DOCSLIB.ORG

The Citizen Life Course: Age Identity in Ecuador's Educational Revolution

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
The Citizen Life Course: Age Identity in Ecuador's Educational Revolution The Citizen Life Course: Age Identity in Ecuador's Educational Revolution Item Type text; Electronic Dissertation Authors Grace, Samantha L. Publisher The University of Arizona. Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. Download date 25/09/2021 14:00:17 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/626696 THE CITIZEN LIFE COURSE: AGE IDENTITY IN ECUADOR'S EDUCATIONAL REVOLUTION by Samantha L. Grace _____________________________________________ Copyright © Samantha L. Grace 2018 A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the SCHOOL OF ANTHROPOLOGY In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY In the Graduate College THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA 2018 3 STATEMENT BY AUTHOR This dissertation has been submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library. Brief quotations from this dissertation are allowable without special permission, provided that an accurate acknowledgement of the source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the head of the major department or the Dean of the Graduate College when in his or her judgment the proposed use of the material is in the interests of scholarship. In all other instances, however, permission must be obtained from the author. SIGNED: Samantha L. Grace 4 Acknowledgements I started working towards this dissertation in 2008, when my husband Guille and I packed up our black and white tuxedo kitten and moved from the D.C. metropolitan area to Tucson, Arizona to start graduate school at the University of Arizona. In the two years immediately after, I often felt like my brain was being pried open to lay down the pathways for new epistemologies. The coursework and mentorship from Susan Shaw, Ivy Pike, Norma Mendoza-Denton, Jen Roth-Gordon, Brian Silverstein, and Mimi Nichter gave me new intellectual direction. To Ivy Pike I am particularly indebted for the introduction to the life course approach, and to Jen Roth-Gordon for showing me how to blend my identity-focused research interests with a commitment to pedagogy. But above all, it was Susan Shaw's steady guidance that allowed me to transform those inchoate ideas into a clear direction for my scholarly path. I had heard from other students that Susan was a great advisor, someone who quickly “got” where you were trying to go and took the time to help you learn how to get the rest of the way there, and with her diplomatic corrections and perceptive questions she got me through Master’s thesis, comps, and, finally, this dissertation. While my professors were bending my mind, my peers in the graduate program were shaping my new academic identity. Pete Taber, in particular, became a mentor and close friend and provided invaluable feedback on almost everything I wrote leading up to and including this dissertation. For seven years he was an ideal writing companion in coffeeshops and bars (depending on the time of day) and, after a move to Oakland, CA 5 took me away from the academic environment of the University of Arizona, remained a constant virtual writing buddy online. This dissertation was made possible by his daily encouragement, as well as by my dear friends Dana Osborne and Robin Steiner. They held my hand through the internet through the last two years of writing, and their understanding, advice, and accountability kept me moving forward when all my instincts insisted it was time to stop. And thank you to Lucero Radonic, Julie Armin, and Lindsey Raisa Feldman, who charitably agreed to participate in writing and academic support groups with me. And, although it's unlikely any of them will ever read this, this dissertation was produced out of the time, emotional, and intellectual investment of the 14 kids whose real names will not appear anywhere in this document, but who gave me an incredible gift in helping me with this research project. Here's hoping we all graduate and become professionals! The research was made possible by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the School of Anthropology, my six incredibly helpful parents (and Mom and Nelly especially, for crossing the continent repeatedly to grandmother the babies so I could work during those critical seven months), and my co-knight-in-shining-armor, Guille. Thank you, my love, for shaping so much of your life around supporting my intellectual journey. You have been an unwavering helpmate over the last nine years (well, sixteen, actually, but we're talking about the PhD now), and your willingness to move from DC to Tucson to Ecuador to Oakland and who knows where next is only the smallest example of that. And also, thank you for making the children with me: they are (for now anyway) the perfect counterbalance to the life of the mind. 6 Table of Contents List of Figures ……………………………………………………………………….. 7 Abstract ……………………………………………………………………………… 8 Part 1: Introduction …………………………………………………………………. 9 1. Theoretical Overview: Age as a Problem of Citizenship …………………… 10 2. Methods and Setting: Life Course Ethnography with Quiteño Students …... 