025. “The Forgotten Ethnographic Legacy of Margaret Mead (1931‑1939),” in BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.
The author of a prolific body of work, Margaret Mead (1901–1978) is the best known US anthropologist of the twentieth century, and the person who epitomized anthropology in the eyes of the public. She is widely known for her popular works, including Coming of Age in Samoa (1928). These works were commercial, highly visible, and often worked against her reputation as a scholar. Yet Mead was a dedicated fieldworker and serious ethnographer, publishing a number of professional ethnographic monographs that covered her fieldwork in eight different cultures during the years 1925 to 1940. Although relatively less known, these works were often well regarded, contributing to the ethnographic record. Mead was also a pioneering and innovative ethnographer, advocating team research, the use of psychological testing, photography, and film, and the importance of fieldnotes.
In the first of two articles highlighting Mead’s trajectory, Paul Shankman covers Mead’s fieldwork and publications between 1925 and 1931. From 1928 and throughout the 1930s, she and her successive husbands, Reo Fortune and Gregory Bateson, conducted ethnographic experiments in New Guinea and Bali. Shankman’s second article is dedicated to the years from 1931 to 1940, namely to Mead’s fieldwork among the Arapesh, Mundugumor, Tchambuli, Balinese, and Iatmul. A disciple of Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict, Mead was one of the first female anthropologists to graduate from a US university (1929). She was a pioneer in her thinking on the methodology of ethnographic observation, through her research on child rearing, sexuality and gender relations, psychological anthropology, and visual anthropology. She worked for the US government during the Second World War and for major international organizations after the war, such as UNESCO, on studies of national character, social change and nutrition. She spent most of her career at the American Museum of Natural History. After her death, her work on Samoa was the subject of a violent controversy with Derek Freeman. Mead remains both an inspirational and a much-debated figure in the history of the discipline.
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