In this unit (to accompany SAPIENS podcast S6E2), students will learn about Margaret Mead’s career, including how her accomplishments impacted future anthropologists from a feminist perspective and how her developments influenced 20th-century America. Students will read about significant milestones in her career and learn how her academic journey led toward her research outcomes with the Samoans and other anthropological achievements.
The belief in and advocacy of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes expressed especially through organized activity on behalf of women’s rights and interests.
The complex, cumulative way in which the effects of multiple forms of discrimination (such as racism, sexism, and classism) combine, overlap, or intersect, especially in the experiences of marginalized individuals or groups.
The idea that contends that categories of knowledge and of “reality” itself are actively created by and are the products of social and symbolic relationships and interactions, all within the given temporal and spatial boundaries of a cultural context
Jarvie, Ian. “Mead and the Trajectory of Anthropology in the United States.” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 47, nos. 4-5 (2016): 359-369.
Shankman, Paul. “The Public Anthropology of Margaret Mead: Redbook, Women’s Issues, and the 1960s.” Current Anthropology 59, no. 1 (2018).
Article: Barnard Center for Research on Women’s “Margaret Mead’s Legacy: Continuing Conversations
Article: The Legacy Project’s “Margaret Mead – Nominee 1901-1978”
Article: Sam Dresser’s “The Meaning of Margaret Mead”
Video: Manufacturing Intellect’s “Margaret Mead interview on Cultural Anthropology (1959)”
Casie Gray, Freedom Learning Group