Margret Mead
Introduction
This cultural anthropologist was born in 1901 in Philadelphia. Se graduated from Barnard College in the year 1923. Mead was appointed as the Assistant Curator of ethnology in the museum of Natural History. Margret travelled to the south pacific on different occasions to study primitive structures (Greenfield,2001). Mead came up with her ideas on the impact of the social convention on behaviour specifically in Adolescent girls.
Sex and Temperaments was Meads famous work; she described the full range of temperaments that were portrayed by women and men from various cultures. She did her studies from the Arapesh nurturing men up to the violent Mundugumor women (Rensberger,1983). Mead always stated that social conventions are the ones that determined peoples behaviour and not biology as many believed. This theory, popularly known as imprinting theory, established that children learnt through apprenticeship, in that they learned by watching the adults.
Later on, Mead came up with her nature vs nurture idea in male and female. In this study, Margret came up with various ways through which the mothers served to reinforce the gender roles in the society to the male and female children. Afterwards, she emphasized that there is a high probability of changing gender stereotypes. She encouraged people to step up and resist traditional gender ideologies.
Meads studies impacted many Americans as she persuaded many of them to understand other peoples lives in a quest to understand themselves better (Greenfield,2001). The new ideologies by Mead informed the Americans that if they ease their sexuality both homosexual and heterosexual, they will get enriched. Her studies also told the people that careers and motherhood had to go together to build better support networks. This relation between the two would assist the nuclear family, which was overburdened.
Conclusion
Meads studies on the primitive cultures enlightened her to come up with theories which would assist the Americans to live better lives. The survey of behaviour being a great work impacted many Americans as people now understood where this behaviour that some children exhibited originated from. Her study about nurture vs nature shaped the ideology of the new thinking of people about gender roles. She was able to persuade people that gender roles should be done away with. She also pointed out the vital role played by mothers in the shaping of gender expectations among the story. It’s true to say she was the oracle of America.
References
Greenfield, S. M. (2001). Nature/Nurture and the Anthropology of Franz Boas and Margaret
Mead as an agenda for revolutionary politics. Horizontes Antropológicos, 7(16), 35-52.
Rensberger, B. (1983). Margaret Mead: the nature-nurture debate I.