Tags
Language
Tags
March 2024
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
25 26 27 28 29 1 2
3 4 5 6 7 8 9
10 11 12 13 14 15 16
17 18 19 20 21 22 23
24 25 26 27 28 29 30
31 1 2 3 4 5 6

Margaret Mead: The Making of an American Icon

Posted By: Stalker1984
Margaret Mead: The Making of an American Icon

Nancy C. Lutkehaus, "Margaret Mead: The Making of an American Icon"
P–-ton U/ty P…s | ISBN: 0691148082 | 2010 | PDF | 347 pages | 3,12 mb

As an anthropologist who has herself conducted research in Papua New Guinea, Lutkehaus (Zarias Fire) is well positioned to evaluate renowned forerunner Margaret Meads cultural influence in 20th-century American society. Her intriguing thesis examines Mead as a representative figure of public concerns and desires—and as a prism through which to view anthropologys influence on the rapidly changing contours of American life. The argument remains too familiar and superficial, however, to be of much force. Lutkehaus stresses Meads early media-savvy participation in the construction of a public persona—from quintessential 1920s flapper to model modern woman, Grandmother to the World to emblem of gay rights. Mead had an instinct for resonant social commentary and notoriety. The author emphasizes (as do many Mead biographers) the connection between her subjects personal life and her academic and popular writing (beginning with her highly influential crossover studies of Samoan adolescence and sexuality), but is too protective of her subject to allow a nuanced reading of Meads precise methodology or political liberalism, or their notable entanglement in the relationship between Meads version of cultural relativism, the new field of applied anthropology and American hegemony.