40 Part 2: Age Horizons ………………………………………………………………. 65 3. The Phenomenology of the Quotidian School Day ………………………… 66 4. The Intergenerational Stakes of Sharing Subjectivity ……………………… 94 Part 3: The Citizen Life Cycle …………………………………………………… 123 5. Making National Progress with Unidirectional Aging …………………… 124 6. School Reforms and the Equal Right to Discontinuous Aging …………… 148 7. Bad Kids and Biocitizenship in Ecuadorian High Schools ………………… 176 Part 4: Conclusion ………………………………………………………………... 213 8. Making Age More Equitable in School and Beyond ……………………… 214 Appendix A. Student Informant Descriptions ………………………………......… 218 Appendix B. Recruitment Script …………………………………………………. 230 Bibliography ……………………………………………………………………... 232 7 List of Figures Image 1. The view from my desk at I.T.S.E. Maestro before the students arrived ……….9 Image 2. A daily schedule for Colegio Conquistador …………………………………….65 Image 3. A student-made anti-pregnancy poster …………………………………………123 Image 4. A mural on an elementary school wall in downtown Quito ……………………213 8 Abstract This dissertation begins from the classic anthropological observation that how we age is culturally specific, and examines how Ecuador’s “educational revolution” has changed what aging looks like in that country. As Quito's public schools underwent rapid and wide-ranging transformations from 2009-2017, its students and their families also adjusted to new "youth" rights and responsibilities. Ethnographic fieldwork on how high school students and their families negotiated these changes in school and at home was analyzed through a life course lens encompassing phenomenological and governmental approaches to time and identity. Here, age identities are shown to emerge from the efforts of formal schooling to define what it means to be a good citizen across the life course. The result is an ethnographic study of a particularly modern relationship between time and youth identity that joins intersectional work on gender, race, and class in considering how categories of social differentiation govern populations. This dissertation theorizes the “age horizon” to analyze age identities through informants’ encounters with a wide variety of temporal guideposts, which subjects use to locate their own identities. It develops the concept of the “citizen life cycle” as the normative life course trajectory that emerges from understanding age as a technology of citizenship. It also contextualizes the citizen life cycle as a single “path” towards national belonging within a much wider and more variable “age horizon.” The concept of the citizen life cycle emphasizes how “youth becoming” gets constructed as a “life stage” within a larger normative “life cycle.” I pay particular attention to the effects of policies, infrastructures, and practices that my informants encounter in their daily attendance in high school. 9 Part 1: Introduction Image 1. The view from my desk at I.T.S.E. Maestro before the students arrived. Dissertation Abstract: In Ecuador's "Educational Revolution," sweeping reforms to educational infrastructure have exposed how the age identities of urban high school students and their families are a locus for negotiating national belonging. Public discourses depicting normal youth as a natural fit with schooling justify the goal of improving educational equality, but these normative age identities also reproduce (and obscure) historical patterns of exclusion based in race, class, and gender. Through policies as broad as yearly graduations, and as narrow as lottery-based enrollment and curriculum standardization, urban public schools teach Quito's citizens that the country depends on students making the most of their time as youth. The "citizen life cycle" - a normative sequence of rights and responsibilities required for national belonging - is what results when students identify their ages as unidirectional (i.e., always getting older), discontinuous (i.e., graduating between " life stages"), and impermanent (i.e., a limited time to "get it right"). This dissertation explores high school
Load more

Recommended publications
  • The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: a Cautionary Tale
    The “Fateful Hoaxing” of Margaret Mead: A Cautionary Tale Author(s): Paul Shankman Source: Current Anthropology, Vol. 54, No. 1 (February 2013), pp. 51-70 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/669033 . Accessed: 03/04/2013 14:08 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. The University of Chicago Press and Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Current Anthropology. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 128.138.170.182 on Wed, 3 Apr 2013 14:08:27 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Current Anthropology Volume 54, Number 1, February 2013 51 The “Fateful Hoaxing” of Margaret Mead A Cautionary Tale by Paul Shankman CAϩ Online-Only Material: Supplements A and B In the Mead-Freeman controversy, Derek Freeman’s historical reconstruction of the alleged hoaxing of Margaret Mead in 1926 relied on three interviews with Fa’apua’a Fa’amu¯, Mead’s “principal informant,” who stated that she and another Samoan woman had innocently joked with Mead about their private lives.
