Margaret Mead Culture And Personality School Analysis

Margaret Mead's position within modern American anthropology is a little strange. She is widely respected as someone who was determined in defining anthropology, establishing its boundaries both within the academy and within public understanding, and shaping the course it has followed today. At the same time, nobody seriously engages with her work, and the main framework she worked in, the Culture and Personality School, is generally considered to be simple and poor. So, why do people still look up to her? The Culture and Personality School was a necessary first step in reaching a more advanced understanding of the relationship between social organization, culture and behavior of individuals. "We are forced to conclude that human nature is …show more content…
The problem with studying other cultures is that you have common sense notions of what different categories mean based on your own culture - so you don't know what is human, and what is culturally specific. For example, when a lot of Americans and Europeans talk about religion, they tend to assume that all other religions basically follow an idealized understanding of Protestant Christianity in modern society. So, we think it's a matter of belief, and that religion is a category within society, that exists separate from and alongside other categories like science, the market, kinship, politics. Mead established that in Samoan society, adolescence was fundamentally different. Issues of teen angst, rebellion and a troubled adjustment between childhood and adulthood didn't exist in the same way it does in the West. In doing so, she did a few important

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Margaret Mead Culture And Personality School Analysis

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