Margaret Mead

1901–1978 · American cultural anthropologist and author

Margaret Mead was the most famous anthropologist America ever produced — a fieldworker in Samoa and New Guinea whose Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) made her a household name at twenty-seven, and who spent the next fifty years as a curator at the American Museum of Natural History and a relentless public explainer of culture. She was also, unusually for a scientist, a columnist, broadcaster and platform speaker, which is exactly why so many unsourced one-liners cling to her: she said an enormous amount out loud, in rooms where nobody was transcribing. Her 1964 book Continuities in Cultural Evolution — grown out of the Terry Lectures at Yale — is her book-length argument about how cultures actually change, with chapters on what she called evolutionary “clusters.”

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