    [Show full text]
  • Fa'afafine and Whakawahine
    A comparative study of the fa’afafine of Samoa and the whakawahine of Aotearoa/New Zealand by Ashleigh McFall A thesis submitted to the Victoria University of Wellington in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts by thesis in Gender and Women’s Studies Victoria University of Wellington 2013 ii Abstract This study explores the meaning of the fa’afafine of Samoa and the whakawahine of Aotearoa/New Zealand. I compare and contrast the experiences of six fa’afafine and four whakawahine. I also examine the historical evidence for the existence of fa’afafine in Samoa and whakawahine in Aotearoa/New Zealand. The theoretical approaches underlying this research incorporate feminist, indigenous, and queer aspects but oral history is the primary theory and method used. As a fa’afafine who researched her own identity and whakawahine, the complexities of insider and outsider are explored. This thesis discusses how narrators understand and/or make meaning of western categories of identification such as gay, transgender, drag queen and/or transsexual. These categories are largely rejected; preference for the culturally specific terms fa’afafine (Samoan) and whakawahine (Maori) are demonstrated. Narrators take issue with western researchers’ focus on sexual aspects of fa’afafine and whakawahine. For them, gender role, specifically feminine dress, behaviour and activities more accurately characterise their identities. This thesis argues that fa’afafine and whakawahine are fluid identities. How one behaves as a woman varies, but narrators insist that fa’afafine and whakawahine are born not made that way, and ‘feel’ like women. The meaning of fa’afafine and whakawahine is not static; westernisation, colonization and the availability of gender reassignment treatment have all impacted on how each narrator defines her identity.
    [Show full text]
  • The Schoolyard Gate: Schooling and Childhood in Global Perspective
    The Schoolyard Gate: Schooling and Childhood in Global Perspective Kathryn M. Anderson-Levitt Journal of Social History, Volume 38, Number 4, Summer 2005, pp. 987-1006 (Article) Published by Oxford University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jsh.2005.0042 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/184089 Access provided by UCLA Library (25 Jan 2017 03:49 GMT) THE SCHOOLYARD GATE: SCHOOLING AND CHILDHOOD IN GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE By Kathryn M. Anderson-Levitt University of Michigan-Dearborn Deux et deux quatre quatre et quatre huit huit et huit font seize Répétez! dit le maître. Deux et deux quatre quatre et quatre huit huit et huit font seize. Mais voilà l’oiseau-lyre qui passe dans le ciel l’enfant le voit l’enfant l’entend l’ enfant l’appelle: Sauve-moi joue avec moi oiseau! ... Jacques Prévert1 Wanting Out, Wanting In The ultimate task here is to ask how schooling as a global phenomenon affects the experiences of children around the world and the cultural construction of childhood. But before I can suggest directions for research on those questions, I must ask whether or in what sense schooling is in fact a global phenomenon. Just as it is inaccurate to conceive of global cognitive effects of “literacy” be- cause literacy is not a single thing in lived experience, so it would be inaccurate to think of schooling as having a single effect on children, for it represents dif- ferent lived experiences. Still, certain patterns or “grammars of schooling” have persisted over the long term across wide regions.2 It is the first task of this essay to determine whether we can now discern a particular grammar of schooling that encompasses the whole world.
    [Show full text]
  • Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Ethnography
    Document generated on 10/01/2021 9:10 p.m. Ethnologies Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Ethnography Storying Scientific Adventure in the South Seas Jacqueline McLeod Jouer Article abstract Play A lightening rod for an array of criticism, Coming of Age in Samoa also attained Volume 32, Number 1, 2010 monumental popularity with both scholarly and popular reading audiences, convincing many that it captured the sexual and social lives of Samoan URI: https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/045219ar adolescent girls and that North American girls might be instructed by this DOI: https://doi.org/10.7202/045219ar portrait. Taking a “recovery and reappraisal” approach, this article argues that the text is neither a collection of detailed, field note-anchored observations nor a cross cultural critique, but a love story to place. The text has much in See table of contents common with postmodern conceptions of ethnography, which acknowledge “writing culture” as mediated by interpretive, representational and linguistic considerations. Like many postmodern ethnographers, Mead self-consciously Publisher(s) constructs an authorial position rather than attempting to remain absent and objective. Part of the persona she constructs is that she is a scientist sharing Association Canadienne d'Ethnologie et de Folklore data; yet she no sooner invokes standards of scientific rigor than she shifts course to promise us a good “tale”. If contemporary readers can read the text ISSN through a postmodern lens, when she wrote, her approach was 1481-5974 (print) unprecedented. Her awareness of transgressing scientific method emerges in 1708-0401 (digital) the “Introduction” to the book, where she self-reflects on her decisions about authorship as performance and text as storied, artful and intimate.
