Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science
by Benjamin Breen · 16 Jan 2024 · 384pp · 118,573 words
Rumsey Map Collection, David Rumsey Map Center, Stanford Libraries. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Breen, Benjamin, 1985- author. Title: Tripping on utopia : Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the troubled birth of psychedelic science / Benjamin Breen. Description: First edition. | New York : Grand Central Publishing, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references
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not usher in the first psychedelic era. They ended it. More than anyone else, it was the group of interdisciplinary scientists connected by the anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson in the years surrounding World War II who shaped the development of psychedelic research from the 1930s onward. This group included anthropologists
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writer Anaïs Nin; and a young Juilliard-trained opera singer and refugee from Nazi Germany who spent part of her LSD trip being interviewed by Margaret Mead regarding the possibility that psychedelics could unlock psychic abilities. Taken together, these stories cast a vibrant, surreal, and at times troubling new light not
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the history of psychedelic science, but on the twentieth century itself. Running through this extraordinary history was the intellectual partnership and tumultuous love affair that Margaret Mead—the most famous, and most polarizing, scientist of her generation—shared with her third husband, the British anthropologist Gregory Bateson. Their influence extended in
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optimism. Carl Sagan was once asked why we should expect that extraterrestrial life might be sending signals into deep space. “All they need is one Margaret Mead,” he replied. Mead saw herself as “a listening post,” collecting and synthesizing information from every domain, like a central computer. Science had “introduced another
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no answer when she knocked. After getting help to break down the door, Mead discovered that Bloomfield had killed herself with cyanide. Ruth Benedict (left), Margaret Mead (center) in the mid-1920s, and Franz Boas (right) in an undated photograph, sitting in Benedict’s apartment. Courtesy Barnard College Special Collections and
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prescient essay, Orwell coined a term that would define an era. The future, Orwell believed, would be locked in “a permanent state of ‘cold war.’” Margaret Mead fundamentally disagreed. Rather than envisioning the postwar world as split between three hermetically sealed empires, she began describing it as an interconnected whole. Human society
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substantial trove of drugs, including amphetamine pills, cocaine, and opiates. He had complicated dreams in which Maya Deren appeared alongside his father, or alongside Margaret Mead, in different guises (“using Maya as my attorney,” he scribbled in an attempt to explain one). He researched locations in which he might easily file
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used to control and manipulate. A conference bringing together researchers involved in the study of consciousness, psychiatry, and sexuality in 1948 made these stakes clear. Margaret Mead and Alfred Kinsey both attended. Despite their public disagreement and personal dislike, the conference crystallized the extent to which they (and Bateson, too) occupied the
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decade earlier, Leary portrayed himself as a lonely prophet surrounded by enemies. The truth was different. Exactly thirty years before Leary’s first trip, Margaret Mead was living among the Omaha people in Nebraska, collecting information about peyote and its role as an engine of consciousness expansion and cultural change. This
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Santa Monica—that citadel of Cold War militarism—researchers studying the effects of psychedelics on creativity supplemented their clinical trials by carefully reading, and citing, Margaret Mead’s description of the Omaha peyote users. Leary and his circle were part of a complex history of cross-cultural knowledge exchanges involving psychedelics. But
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began working to actively transform global society by providing psilocybin to the world’s most influential people. Their list of possible collaborators included everyone from Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson to the jazz musicians Charlie Mingus and Dizzy Gillespie. Leary even began to speak, half-seriously, about “turning on” John F.
