Warfare: An Invention — Not a Biological Necessity
W
\M.vO
Margaret Mead
Warfare: An Invention — Not a Biological Necessity
(1940)
IN 1969, TIME MAGAZINE named anthropologist Margaret Mead (1901-1978) the
"Mother of the World." This title stemmed in part from Mead's work with young girls in various cultures around the world, but it also recognized the moral and intellectual status that she earned during her fifty-year career as the world's most famous and respected anthropologist.
Mead was born in Philadelphia in 1901. She earned a doctoral degree in anthropology from Columbia University, where she studied under the legendary anthropologist Ruth Benedict (p. 56). In 1925, Mead traveled to American Samoa for an extensive fieldwork project studying adolescent girls. She used this research as the basis for her first book, Conning of Age in Samoa (1928), which became a best seller and introduced a generation of nonspecialists to the field of anthropology. In 1929,
Mead traveled to New Guinea for a similar study, which resulted in her second major book, Crowing Up in New Guinea (1930). She continued doing fieldwork throughout the world, but maintained strong ties to New York, where for most of her career she worked at the American Museum of Natural History.
In the course of her career, Mead became known as an expert on both a diverse group of cultures and on human culture generally—on the ways that human beings form, maintain, and modify social relations. She refused to accept the common division of the world into "civilized" and "primitive" cultures, insisting instead that all cultures had things to learn from each other. The accessibility of her scholarly work, combined with her willingness to write articles for the popular press (she wrote a monthly column for Redbook magazine for seventeen years), put a human face on the often-obscure discipline of anthropology and gave Mead enormous influence with the American public.
The following essay, "Warfare: An Invention—Not a Biological
\M.vO
Margaret Mead
Warfare: An Invention — Not a Biological Necessity
(1940)
IN 1969, TIME MAGAZINE named anthropologist Margaret Mead (1901-1978) the
"Mother of the World." This title stemmed in part from Mead's work with young girls in various cultures around the world, but it also recognized the moral and intellectual status that she earned during her fifty-year career as the world's most famous and respected anthropologist.
Mead was born in Philadelphia in 1901. She earned a doctoral degree in anthropology from Columbia University, where she studied under the legendary anthropologist Ruth Benedict (p. 56). In 1925, Mead traveled to American Samoa for an extensive fieldwork project studying adolescent girls. She used this research as the basis for her first book, Conning of Age in Samoa (1928), which became a best seller and introduced a generation of nonspecialists to the field of anthropology. In 1929,
Mead traveled to New Guinea for a similar study, which resulted in her second major book, Crowing Up in New Guinea (1930). She continued doing fieldwork throughout the world, but maintained strong ties to New York, where for most of her career she worked at the American Museum of Natural History.
In the course of her career, Mead became known as an expert on both a diverse group of cultures and on human culture generally—on the ways that human beings form, maintain, and modify social relations. She refused to accept the common division of the world into "civilized" and "primitive" cultures, insisting instead that all cultures had things to learn from each other. The accessibility of her scholarly work, combined with her willingness to write articles for the popular press (she wrote a monthly column for Redbook magazine for seventeen years), put a human face on the often-obscure discipline of anthropology and gave Mead enormous influence with the American public.
The following essay, "Warfare: An Invention—Not a Biological