    [Show full text]
  • Shankman Revised
    Research TOC SEX, LIES, AND ANTHROPOLOGISTS: MARGARET MEAD, DEREK FREEMAN, AND SAMOA Paul Shankman efore Madonna and Sex, before Wilt Chamberlain and his alleged twenty thousand sexual partners, before the televi- Bsion show “Studs,” and before “900” numbers, there was Polynesia. The people of Polynesia have a reputation for sexual license, and this reputation, deserved or not, has contributed to our own fascination with the subject of sex. Our images of tropical isles, blue lagoons, and swaying palms in the beautiful South Pacific are intimately linked with ideas about sexual paradise, and numerous accounts from early explorers to modern anthropolo- gists indicate that some Polynesian cultures fulfill at least some of our sexual fantasies. Among these cultures, Samoa is legendary. Ever since the publication of Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa in 1928, public opinion has elevated the Samoans to the heights of sexual superstardom. Mead herself felt that of all the people she studied, the Samoans had the sunniest and easiest atti- tudes towards sex. Margaret Mead was no ordinary anthropologist. At the time of her death in 1978 she was the best-known anthropologist in the world; she was also America’s first woman of science, and one of the three best-known women in the United States. Mead authored popular books for the reading public, wrote columns for maga- zines such as Redbook, lectured widely, and almost single-handedly turned anthropology into a household word. Almost everyone knew who Margaret Mead was, and most people knew of Samoa too, for Coming of Age in Samoa remained her best-known work.
    [Show full text]
  • Margaret Mead and the Culture of Forgetting in Anthropology: a Response to Paul Roscoe
    MICAELA Dl LEONARDO Margaret Mead and the Culture of Forgetting in Anthropology: A Response to Paul Roscoe Only connect. research, and write and speak. And this is what is curious about Paul Roscoe's piece: its anachronism, its radical lack —E. M. Forster of a sense of the historical shifts in anthropology and in the world, since Margaret Mead and Reo Fortune wrote EARLY A QUARTER CENTURY AGO, the late Eric about the Mountain Arapesh in the 1930s. Thus, while I NWolf published a ringing editorial in the New York appreciate Roscoe's long familiarity with Papua New Times titled "They Divide and Subdivide, and Call It An- Guinea (PNG) populations and his archival work, this lack thropology" (1980). Wolf's concern was the proliferation of "history and history of theory" connection means that of mutually uncommunicative subfields in our discipline both his framing of the question at hand and his empirical to the detriment of any overarching set of understandings claims leave much to be desired. Let me elaborate. of the human condition. He laid out his larger history-of- First, I certainly agree with Roscoe on the importance thought vision in Europe and the People without History of revisiting Margaret Mead's oeuvre. Mead is still, as I (1982), in which he argued for our discipline's release wrote in Exotics at Home, "the most well-known anthro- from the "bounds of its own definitions" in an historical pologist across this century in the United States, and prob- political-economic vision uniting the social sciences and ably the world.
    [Show full text]
  • Coming of Age in Samoa
    .^ ^ ^,^ <^ .'A .'\ >r > >r > :: COMING OF AGE S COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA 14 ith Hihbcus in her hair T> l..( To THE Girls of Tau THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED *Ou te avatu lene't tusitala id te ^outou O Teineiti ma le Aualuma o Tail 4SH173 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I AM indebted to the generosity of the Board of Fel- lowships in the Biological Sciences of the National Re- search Council whose award of a fellowship made this investigation possible. I have to thank my father for the gift of my travelling expenses to and from the Samoan Islands. To Prof. Franz Boas I owe the in- spiration and the direction of my problem, the training which prepared me to undertake such an investigation, and the^ticism of my results. For a co-operation which greatly facilitated the prog- ress of my work in the Pacific, I am indebted to Dr. ^Herbert E. Gregory, Director of the B. P. Bishop Mu- ^seum and to Dr. E. C. S. Handy and Miss Stella Jones of the Bishop Museum. To the endorsement of my work by Admiral Stitt and the kindness of Commander Owen Mink, U. S. N., I owe the co-operation of the medical authorities in Samoa, whose assistance greatly simplified and expe- dited my investigation. I have to thank Miss Ellen M. Hodgson, Chief Nurse, the staff nurses, the Sa- moan nurses, and particularly G. F. Pepe for my first contacts and my instruction in the Samoan language. To the hospitality, generosity, and sympathetic co-op- eration of Mr. Edward R.