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, to whom Leary and Alpert entrusted psilocybin “without personal supervision.” Around the same time that Blum spoke to her about Leary’s psilocybin project, Margaret Mead began researching a series of articles that revealed her to be grappling with her legacy of collaboration with the U.S. military and intelligence services
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ambient dread surrounding the concept of brainwashing. In January 1961, Huxley spoke at a widely publicized conference called “Control of the Mind.” His speech linked Margaret Mead’s anthropological research to his hopes for a future in which psychedelic drugs might become integrated into the education system to increase appreciation for beauty
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portrayed homosexuality as a form of “sexual pathology” that psychedelics might cure—not as something that psychedelics could help the user accept. The contrast with Margaret Mead and her world could hardly have been starker. On September 11, 1961, she appeared on a groundbreaking documentary called The Rejected, which aired on KQED
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Cohen, “the anthropological approach” meant a science built on and with the cultural patterns of other societies, not an attempt to invent them from scratch—Margaret Mead’s approach, in other words. But now, Cohen complained, the anthropological approach to drugs was being abandoned in favor of reckless experimentation—“these Acid Tests
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”) agreed to have their body language photographed and analyzed—with an emphasis on interpersonal tension—as part of a study Mead coauthored in 1968. From Margaret Mead and Paul Byers, The Small Conference: An Innovation in Communication (De Gruyter Mouton, 1968). Photographer: Paul Byers. Courtesy the estate of Paul Byers. Teaching
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the brain of a sinister “psycho-pharmacologist.” On the back of Blum’s book, alongside an enthusiastic endorsement from Noam Chomsky, was a blurb from Margaret Mead. The book, she said, was not entirely fictional. Between the era’s countercultural rebellion against “establishment” authority, the increasing recognition among Cold War researchers
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project began to seem obsolete. Respect for scientific idealism was evaporating fast, and neither left nor right, squares nor “heads,” knew where she stood. Margaret Mead in her office at the American Museum of Natural History, 1971. New York Public Library. Photographer: Martha Swope. Mead did her best to stay relevant
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literally thousands of newspaper articles over the course of 1975 and 1976, the surviving members of the Macy circle had little to say about them. Margaret Mead spent 1975 as president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the nation’s oldest and most prestigious scientific organization. Her presidential address
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but came up short. The world of the Barbary Coast had already faded away. As the new MKULTRA revelations were breaking, Margaret Mead was being feted at the first ever Margaret Mead Film Festival. The lavish, multiday screening of hundreds of documentary films was held in thirteen venues throughout the American Museum of Natural
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literature relating to psychedelics and psychedelic science. I am profoundly thankful to all the historians and authors who have written them. Margaret Mead’s most comprehensive biography remains Jane Howard’s Margaret Mead: A Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984). Excellent studies that have appeared more recently include Maureen A. Molloy, On Creating
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. Where possible, I have indicated both using the following citation style: “N120:5” means Box N120, Folder 5. Notes Abbreviations Used in the Notes BW Margaret Mead, Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years (New York: William Morrow, 1972) GB Gregory Bateson GB papers Gregory Bateson papers, University of California, Santa Cruz, Special
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diary Unpublished diaries of Weldon Kees (1950–54), collection of James Reidel LOC Library of Congress, Washington, DC MM Margaret Mead MM papers Margaret Mead papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC MM FBI file Margaret Mead FBI file, File #121-14450, accessible at https://archive.org/details/MargaretMead/mode/2up NARA National Archives and Records Administration
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Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022). “She was truly interested”: Author interview with Jean Houston, August 11, 2021, 29:25 (audio). Mead’s primary goal: Margaret Mead, “This I Believe… the Human Potential,” Hartford Courant, May 16, 1952, 16 (a transcript of her submission to Edward R. Murrow’s radio program). On
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purpose of anthropology”: Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934), 17. “Ruth and I”: Lapsley, Kinship of Women, 124. “new kind of consciousness”: Margaret Mead, “The Future as the Basis for Establishing a Shared Culture,” Daedalus 94, no. 1 (1965): 135–55, www.jstor.org/stable/20026899. This article, written
