(9 May 1904 – 4 July 1980) was an English anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician, and cyberneticist whose work intersected that of many other fields. In the 1940s, he helped extend systems theory and cybernetics to the social and behavioral sciences. During 1936–1950, he was married to Margaret Mead.[10] Bateson was a lifelong […]
Nonsense about the “modern” nuclear family continues to be churned out. by Melanie Phillips. For the last fifty years, these ethnographers’ accounts have been misinterpreted and wrenched out of context in the attempt by others to prove that patriarchy was not only not universal but that where it didn’t exist the people lived blissful lives […]
by Elesha J Coffman. Mead asserted that, by comparing sex roles across these societies, ‘it is possible to gain a greater insight into what elements are social constructs, originally irrelevant to the biological facts of sex-gender.’ She concluded that ‘human nature is almost unbelievably malleable, responding accurately and contrastingly to contrasting cultural conditions.’ In short, […]
Mead argued that non-Western cultures offered alternative (often better) ways to be human. Why was she so vilified for it? by Sam Dresser. Mead had an enemy who attacked with uncommon hatred: Derek Freeman, a New Zealand anthropologist who made it his life’s work to expunge Mead after her death. His criticisms have stuck. Like […]
How a circle of renegade anthropologists reinvented race, sex and gender in the Twentieth Century. by Charles King. Published 2019 – hard-cover book in our library. Mead stands out, especially for the links between her personal and professional lives. From young adulthood on, she was inclined toward polyamory, feeling cosseted and constrained by her culture’s […]
Both revered and despised for the image of humanity she presented to the world, and for her conclusions about the Samoan people, in particular. by Matthew Blackwell. Within the emerging field of anthropology, Mead became a revered figure. Hundreds of anthropology books relayed her research, promoting the overarching lesson that sexuality and violence are entirely […]
Revolutions are seldom the spontaneous mass upheaval of the downtrodden, provoked beyond endurance by their miserable condition, and the sexual revolution was certainly no exception in this respect. The revolution had its intellectual pro-genitors, as shallow, personally twisted, and dishonest a parade of people as one could ever wish to encounter. They were all utopians, […]
by Gloria Steinem. If men had grown up seeing God portrayed only as Mother and She, would they feel an equal godliness within themselves?
by Elizabeth Fisher. As long as the masculine role is aggrandized and the female role derogated, as long, that is, as nature is seen from a male-supremacist view, human sexual encounters will be tainted. We are imprisoned in a conquest vocabulary which places females in the “submissive position.” Convention equates the female’s role in sex […]
by Donald Symonds, 1979 Oxford University Press. A central theme of this book is that, with respect to sexuality, there is a female human nature and a male human nature, and these natures are extraordinarily different.
Dedicated to Robert Briffault, warm friend and one of the most amazing minds of our generation. by V.F.Calverton. Formal Sex Relations in Samoa by Margaret Mead, P587: “More frequently still an older man, a widower or a divorced man will be the girl’s first lover…But the first amorous excursions of the older men among the […]