GENDER ROLES IN GUINEA

Gender Roles in Guinea

GENDER ROLES IN GUINEA

Margaret Mead, the most prominent and recognized anthropologist of the 20th century, had a profound influence on anthropology and feminism. She achieved celebrity status and became an American oracle.

Mead's work in Peri led to Growing Up in New Guinea (1930), in which she argued that the difference between the “civilized mind” and the “primitive mind” had been exaggerated; human nature was malleable. The work was highly received and inspired her to study the Omaha Indians of Nebraska (1930), followed by research in Alitoa, New Guinea (1931). There, Mead developed a typology of aggression based on the pacifist Arapesh mountain people and the violent Mundugamour village people, and she also studied the Tchambuli people while living with the Washkuk tribe. Her typology was a major contribution to the theory of cultural relativity.

Following a divorce from Fortune, Mead married ethnologist Gregory Bateson (1936). They conducted 2 years of fieldwork in Bali, where they used photography in research and annotated more than 25,000 photographs, many taken of the Balinese ritual of trances, a fundamental element in Balinese culture (“Trance and Dance in Bali” in Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis, 1942).

In 1944, Mead and Benedict collaborated to form the Institute for International Studies to analyze contemporary societies from which salient elements could be incorporated into a new world order.

Mead's prolific writings include And Keep Your Powder Dry: An Anthropologist Looks at America (1942); Male and Female: A Study of the Sexes in the Changing World (1949); New Lives for Old (1956); Culture and Commitment: A Study of the Generation Gap (1970); and her autobiographical Blackberry Winter: My Early Years (1972). Feminism is a recurrent theme throughout her writings. She had a demonstrable sense of adventure and heroism along with a disdain for the passive cultural ...