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thirty years. In the fall of 1926: “Scientist Goes on Jungle Flapper Hunt,” NYT, November 8, 1926, 190. “What constitutes courtesy”: Franz Boas, foreword to Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation (New York: William Morrow, 1928). 2. SOCIETY IS THE PATIENT “The
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with George Phillips, June 26, 1930, N120:5, MM papers. “Doesn’t somebody warn the newcomer”: MM interview with Phillips, 2. But Mead quoted: Margaret Mead, The Changing Culture of an Indian Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), 27. There were stretches of happiness: “Housekeeping in New Guinea,” The Sun
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of this and related work reached Mead all through 1932 and 1933 via Benedict’s letters. Benedict privately self-identified: Lois W. Banner, Intertwined Lives: Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Their Circle (New York: Vintage, 2010), 10. Perhaps the society that excluded: Benedict, “Anthropology and the Abnormal,” 270. Mead’s first
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. “All three of us together”: Howard, Mead, 161. Although Mead disavowed the Squares, she continued to tinker with the theory for several years afterward. See Margaret Mead, “Statement of the Squares Hypothesis, May 16, 1937,” N12:2, MM papers. “dangerous madness”: Reo Fortune to Bronislaw Malinowski, January 12, 1937, LSE/Malinowski/
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7/8, as cited in Maureen A. Molloy, On Creating a Usable Culture: Margaret Mead and the Emergence of American Cosmopolitanism (Manoa: University of Hawaii Press, 2008), 120. His anger culminated: For a full description of this episode see Banner
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GB, June 12, 1934, TCLW, 89–90. 3. ARTIFICIAL PARADISES “Shamanism remained very much”: Mead, Changing Culture, 29. “remain below the surface”: See, for instance, Margaret Mead, Culture and Commitment, chapter 1, in which she summarizes twenty-five years or more of her fieldwork along these lines. “a new kind of consciousness
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4–5. “great inter-disciplinary expeditions”: BW, 275. For all their theorizing: Interview of I Madé Kalér by Geoffrey Robinson, as transcribed in Tessel Pollmann, “Margaret Mead’s Balinese: The Fitting Symbols of the American Dream,” Indonesia, no. 49 (April 1990): 1–35. “wanted to believe Bali”: Tessel Pollmann, interview with Ibu
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University Press, 2008), 306, fn. 13. He hired a young anthropology: Kinsey to MM, January 16, 1947, Kinsey Institute Archives, Bloomington, IN. “extraordinarily destructive of”: Margaret Mead, “An Anthropologist Looks at the Report,” in Proceedings of a Symposium on the First Published Report of a Series of Studies of Sex Phenomena by
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: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 21. Benedict looked to her “almost supernatural”: Margaret Mead, ed., An Anthropologist at Work: Writings of Ruth Benedict (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959), 438; and WDE, 117. The FBI began a loyalty: See MM
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. 3 (1959), a paper that cites creativity and psychedelic researcher Frank Barron. As Ido Hartogsohn writes: Hartogsohn, American Trip, 34. It was also the year: Margaret Mead, “Character Formation and Diachronic Theory,” in Essays Presented to A. R. Radcliffe-Brown (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949). The show trial of the Hungarian: Streatfeild,
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Brown, 2017). In that year alone: Marks, Manchurian Candidate, 61–62. “For one reason or another”: Albarelli, Terrible Mistake. “every sort and kind of American”: Margaret Mead, New Lives for Old: Cultural Tranformation—Manus, 1928–1953 (New York: William Morrow, 1956), 168. “Science is a cooperative task”: MM to Lenora and Theodore
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thought”: Author interview with Laurence Jarvik, June 29, 2021. “a physician who combines”: Harold A. Abramson, The Patient Speaks (New York: Vantage, 1956), reviewed by Margaret Mead in The Psychoanalytic Review 46B, issue 2 (1959): 126–27. 15. THE LSD SESSIONS “prophetic dreams”… “a utopia”: Mead, New Lives, 38, 453. “the
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apocalyptic cult aspect”: Margaret Mead, Continuities in Cultural Evolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1964), xxxiii. Perhaps, as she wrote: Mead, “LSD Memo,” 1. On the idea of curing
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in Solomon, LSD, 104–5. “interesting research designs”: Timothy Leary, Memo to Dave McClelland, March 16, 1961, Box 45, Leary papers. “subtler warfare of control”: Margaret Mead, The World Ahead: An Anthropologist Anticipates the Future (The Study of Contemporary Western Cultures, vol. 6) (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005), 81. The Oakland Tribune
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/archpsyc.1963.01720110001001. “earnest desire to support”: Harold A. Abramson, “Extraordinary Behavior,” NYT, January 3, 1965, 10 and 12. “our dislike of being”: From Margaret Mead’s February 1967 speech at UC Davis, as quoted in June Peters, “Single Persons Are ‘Lonely,’” Sacramento Bee, February 16, 1967, 28. “It was easy
