Margaret Mead

(From the introduction) On August 25, 1970, anthropologist Margaret Mead and writer James Baldwin met for the first time to have three recorded conversations, totaling more than seven hours of tape that, once transcribed, would compose the book, A Rap on Race (1971). The Mead and Baldwin Book is an amazing account documenting the meeting of two of the twentieth century's paradigmatic thinkers and cultural creators discussing the meanings of "race" in the United Staes and in the world.

Excerpts from women's diaries, letters, speeches, and autobiographical writings provide a first-person look at the history of American women.

Traces the life and work of the noted woman anthropologist whose studies of primitive cultures established her as an authority in her field.

"Margaret Mead once said, "I have spent most of my life studying the lives of other peoples - faraway peoples - so that Americans might better understand themselves." Continuities in Cultural Evolution is evidence of this devotion. It began as the Terry Lectures, given at Yale in 1957 and was not published until 1964, after extensive reworking. The time she spent on revision is evidence of the importance Mead attached to the subject: the need to develop a truly evolutionary vision of human culture and society."--BOOK JACKET.

"The Manus of New Guinea's Pere village were Margaret Mead's most favored community, the people to whom she returned five times before she died in 1978. Kinship in the Admiralty Islands is the classic and only thorough description of their complex rules of marriage and family relations. It draws on Mead's 1928-1929 field work, conducted with her second husband, New Zealander Reo Fortune, and benefits by her being able to cross-check her data with his. Written in 1931, Kinship followed Mead's first and very popular book on the Manus, Growing Up in New Guinea, which was criticized by other anthropologists for being too general in scope. In Kinship, Mead succeeded in demonstrating her thorough knowledge of this Melanesian group in the specific terms prized by her scholarly colleagues, while also describing in depth Manus social structure.". "Kinship in the Admiralty Islands describes an intricate system of social restraints and kinship ties and their impact on the local economy. The Manus' predilection for adoption for example, allows surrogate fathers to make extended marriage payments, while in the next generation their adopted sons will take on the same responsibility for other young men in the new kin network. Mead reviews other kinship rules, such as avoidance behavior between in-laws of the opposite sex, early betrothals, other forms of adoption, and a range of deference behavior and joking relations among kin. In this work, Mead walks a fine line between functionalist kinship analysis of the British school of Radclife-Brown and the cultural-and-personality orientation of Americans in the school of Franz Boas."--BOOK JACKET.

286 pages ; 24 cm

Margaret Mead, America's most famous anthropologist, offers an intimate portrait of her long-time colleague and friend, Ruth Benedict. The first met when Mead was Benedict's student at Barnard in the 1920s; their professional association and their friendship were close and lasting. Beginning with Benedict's early life, Mead discusses her long struggle, as a woman, to attain an identity of her own, her early interests as a writer and poet, and her reasons for laying aside poetry for full-time scholarship. She grappled with the problems of a middle-class marriage and suburban household and eventually broke away to establish herself as a scholar and writer of distinction. As an anthropologist, her fame spread far beyond her profession with the publication of her first book, Patterns of Culture. With the coming of World War II, Benedict shifted her attention to an anthropological study of contemporary, highly developed cultures. The culmination of this interest was the publication of The Chrysanthemum and the Sword and the establishment of the Columbia University Research in Contemporary Cultures project, a broad-based interdisciplinary research project which she headed until her untimely death in 1948. Complementing the biography are seven selections from Benedict's writings which show the range of her thought as well as the beauty of her writing, including her lecture as retiring President of the American Anthropological Association.--From publisher description.