1 post tagged “margaret mead”

I know this passage I'm about to paste is pretty common sense type knowledge, but it was nice to read actual scientific study documentation about it..... (Came across it while working for my Cultural Anthropology class in the textbook.  It's called "Cultural Anthropology: An Applied Perspective" by Gary Ferraro. Seventh Edition, Page 75)...

"Margaret Mead (1901-1978)... was one of the earliest and most prolific writers in the field of culture and personality.  After completing her graduate training under Boas at Columbia University, Mead became fascinated wth the general topic of the emotional disruption that seemd to accompany adolescence in the United States.  Psychologists at the time maintained that the stress and emotional problems found among American adolescents were a biological fact of life and occured in puberty in all societies.  But Mead wanted to know whether this emotional turbulence was the result of being an adolescent or of being an adolescent in the United States.  In 1925 she left for Somoa to try to determine whether the strains of adolescence were universal (that is, biologically based) or varied from one culture to another. In her first book, Coming of Age in Somoa (1928), Mead reported that the permissive family structure and relaxed sexual patterns among Somoans were responsible for a calm adolescence.  Thus, she concluded that the emotional turbulence found among adolescents in the United States was culturally rather than biologically based."