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1967, TCLW, 188. The reader’s letter: Stephen V. Roberts, “Dr. Leary Fails to Sway Students,” NYT, August 18, 1967. Though LSD’s users could: Margaret Mead, “Margaret Mead Answers: Should We Have Laws Banning the Use of LSD?” Redbook 130, no. 3 (January 1968): 30, 32. Mead penned a letter: MM to Mysbergh
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transcript, Dialectics of Liberation conference, London, July 18, 1967, https://villonfilms.ca/main/transcripts-dialectics-stokely-carmichael-18-7-67.pdf. “human beings are reduced”: Margaret Mead, “Research with Human Beings: A Model Derived from Anthropological Field Practice,” Daedalus 98, no. 2, Ethical Aspects of Experimentation with Human Subjects (Spring 1969): 367
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Practice and Procedure of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1976), 255. “science of the human”: Margaret Mead, “Towards a Human Science,” Science 191 (March 5, 1976): 903–9. It was a genuinely: Nancy D. Campbell and Laura Stark, “Making Up ‘Vulnerable’
100 Years of Identity Crisis: Culture War Over Socialisation
by Frank Furedi · 6 Sep 2021 · 535pp · 103,761 words
20th century. Educationalists and psychologists often perceived adults as out of touch and diagnosed adulthood as a rigid and backward-oriented condition. The cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead, who played a central role in promoting the idealisation of adolescence, communicated a distinctly downbeat account of adulthood. ‘All adults are to some extent out
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in life. But even at this point in time, the common-sense view of adulthood was questioned by the emerging professional discourse on the subject. Margaret Mead highlighted the fragility of the authority of adulthood. Like Fromm, she too believed that the young were the ‘smarter’ generation: By and large, the American
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in a rapidly changing world, the values of adults should not be imposed upon a child’.67 Writing in 1943 during the Second World War, Margaret Mead highlighted the reluctance of the interwar generation of parents to give clear moral guidance to their children. She noted that ‘millions of young Americans were
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, homosexuality, and most pertinent for family therapists, delinquency and schizophrenia’.539 This sentiment was captured by the question ‘What’s wrong with the family?’, which Margaret Mead posed in Harper’s in the spring of 1945. This question, which would be repeated with increasing frequency in the decades to follow, would invite
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) Don’t Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate, White River Junction: Chelsea Green Publishing. a, b Langness, L.L. (1975) ‘Margaret Mead and the study of socialization’, Ethos, 3(2), 97 – 112. → Lasch, C. (1977) Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged, New York: Basic Books
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State University in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts In History. → Mandler, P. (2013) Return from the Natives: How Margaret Mead Won the Second World War and Lost the Cold War, New Haven: Yale University Press. → Mandler, P. (2019) ‘The language of social science in everyday
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Liquid Society Literature and Revolution (Trotsky) Locke, John Luther, Martin Lynd, Helen MacKinnon, Rachel Mandler, Peter Marx, John Maslow, Abraham Mazzini, Giuseppe McLaughlin, BethAnn McMillan, Margaret Mead, Margaret medicalisation of education of everyday life of human existence of human experience of personhood of self of socialisation of society medical moralization Medium website
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of Political and Social Science, 265, 108 – 114, at 108. 36 Ross (1991) p.444. 37 See P. Mandler (2013) Return from the Natives: How Margaret Mead Won the Second World War and Lost the Cold War, New Haven: Yale University Press, pp.3−4. 38 Frank (1940) p.16. 39 Davis
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T. Parsons and R.F. Bales (1956) Family: Socialization and Interaction Process, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, p.60. 393 Cited in L.L. Langness (1975) ‘Margaret Mead and the study of socialization’, Ethos, 3(2), 97 – 112, at 104. 394 J. Dollard et al. (1939) Frustration and Aggression, New Haven: Yale University
The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
by Steven Pinker · 1 Jan 2002 · 901pp · 234,905 words
them. —Ruth Benedict (1934)36 We are forced to conclude that human nature is almost unbelievably malleable, responding accurately and contrastingly to contrasting cultural conditions. —Margaret Mead (1935)37 Others likened the mind to some kind of sieve: Much of what is commonly called “human nature” is merely culture thrown against a
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organs, muscles, etc. —Leslie White (1949)38 Or to the raw materials for a factory: Human nature is the rawest, most undifferentiated of raw material. —Margaret Mead (1928)39 Our ideas, our values, our acts, even our emotions, are, like our nervous system itself, cultural products—products manufactured, indeed, out of tendencies
