MARGARET MEAD'S INDIVIDUAL IN CULTURE, OR CULTURES AND PERSONALITIES WITHOUT EMBARRASSMENT

Authors

Gerald Sullivan, Collin County Community CollegeFollow

Abstract

Margaret Mead is associated with the rubric "culture and personality." Mead herself preferred the formula "individual in culture." This essay traces Mead's uses of her preferred formula from 1928 through 1946. Over the course of this period, Mead developed her idea from its initial concerns with the "role" of the individual in Samoan culture in ways which came to focus on the person as the conjunction of biological, developmental (or "genetic"), and cultural processes. The essay examines both published, if now little known, materials and Ruth Benedict's notes taken during a course on "The Study of the Individual in Culture" that Mead taught in 1935. Mead emerges as a researcher well aware of cultural and individual differences, but not as a cultural determinist, much less a biological determinist. Cultures and the personalities which emerge within those cultures were related, according to Mead, but not mirror images of each other.

Recommended Citation

Sullivan, Gerald (2005) "MARGARET MEAD'S INDIVIDUAL IN CULTURE, OR CULTURES AND PERSONALITIES WITHOUT EMBARRASSMENT," Pacific Studies Journal: Vol. 28: No. 2, Article 6.
Available at: https://digitalcollections.byuh.edu/pacific-studies-journal/vol28/iss2/6