Talk:Margaret Mead

Pronunciation

Can pronunciation of her surname be added please. I imagine this is obvious to native English speakers but we EFL learners are at a loss. Mateno (talk) 19:52, 5 May 2024 (UTC)

Number of siblings

At one point, this article states that Margaret was one of 5 children. Then later on, it says "she had two sisters and a brother"... 62.172.214.50 (talk) 08:50, 10 January 2025 (UTC)

Sex and Temperament: Deleting Perey material and starting over

From 2005 until now, the bulk of the section on Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies has been this text contributed by an IP user and by @Arnold Perey in 2005:

The IP addition is as follows:

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 tribes of the South Sea islands, without causing any special problems. However, looking up Tchambuli (sometimes spelled Chambri or Chimbu) in the Encyclopedia Britannica and other such modern references, the reader finds that later anthropological studies do not confirm this, and that males are dominant in Melanesia, except for the belief that some female witches have special taboo powers. (See also Gender Relations in Melanesian Culture, in the Encyc. Britannica.) Also, Mead claimed that the Arapesh people were pacifists, but later studies did not confirm this.

And Arnold Perey's two-part contribution is this:

However, it should also be pointed out that Mead was looking at cultures in transition in the 1930s. The Tchambuli men seem bewildered in Sex and Temperament for they no longer have traditionsl warfare--stopped by the Australiam administration. The Tchambuli later may well have been different--and later studies should be related to Mead's earlier studies rather than "replacing" them.

All generalizations about Melanesia need not apply to every culture in New Guinea, for New Guinea is a large island with isolated populations. For example networks of political influence among females may be more powerful than at first appears, particularly to a male anthropologist. 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, Mr. Hagen. They were closer to those described by Mead.

Informants describe Arapesh as definitely fighting with others. However, a close study of her volumes on the Arapesh show that Mead did describe how the Arapesh had both peace and war, as other cultures do, but she did not sufficiently not relate the two dispositions: (1) the disposition to see others as enemies and (2) to see them as friends. Meanwhile, her observations about the sharing of garden plots amongst the Arapesh, the egaliterian emphasis in child-rearing, and her documentation of predominantly peaceful relations among relatives hold up. These descriptions are very different from the "big-man" displays of dominance that were documented in more stratified New Guinea cultures--e.g. by Andrew Strathern. They are indeed, as she wrote, a cultural pattern

When Margaret Mead described her own researches 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:--

1. Mead tells of Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies. "She explained that nobody knew the degree to which temperament is biologically determined by sex. So she hoped to see whether there were cultural or social factors that affected temperament. Were men inevitably aggressive? Were women inevitably "homebodies"? It turned out that the three cultures she lived with in New Guinea were almost a perfect laboratory--for each had the variables that we associate with masculine and feminine in an arrangement different from ours. She said this surprised her, and wasn't what she was trying to find. It was just there.

"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.

"And the Tchambuli were different from both. The men 'primped' and spent their time decorating themselves while the women worked and were the practical ones--the opposite of how it seemed in early 20th century America." [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 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.

"Note: Animistic thinking gives feelings or personality to inanimate objects. For example, a child can say "Bad sidewalk!" if she falls and hurts herself on it--seeing the sidewalk as mean for causing her pain. The term animism comes from the Latin for soul, "anima." And tribal cultures often do have animistic concepts: Pueblos see the clouds as cloud people, who can be pleased or displeased by what man does--and give rain or drought." [Perey. Reproduced by permission of the author.]

Nearly all of this comes from Perey's blog, Anthropological Anecdotes. Perey was a student of Mead's and later a professor at Queensborough Community College. However, over time, bits of this early Wikipedia article have been copied elsewhere online, and a section of Perey's lecture summary paraphrasing Mead now appears in a College Sidekick study guide on Sex and Temperament, which in turn is provided as an incorrect citation to Mead's book.

The anonymous IP contribution is argumentative and it begins with a flat-out falsehood: it is not the case that female dominance among the Tchambuli led to Sex and Temperament's role in the women's movement, but rather the book's explanation of the sex-gender distinction. Perey's blog does not meet the requirements for self-published sources to be included here. The section does not focus first on sharing the contents of Sex and Temperament and second on sharing RS commentary on it. Better to rewrite it from the start. Carwil (talk) 07:14, 17 November 2025 (UTC)

I've now re-added the paragraphs on Deborah Gewertz and Jessie Bernard to Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies. @Sdio7, your contribution is part of this. Carwil (talk) 19:41, 17 November 2025 (UTC)

Re 'Perey's blog does not meet the requirements for self-published sources to be included here' - well, as far as I can see, he is a 'an established subject-matter expert, whose work in the relevant field has previously been published by reliable, independent publications', which is just the sort of case in which self-published sources are allowed per the policy you linked to. I do agree that his opinions on this matter shouldn't be presented in wikivoice as he himself posted them, nor should they be rendered in such great detail, but some concise, explicitly attributed rendering of his main points and arguments would seem appropriate.--Anonymous44 (talk) 14:19, 13 April 2026 (UTC)