Posts Tagged ‘Margaret Mead’

The two first acknowledged female anthropologists, Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict both criticized their own society through their ethnographies in their genderpositions and by presenting their work for a public audience as well as for the academic audience. They both considered cultural relativism as a necessary approach and had common theories based on culture, personality, patterns of culture and models human behaviour.

Mead’s Coming of age in Samoa was published in 1928 and Patterns of Culture by Benedict in 1934. Up to date the anthropologists where men studying men, the so called elderly men approach that resulted in descriptive anthropology presenting the lives lived by the eldest and wisest men in society. The changes in the younger generations behaviour where dismissed i the elderly men approach and the societies being studied where freezed in time and not even in the present but in the past represented by memories from the elderly men. This was challenged by Mead who used adolescents as informants, she gave the double subjugated voice- adolescent girls.

Benedict also has an agenda concerning inequality in the American society, but her main theme is discrimination on the foundation of sexuality. Benedict is widely respected in gay and lesbian communities up to date since she was a pioneer even in this area to challenge standardised norms of western society in making a be pro-gay standpoint. Taking a pro-gay stand in the 1920ies was of course controversial!

These two female anthropologists made way for many more female anthropologists to come, and I admire their courage to enter the field and  new approaches and topics in the male dominated discipline of anthropology. In my master thesis I am aiming at approaching a wider audience like Mead and Benedict and I am also, like Mead studying adolescent girls. Nowadays my deadline is getting closer, so lots of knowledge production is taking place at the moment. MA knowledge!