    [Show full text]
  • MANE-003 Comparative Ethnography Indira Gandhi National Open University School of Social Sciences
    MANE-003 Comparative Ethnography Indira Gandhi National Open University School of Social Sciences Block 7 GENDER AND SEXUALITIES UNIT 1 Gender Identities Ethnography 1: Identity Gender and Poverty: New Perspectives on Caste and Tribe in Rajasthan by Maya Unnithan-Kumar Ethnography 2: Life Cycle, Gender and Status among Himalayan Pastoralists by Aparna Rao 5 UNIT 2 Rites De Passage Ethnography 1: Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead Ethnography 2: The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual by Victor Turner 17 UNIT 3 Gendered Bodies Ethnography 1: Neither Man nor Woman: The Hijras of India by Serena Nanda Ethnography 2: The Meanings of Macho: Being a Man in Mexico City. Matthew. C. Gutmann 30 Expert Committee Professor Nadeem Hasnain Faculty of Anthropology SOSS, IGNOU Department of Anthropology University of Lucknow Dr. Rashmi Sinha, Reader Lucknow Dr. Rukshana Zaman, Assistant Professor Professor Rowena Robinson Dr. P. Venkatramana, Assistant Professor Professor of Sociology Dr. Mitoo Das, Assistant Professor Department of Humanities and Social Sciences Indian Institute of Technology Bombay Dr. K. Anil Kumar, Assistant Professor Powai Dr. Nita Mathur Associate Professor Faculty of Sociology School of Social Sciences IGNOU New Delhi Dr. V. N. V. K. Sastry, (Retd.) Director, Tribal Research Institute Government of Andhra Pradesh Hyderabad Academic Assistance provided by Dr. N.K. Mungreiphy, Research Associate (DBT) for the Expert Committee meeting Programme Coordinator: Dr. Rashmi Sinha, SOSS, IGNOU, New Delhi Course Coordinator: Dr. Rukshana Zaman, SOSS, IGNOU, New Delhi Content Editor Professor Vinay Kr. Srivastava Department of Anthropology University of Delhi, Delhi Block Preparation Team Block Coordinator Unit Writers Dr.
    [Show full text]
  • Confronting the Margaret Mead Legacy
    Confronting the Margaret Mead Legacy Confrontingthe Margaret Mead Legacy Scholarship, Empire, and the South Pacific Edited by Lenora Foerstel and Angela Gilliam ill Temple University Press • Philadelphia Temple University Press, Philadelphia 19122 Copyright © 1992by Temple University. All rights reserved Published 1992 Printed in the United States of America @)The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Confronting the Margaret Mead legacy: scholarship, empire, and the South Pacific / edited by Lenora Foerstel and Angela Gilliam. p. ern. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-87722-886-8(alk. paper) 1. Ethnology-Oceania. 2. Mead, Margaret, 1901-1978. 2. Anthropology-Government policy-Oceania. I. Foerstel, Lenora, 1929- . II. Gilliam, Angela, 1936- GN662.C64 1992 306' .0995-dc20 91-16194 This book is dedicated in loving memory to Eleanor Leacock (~ONTENTS Foreword Peter Worsley ix Preface Angela Gilliam and Lenora Foerstel xix Acknowledgments xxxiii PARTl The Margaret Mead Legacy 1 Anthropologists in Search of a Culture: 3 Margaret Mead, Derek Freeman, and All the Rest of Us Eleanor Leacock 2 Leaving a Recordfor Others: An Interview 31 with Nahau Rooney Angela Gilliam 3 Margaret Meadfrom a Cultural-Historical 55 Perspective Lenora Foerstel 4 The Stigma of New Guinea: Reflections on 75 .Anthropology and Anthropologists Warilea Iamo 5 Margaret Mead's Contradictory Legacy 101 Angela Gilliam and Lenora Foerstel viii CONTENTS PART II Empire and Independence 6 For an Independent Kanaky 159 Susanna Ounei 7 The United States Anthropologist in 173 Micronesia: Toward a Counter-Hegemonic Study of Sapiens Glenn Alcalay 8 Anthropology and Authoritarianism in the 205 Pacific Islands Simione Durutalo 9 Tugata: Culture, Identity, and 233 Commitment John D.