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, Rousseau was wrong. To begin with, the stories of tribes out there somewhere who have never heard of violence turn out to be urban legends. Margaret Mead’s descriptions of peace-loving New Guineans and sexually nonchalant Samoans were based on perfunctory research and turned out to be almost perversely wrong. As
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of evolution; the other, radical in Darwin’s time, was that all races had recently diverged from a common ancestor.6 Despite these uplifting messages, Margaret Mead called Ekman’s research “outrageous,” “appalling,” and “a disgrace”—and these were some of the milder responses.7 At the annual meeting of the American
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nearly passed a motion censuring Sociobiology and banning two symposia on the topic, and in 1983 they did pass one decreeing that Derek Freeman’s Margaret Mead and Samoa was “poorly written, unscientific, irresponsible, and misleading.”36 But that was mild compared with what was to come. In September 2000, the anthropologists
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, proclaimed, “Sexes Equal on South Sea Isle.”3 It was based on the work of the anthropologist Maria Lepowsky, who (perhaps channeling the ghost of Margaret Mead) said that gender relations on the island of Vanatinai prove that “the subjugation of women by men is not a human universal, and it is
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members rather than to pursue their own aspirations—and that many eventually switched out for that reason.79 I will give the final word to Margaret Mead, who, despite being wrong in her early career about the malleability of gender, was surely right when she said, “If we are to achieve a
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micromanage the personalities of their children, that humans are born free of selfish tendencies, or that appealing stories, melodies, and faces are arbitrary social constructions. Margaret Mead, an icon of twentieth-century egalitarianism, told her daughter that she credited her own intellectual talent to her genes, and I can confirm that such
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Letter, 12, 4–6. Freedman, J. L. 2002. Media violence and aggression: No evidence for a connection. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Freeman, D. 1983. Margaret Mead and Samoa: The making and unmaking of an anthropological myth. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Freeman, D. 1999. The fateful hoaxing of
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Margaret Mead: A historical analysis of her Samoan research. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press. Frith, C. 1992. The cognitive neuropsychology of schizophrenia. New York: Psychology Press. Fry, D.
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) Mansfield, Harvey Man Who Came to Dinner, The Mao Zedong Mapplethorpe, Robert March of Folly, The: From Troy to Vietnam (Tuchman) Marcos, Ferdinand Marcus, Gary Margaret Mead and Samoa (Freeman) Marr, David Martindale, Colin Marx, Karl Marx Brothers Marxism Masters, Roger materialism Mating Mind, The (Miller) Matrix, The Mayr, Ernst Mazursky, Paul
War Without Mercy: PACIFIC WAR
by John Dower · 11 Apr 1986 · 516pp · 159,734 words
-known English and American anthropologists, along with their peers in sister disciplines, contributed energetically to this cause as theorists and proselytizers. Notable among them were Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Ruth Benedict, Clyde Kluckhohn, Alexander Leighton, and Geoffrey Gorer. Mead once suggested that country-oriented studies could be most accurately described as focusing
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as being by far the most interesting.2 A fundamental premise of the national-character approach was “the psychic unity of humankind”—the assumption, as Margaret Mead later expressed it, that “all human beings share in a basic humanity.” This reflected the antiracist influence of Franz Boas, who had been the immensely
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found security and stability by “fitting into a system of culturally defined patterns of group life” was “analogous to the conformism of our adolescent patterns.” Margaret Mead agreed that this “conscious conformity” lay at the heart of the adolescent quality in Japan, and went on to note that “whereas in the United
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in the group and complete individual insecurity outside the group.” The day after the conference ended, Tannenbaum followed up this notion in a letter to Margaret Mead, one of the coordinators of the conference, in which he provided a list of twenty-eight points of analogy between Japanese behavior and “the character
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treat as not inappropriate under the circumstances: the Japanese, after all, had good reason to feel inferior. Two of the West’s most distinguished anthropologists, Margaret Mead and her husband Gregory Bateson, for example, took this line. At the December 1944 conference, Mead agreed that Japanese culture was “childish” and “pathological.” Previously
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“trifles,” she observed (in the postwar reworking of her wartime studies), “occurs in American records of adolescent gangs and case-histories of neurotics.”17 As Margaret Mead later observed, Benedict herself was uncomfortable with rigid psychological and psychiatric concepts, and used them sparingly. Gorer too, although more sympathetic to Freudian analysis, had
