Margaret Mead was born on the 16th of December 1901 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

She was an American cultural anthropologist and writer. She is considered as the best-known
anthropologist of the 20th century because of the change she did in studying different human
cultures. Her studies mostly focused on the peoples living in Oceania.

Mead was the first of five children born to Emily Fogg and Edward Sherwood Mead. Her
father taught at the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce and founded the University of
Pennsylvania’s evening school. On the other hand, her mother was a sociologist and an advocate
of women’s rights. She graduated in 1923 from Bernard College where she majored in
psychology. After receiving her master’s degree, she embarked on a journey to Samoa. Despite
the opposition of her older colleagues, she continued her study of the life of adolescent girls and
even learned their native language. The findings she collected became the material for her first
book, “Coming of Age in Samoa.” This book highlighted Mead’s reliance on observation rather
than statistics for data and belief in cultural determinism, a theory which states that a person’s
behavior, beliefs, attitudes, and the like are dependent to the culture they were born with.

Her second journey to the Pacific started in 1928. She went to the country of New Guinea
with an anthropologist in New Zealand, Reo Fortune. She focused on studying the thoughts of
young children. She then released a book entitled “Growing Up in Guinea” published in 1930.
Twenty-five years later, she went back to the same town where the children she knew when she
first visited are now community leaders facing modern problems. She further discussed this
transition in her book “New Lives for Old.”

Mead’s dedication to study the cultures of people, who are thousands of miles from her
home, made anthropology accessible to a wider public. Her studies changed the views of many
Westerners when it comes to primitive cultures. Her belief that any group of people can learn
from any other group humbled a lot of researchers and non-researchers alike. Margaret Mead’s
brave approach to cultural anthropology allowed more to understand the culture of the unknown
back then.

References:
Margaret Mead. (1999). Retrieved from brittanica.com/biography/Margaret-Mead.
Margaret Mead biography. (2014). Retrieved from biography.com/scholar/margaret-mead.
Margaret Mead biography. (n.d.). Retrieved from notablebiographies.com/Ma-Mo/Mead-
Margaret.html.