Academic recognition: Margaret mead, ruth benedict and sexual secrecy

In January 1932, anthropologist Ruth Benedict writes a letter to her colleague Margaret Mead on fieldwork in New Guinea, bringing Mead up to date on the health of “Papa” Franz Boas. Boas, the academic mentor that Benedict and Mead shared at Columbia University, acts as only the momentary locus for their continuing exchange about life and work and the relationship between the two. After giving “her hospital report,” Benedict turns eagerly to another conversation with Mead, asking, “Did you likeThe Waves? And did you keep thinking how you'd set down everybody you knew in a similar fashion? I did. I suppose I'm disappointed that she didn't include any violent temperaments, and I want my group of persons to be more varied” (Mead,Anthropologist at Work, 318). Focusing on the depiction of characters in Virginia Woolf's 1931 novelThe Waves, Benedict presents modernist fiction as a model for ethnography. However, she completely avoids the literary termcharacterin her discussion of Woolf, a particularly odd omission since Benedict had majored in English at Vassar College and since she and Mead regularly exchanged novels and their own poetry in letters.Ruth Benedict's reading ofThe Waveshas been cited as evidence of her tendency toward a vaguely “poetic” anthropology, an argument that tends to separate the aesthetic from the sociopolitical in both Benedict and Woolf. In this essay, I consider Benedict's reading of Woolf, together with Margaret Mead's subsequent response, as evidence of a shared critical engagement with character, culture, and sexuality in the early 20th century.

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Reclaiming Women’s Perspective: Feminist Anthropology and the Androcentric Bias

Folia linguistica et litteraria ◽

10.31902/fll.26.2019.8 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 93-106

Author(s):

Maja Muhić

Keyword(s):

Social Sciences ◽

The Other ◽

Power Relationship ◽

Male Bias ◽

The Past ◽

Feminist Anthropology ◽

Margaret Mead ◽

Dialogical Relation ◽

Ruth Benedict

The past few decades have been marked by an increasing discussion on the role of dialogue in anthropology, especially following the anthropological turn of the 80s, when the discipline was looked upon as one “writing a culture” rather than understanding it from the insider’s perspective, while the ethnographer was thought of as the epistemic dictator, incapable of establishing a dialogical relation with his subjects of inquiry. The power relationship was indeed one of the most prominent problems in creating an equal, dialogical setting between the anthropologist and the other culture. This paper aims at revisiting feminist anthropology tracing the elements which constituted it, its original inspiration, and main motifs of action mostly gathered around the strong male bias of the discipline. This bias was predominantly manifested in the monological, androcentric understanding and exploration of cultures. In tracing these aspects, and acknowledging the more egalitarian status of this discipline since its early days versus other social sciences (Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict were among the most prominent women anthropologists), the paper will look at early women anthropologists works some of which were excluded from the canon. It will also point to the existence of strong male bias in ethnography and the discipline as a whole, thus triggering the emergence of feminist anthropology with its capacity for reflexivity and accountability in ethnographic work.

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Educação como tradição: a relação adulto-criança na antropologia culturalista de Margaret Mead e Ruth Benedict

Zero-a-Seis ◽

10.5007/1980-4512.2019v21n39p120 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 21 (39) ◽

pp. 120-135

Author(s):

Karina Augusta Limonta Vieira

Keyword(s):

Margaret Mead ◽

Ruth Benedict

A criança tem feito parte de pesquisas antropológicas e educacionais na última década no Brasil. E é a partir desse interesse que esse artigo apresenta a educação como tradição na perspectiva antropológica. Esse artigo, então, tem como objetivo apresentar e discutir de maneira original a educação como tradição na compreensão das relações adulto-criança na perspectiva das contribuições da antropologia cultural. O artigo, então, tem como questões norteadoras: Qual o papel desempenham o adulto e a criança na perspectiva da antropologia cultural de Mead e Benedict? Há dinamicidade educacional no diálogo entre adulto e criança? Essa relação adulto-criança, na perspectiva da educação como tradição, está representada aqui nos trabalhos que Margared Mead e Ruth Benedict desenvolveram no início do século XX. Os trabalhos mostram a existência dos padrões de cultura, na preservação das relações e na formação do adulto ideal por meio da educação entre gerações.

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