Margaret Mead: Perbedaan antara revisi

 

 

 

Margaret Mead menikah tiga kali, pertama dengan [[Luther Cressman]] dan dua pernikahannya yang berikut dengan sesama antropolog, [[Reo Fortune]] dan [[Gregory Bateson]]. Dengan Bateson ia memperoleh seorang anak perempuan, yang juga seorang antropolog, [[Mary Catherine Bateson]]. Cucu perempuannya, Sevanne Margaret Kassarjian, adalah seorang aktris panggung dan televisi yang bekerja secara professional dengan nama Sevanne Martin.

Mead meninggal di [[New York City]] pada [[15 November]] 1978, dalam usia 76 tahun.

 

{{main|Coming of Age in Samoa}}

Dalam pengantarnya dalam buku ''Coming of Age in Samoa'', pembimbing Mead, [[Franz Boas]], menulis signifikansi buku tersebut:

Jadi, sebagaimana Mead sendiri menggambarkan tujuan penelitiannya: "Saya telah mencoba menjawab pertanyaan yang membuat saya pergi ke Samoa: Apakah gangguan-gangguan yang dialami remaja-remaja kita itu disebabkan oleh masa remaja itu sendiri ataukah karena peradaban? Dalam keadaan yang lain apakah kehidupan remajanya juga berbeda?" Menurut Mead memang demikian. (Lih. hlm. 6-7, American Museum of Natural History edisi 1973.)

 

 

Ia menyimpulkan bahwa peralihan dari kanak-kanak menjadi dewasa (masa remaja) di Samoa terjadi dengan mulus dan tidak ditandai oleh keresahan emosional ataupun psikologis, rasa cemas, atau kebingungan seperti yang tampak di AS. ([http://www.livejournal.com/users/aperey/1217.html Perey])

<!--After an initial flurry of discussion, most anthropologists concluded that the absolute truth would probably never be known. Many, however, find Freeman's critique highly questionable. First, these critics have speculated that he waited until Mead died before publishing his critique so that she would not be able to respond. Second, they pointed out that Mead's original informants were now old women, grandmothers, and had converted to [[Christianity]]. They further pointed out that Samoan culture had changed considerably in the decades following Mead's original research, that after intense missionary activity many Samoans had come to adopt the same sexual standards as the Americans who were once so shocked by Mead's book. They suggested that such women, in this new context, were unlikely to speak frankly about their adolescent behavior. (Note also that one of Freeman's interviewees gave her born-again faith as her reason for admitting to the past deception.) Finally, they suggested that these women would not be as forthright and honest about their sexuality when speaking to an elderly man, as they would have been speaking to a young woman. Many anthropologists also accuse Freeman of having the same ethnocentric sexual point of view as the people Boas and Mead once shocked.

 

 

Freeman continued to argue his case in the 1999 publication of ''The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis of Her Samoan Research''.

Another extremely influential book by Mead was ''Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies''. This became a major cornerstone of the women's liberation movement, since it claimed that females are dominant in the Tchambuli (now spelled Chambri) tribe of [[Papua New Guinea]] (in the western Pacific) without causing any special problems. The lack of male dominance may have been the result of the Australian administration's outlawing of warfare. According to contemporary research, males are dominant throughout Melanesia (although some believe that female witches have special powers). Others have argued that there is still much cultural variation throughout Melanesia, and especially in the large island of [[New Guinea]]. Moreover, male anthropologists often miss the significance of networks of political influence among females. The formal male-dominated institutions typical of some high-population density areas were not, for example, present in the same way in Oksapmin, West Sepik Province, a more sparsely populated area. Cultural patterns there were different from, say, Mt. Hagen. They were closer to those described by Mead.

 

When Margaret Mead described her research to her students at Columbia University, she put succinctly what her objectives and her conclusions were. A first-hand account by an anthropologist who studied with Mead in the 60s and 70s provides this information:

 

:*"Among the Arapesh, both men and women were peaceful in temperament and neither men nor women made war.

:*"Among the Mundugumor, the opposite was true: both men and women were warlike in temperament.

([http://www.livejournal.com/users/aperey/ Perey.] Reproduced by permission of the author.)

 

:2. Mead tells of ''Growing Up in New Guinea.'' "Margaret Mead told us how she came to the research problem on which she based her Growing Up in New Guinea. She reasoned as follows: If primitive adults think in an [[animistic]] way, as [[Jean Piaget|Piaget]] says our ''children'' do, how do primitive children think?

:*"In her research on [[Manus Island]] of New Guinea, she discovered that 'primitive' children think in a very practical way and begin to think in terms of spirits etc. as they get older.

([http://www.livejournal.com/users/aperey/970.html Perey]. Reproduced by permission of the author.)-->

 

== Bibliografi ==

* ''The Changing Culture of an Indian Tribe'' (1932)

* ''Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies'' (1935)

* ''New Lives for Old: Cultural Transformation in Manus, 1928-1953'' (1956)

* ''People and Places'' (1959; buku untuk pembaca muda)

* ''Continuities in Cultural Evolution'' (1964)

* ''Culture and Commitment'' (1970)

 

== Buku-buku suntingan ==

* George Appell 1984 "Freeman's Refutation of Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa: The Implications for Anthropological Inquiry" ''Eastern Anthropology'' 37: 183-214.

* Ivan Brady 1991 "''The Samoa Reader'': Last Word or Lost Horizon?" ''Current Anthropology'' 32: 263-282.

* Richard Feinberg 1988 "Margaret Mead and Samoa: ''Coming of Age'' in Fact and Fiction" ''American Anthropologist'' 90: 656-663

* [[Derek Freeman]] (1983). ''Margaret Mead and Samoa. Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-54830-2.

*Lowell D. Holmes (1987) ''Quest for the Real Samoa: the Mead/Freeman Controversy and Beyond''. South Hadley: Bergin and Garvey

* Eleanor Leacock 1988 "Anthropologists in Search of a Culture: Margaret Mead, Derek Freeman and All the Rest of Us" dalam ''Central Issues in Anthropology'' 8(1): 3-20.

* Allan Patience and Josephy Smith 1986 "Derek Freemanin Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of a Biobehavioral Myth" ''American Anthropologist'' 88: 157-162.

* David B. Paxman 1988 "Freeman, Mead, and the Eighteenth-Century Controversy over Polynesian Society" ''Pacific Studies'' 1(3): 1-19

*Nancy Scheper-Hughes 1984 "The Margaret Mead Controversy: Culture, Biology, and Anthropological Inquiry" dalam ''Human Organization 43(1): 85-93.

* Paul Shankman 1996 "The History of Samoan Sexual Conduct and the Mead-Freeman Controversy" dalam ''American Anthropologist''98(3): 555-567.

*[http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/mead/ Library of Congress, Margaret Mead: Human Nature and the Power of Culture]

 

[[Kategori:Antropolog Amerika Serikat|Mead, Margaret]]

 

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