On Creating a Usable Culture Margaret Mead and the Emergence of American Cosmopolitanism
On Creating a Usable Culture: Margaret Mead and the Emergence of American Cosmopolitanism

Margaret Mead's career took off in 1928 with the publication of Coming of Age in Samoa. Within ten years, she was the best-known academic in the United States, a role she enjoyed all of her life. In On Creating a Usable Culture, Maureen Molloy explores how Mead was influenced by, and influenced...

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Bibliographische Detailangaben
1. Verfasser: Molloy, Maureen A. (VerfasserIn)
Format: Elektronisch E-Book
Sprache:English
Veröffentlicht: Honolulu University of Hawaii Press [2008]
Schlagworte:
SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / Cultural & Social
Anthropology in literature
Anthropology in popular culture > United States
Anthropology > United States > Popular works
Cosmopolitanism > United States
Online-Zugang:DE-1046
DE-1043
DE-858
DE-859
DE-860
DE-739
DE-473
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Zusammenfassung:Margaret Mead's career took off in 1928 with the publication of Coming of Age in Samoa. Within ten years, she was the best-known academic in the United States, a role she enjoyed all of her life. In On Creating a Usable Culture, Maureen Molloy explores how Mead was influenced by, and influenced, the meanings of American culture and secured for herself a unique and enduring place in the American popular imagination.
She considers this in relation to Mead's four popular ethnographies written between the wars (Coming of Age in Samoa, Growing Up in New Guinea, The Changing Culture of an Indian Tribe, and Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies) and the academic, middle-brow, and popular responses to them.Molloy argues that Mead was heavily influenced by the debates concerning the forging of a distinctive American culture that began around 1911 with the publication of George Santayana's "The Genteel Tradition." The creation of a national culture would solve the problems of alienation and provincialism and establish a place for both native-born and immigrant communities. Mead drew on this vision of an "integrated culture" and used her "primitive societies" as exemplars of how cultures attained or failed to attain this ideal.
Her ethnographies are really about "America," the peoples she studied serving as the personifications of what were widely understood to be the dilemmas of American selfhood in a materialistic, individualistic society. Two themes subtend Molloy's analysis. The first is Mead's articulation of the individual's relation to his or her culture via the trope of sex. Each of her early ethnographies focuses on a "character" and his or her problems as expressed through sexuality. This thematic ties her work closely to the popularization of psychoanalysis at the time with its understanding of sex as the key to the self. The second theme involves the change in Mead's attitude toward and definition of "culture"-from the cultural determinism in Coming of Age to culture as the enemy of the individual in Sex and Temperament.
Beschreibung:Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 29. Jul 2021)
Beschreibung:1 online resource (216 pages) 10 illus
ISBN:9780824863777
DOI:10.1515/9780824863777

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