    [Show full text]
  • Coming of Age in Samoa -.:Elitelore World
    [“Coming” of Age in Samoa: Margaret Mead’s 1928 Book Unmasked by Derek Freeman’s 1983 Book Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth Based on Sexual Fantasy], By Jack Cashill (2005) [Freeman’s 1999 book The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead furthered his case against her, much to the continued consternation of Mead’s followers in the “Mainstream” Anthropological Profession, many of whom refused to accept challenge to their “Goddess” of knowledge—never mind the evidence in the case of Samoa.] "Sexual Fantasies," by Jack Cashill [from his Hoodwinked: How Intellectual Hucksters Have Hijacked American Culture (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2005), Chapter 5 reprinted at http://catholiceducation.org/articles/sexuality/se0120.html. [Cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Freeman which as of May 2013 Wikipedia still states unconvincingly that the Freeman vs. Mead Debate remains unresolved, yet important to examine for different views of the “Truth”; but see also insightful comments readers by the books readers at http://www.amazon.com/Margaret-Mead-Samoa- Unmaking-Anthropological/dp/0140225552) [Mead’s “Fantasy Island,” by Jack Cashill (who received his Ph.D. in American Studies from Purdue, and whose writings have appeared in Fortune, The WallStreet Journal, Washington Post, and other national publications) reviews, below, the debate for against Mead’s “research” in Samoa, and Cashill finds clearly in favor of Freeman]: Margaret Mead (1901-1978) In San Francisco in 1926, as she prepared to sail away to Samoa, twenty-four-year-old Margaret Mead wrote a farewell letter to her husband, Luther Cressman. When Cressman got the letter back in New York and read it, the cold calculation of it all unnerved him.
    [Show full text]
  • Margaret Mead: the Making of an American Icon. Nancy Lutkehaus
    Margaret Mead: The Making of an American Icon. Nancy Lutkehaus. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008. 392 pp.* Reviewed by Howard Brick In 1978, a newspaper editor celebrated the common anniversary of two distinctly “American” achievements: fifty years before, Mickey Mouse first appeared on the screen and anthropologist Margaret Mead published Coming of Age in Samoa (1928). The editorial was prompted by Mead’s death that year at age 76, and the point was not to suggest that Coming of Age was cartoonish (though Mead’s Samoan sojourn gave rise over the years to numerous wry New Yorker cartoons and some critics considered her portrait of South Pacific adolescent sexuality simplified or fabricated). Rather, the editorial intended to suggest the rare celebrity Mead had achieved—comparable to Walt Disney, but in the roles of scholar, commentator on American culture and public affairs, and much-admired representative woman. As observers today lament the decline of “public intellectuals” in American life, Nancy Lutkehaus reminds us that it was Mead who filled that role with more vigor and prominence than almost any other figure of the 20th century. How Mead managed to do that—starting out in her twenties as a practitioner of an upstart science, a seemingly innocent exponent of something like free love, and a person whose discretion veiled what would have struck many at the time as a scandalous personal life—makes for quite a story and an enigma in the history and sociology of modern publicity. In this wonderfully illustrated book, Lutkehaus, once a young aide to Margaret Mead at the American Museum of Natural History and now Anthropology Department chair at the University of Southern California, carries off the narrative and the analysis of Mead’s “iconicity” with learning, clarity, and panache.
    [Show full text]
  • MARGARET MEAD December 16, 1901-November 15, 1978
    NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES M A R G A R E T M EAD 1901—1978 A Biographical Memoir by CLIFFORD GEERTZ Any opinions expressed in this memoir are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Academy of Sciences. Biographical Memoir COPYRIGHT 1989 NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES WASHINGTON D.C. MARGARET MEAD December 16, 1901-November 15, 1978 BY CLIFFORD GEERTZ ARGARET MEAD was probably the most famous anthro- M pologist of her time, and even more probably the most controversial. Author of more than fifteen hundred books, articles, films, and occasional pieces; a tireless public speaker traveling the world to instruct and persuade; a field re- searcher of extraordinarily extensive and varied experience; a hyperactive organizer of projects, conferences, programs, and careers; and possessed of a seemingly endless fund of opinions on every subject under the sun that she was all too willing to share with anyone who asked, and many who did not; she left no one who came into contact with her or her works indifferent to either. Even death, which came from pancreatic cancer in the winter of 1978, a month shy of her seventy-seventh birthday, did not still the debates that circulated about her person and her work. The appearance in 1983 of the New Zealand/Aus- tralian anthropologist Derek Freeman's highly publicized wholesale attack on her first book, Coming of Age in Samoa, published fifty-five years earlier, began yet another round of intense and often bitter discussion, both popular and profes- sional, whose end is still not in sight.
    [Show full text]