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.S. Army Forces in the Pacific, Psychological Warfare Branch” (1 box plus scrapbook). 2. The theories and premises underlying national-character studies were explained by Margaret Mead in a number of postwar essays: “The Study of National Character,” in Daniel Lerner and Harold D. Lasswell, eds., The Policy Sciences: Recent Developments in
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Scope and Method (1951: Stanford University Press), 70–85; Margaret Mead and Rhoda Metraux, eds., The Study of Culture at a Distance (1953: University of Chicago Press), esp 3–53, 397–400; “National Character,” in A
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conflicts.” American Anthropologist 47.4 (October-December 1945): 635–37; also Embree in ibid., 52.3 (July-September 1950): 430–32. 15. Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis (1942: Special Publications of the New York Academy of Sciences, vol. 11), 263. 16. Edgar Snow, The Battle for Asia
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Defeat: A Report by a Chatham House Study Group (1945: Oxford University Press), xii, 129; Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, 108; cf. 165. 18. Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict (1974: Columbia University Press), 57–59 Haring was also a prolific writer on Japan during the war, producing among other contributions a book
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, 1963. Bastide, Roger. “Color, Racism, and Christianity.” Daedalus, Spring 1967, 312–27. Batchelder, Robert. The Irreversible Decision, 1939–1950. Houghton Mifflin, 1961. Bateson, Gregory, and Margaret Mead. Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis. Special Publications of the New York Academy of Sciences, vol. 11, 1942. Beaufort, John, and Clinton Green. “Japs Don’t
Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller
by Alec Nevala-Lee · 1 Aug 2022 · 864pp · 222,565 words
of hearing aids—and was more comfortable lecturing into the night, but he was still treated as a celebrity. The guests included the cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead, the British economist Barbara Ward, and an exceptional figure who connected with Fuller on the first day. Hearing someone call his name, Fuller turned to
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would be headed by Glenn Olds, the president of Kent State University, and its members included David Rockefeller’s daughter Neva Kaiser, with Jonas Salk, Margaret Mead, and Arthur C. Clarke on its advisory board. In 1972 Fuller met William F. Buckley Jr. at the University of Virginia’s commencement ceremonies. “I
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to keep. Fuller also mourned a more personal loss. Of all the celebrities he had encountered on the Delos cruise, he had been closest to Margaret Mead. As early as World War II, he had wanted to meet the noted “woman anthropologist,” who later spent time with him in Carbondale. After Mead
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. Hession, Jane King, and Debra Pickrel. Frank Lloyd Wright in New York: The Plaza Years, 1954–1959. Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 2007. Howard, Jane. Margaret Mead: A Life. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1984. Howland, Llewellyn, III. No Ordinary Being: W. Starling Burgess, Inventor, Naval Architect, Poet, Aviation Pioneer, and Master of
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-scientist-who-inspired-the-name-of-epcots-spaceship-earth (accessed January 2021). a belated invitation: Martin A. Sklar to RBF, November 8, 1978, B380-F8. Margaret Mead: In an undated letter from 1971, Mead questioned one of RBF’s key assumptions: “Do you think it would be possible to say that with
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9, 1944, B59-F4. event in her memory: Panayis Psomopoulos to RBF, November 18, 1978, B377-F4. “I know she can hear me”: Jane Howard, Margaret Mead: A Life (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1984), 428. 1982 World’s Fair in Knoxville, Tennessee: Norman Foster, “Buckminster Fuller—File for Future.” Manuscript provided to
How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States
by Daniel Immerwahr · 19 Feb 2019
prominent treatments of overseas territories are rare. The only one with a truly large audience was Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) by the anthropologist Margaret Mead, a wildly popular ethnography that featured frank discussions of Samoan sexuality and launched Mead’s career as one of the most famous scholars in the
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(2017): 874–902. coverage in The New York Times: New York Times Index: Annual Cumulative Volume Year 1930 (New York, 1931). “brown Polynesian people,” etc.: Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928; New York, 2001), 8. Mead’s silence on the colonial aspects of her subject is discussed in Derek Freeman
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, Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth (Cambridge, MA, 1983). Mead’s book contains only three instances of the term American Samoa (
The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community
by Ray Oldenburg · 17 Aug 1999
out of the home, he is not nearly as removed from domestic responsibility as many feminists and child developmentalists suggest. While parenting is largely mothering, Margaret Mead’s observations are also true: “In all the known history of civilization, never have fathers taken as much care of their little children as in
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important ways. Among those who currently enjoy it, third place association reduces the dangerous insularity of modern marriage, a condition once described by the late Margaret Mead: each spouse is supposed to be all things to the other. They’re supposed to be good in bed, and good out of it. Women
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, The Country House (New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1905). 22. Gail Fullerton, Survival in Marriage (Hinsdale, Illinois: Dryden, 1977), 215. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. Margaret Mead, “The American Family” in ed. Huston Smith, The Search for America (Englewood-Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1959), 119. 26. Bert N. Adams, The Family
Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History
by Thomas Rid · 27 Jun 2016 · 509pp · 132,327 words
of ten meetings, with transportation, meals, and cocktails included. Many distinguished cybernetics-inspired scientists were in the audience, among them Gregory Bateson, his then wife Margaret Mead, Warren McCulloch from MIT’s Laboratory of Electronics, Julian Bigelow, who had worked with Wiener on the antiaircraft predictor, and Arturo Rosenblueth from Mexico City
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20 (December 1948): 379–83. The article was reprinted in the United Sates in March 1949 in the magazine Radio-Electronics, pp. 77–80. 26.Margaret Mead, “Cybernetics of Cybernetics,” in Purposive Systems, ed. Heinz von Foerster (New York: Spartan Books, 1968), 1. 27.W. Ross Ashby, “Homeostasis,” in Cybernetics: Circular Causal
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and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and Social Systems: Transactions of the Ninth Conference, March 20–21, 1952, New York, NY, ed. Heinz von Foerster, Margaret Mead, and Hans Lukas Teuber (New York: Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, 1953), 73. 28.Ibid., 74. 29.Ibid., 89. 30.Ibid. 31.Ibid. 32.Ibid., 97
Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence
by Kristen R. Ghodsee · 20 Nov 2018 · 211pp · 57,759 words
collectively who shape history. “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world,” begins a quote attributed to the anthropologist Margaret Mead. “Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” Of course, things don’t always change for the better, as Yurchak and many of his
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Press, 1992). 2. Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). 3. This quote is attributed to Margaret Mead, although there is no written source. A full explanation of the quote can be found on the website of the Institute for Intercultural Studies: www
Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart
by Nicholas Carr · 28 Jan 2025 · 231pp · 85,135 words
trying to defeat? And second, what kinds of media could they use to do it?” The questions inspired a few dozen prominent intellectuals, including anthropologist Margaret Mead, psychologists Gordon Allport and Erich Fromm, pollster George Gallup, and art historian Arthur Upham Pope, to form, with the Roosevelt administration’s backing, the Committee
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discussing his ideas, Shannon again emphasized the separation of the meaning of a message from the mechanism of its communication. Also at the conference was Margaret Mead. As the discussions continued, she began to grow uneasy with what she was hearing. Having spent years studying how groups of people make meaning through
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it’s interpreted. They influence meaning both directly (by selecting the information people see) and indirectly (by promoting certain forms of expression and discouraging others). Margaret Mead was right. The manipulation of information is always also the manipulation of meaning. “People are not in general influenced by long books or discourses,” the
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-specific” treatment under the law. As “the most participatory form of mass speech yet developed,” it should be granted “the highest protection from governmental intrusion.” Margaret Mead’s ideal of a truly democratic communication medium—bidirectional, decentralized, participatory, multisensory, enveloping—had gone underground in the sixties. Without the technology required to bring
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us of direct contact with the sweaty, stinky, predigital meatworld and shepherd us into a society composed of mirages generated by communication systems they control. Margaret Mead’s wayward offspring, they realize that if you push democratic media far enough, you’ll reveal and be able to exploit its totalizing essence. Their
The Rough Guide to New York City
by Rough Guides · 21 May 2018
Animal Spirits: The American Pursuit of Vitality From Camp Meeting to Wall Street
by Jackson Lears
The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal
by M. Mitchell Waldrop · 14 Apr 2001
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