Margaret Mead: Humanity

Margaret Mead was American anthropologist. Explore interesting quotes on humanity.
Margaret Mead: 266 quotes28 likes

“One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are when you don't come home at night.”

Margaret Mead

Attributed in The Quotable Woman (1991) by the Running Press, p. 53
1990s

“I must admit that I personally measure success in terms of the contributions an individual makes to her or his fellow human beings.”

Margaret Mead

Source: 1970s, Margaret Mead: Some Personal Views (1979), p. 249

“The contempt for law and the contempt for the human consequences of lawbreaking go from the bottom to the top of American society.”

Margaret Mead

As reported in "Impeachment?" by Claire Safran, in Redbook (April 1974)
1970s

“If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse gift will find a fitting place.”

Margaret Mead

Source: 1930s, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935), p. 322
Context: Historically our own culture has relied for the creation of rich and contrasting values upon many artificial distinctions, the most striking of which is sex. It will not be by the mere abolition of these distinctions that society will develop patterns in which individual gifts are given place instead of being forced into an ill-fitting mould. If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse human gift will find a fitting place.

“Man's role is uncertain, undefined, and perhaps unnecessary. By a great effort man has hit upon a method of compensating himself for his basic inferiority. Equipped with various mysterious noise-making instruments, whose potency rests upon their actual form's being unknown to those who hear the sounds — that is, the women and children must never know that they are really bamboo flutes, or hollow logs, or bits of elliptic wood whirled on strings — they can get the male children away from the women, brand them as incomplete, and themselves turn boys into men. Women, it is true, make human beings, but only men can make men.”

Margaret Mead

Source: 1940s, Male and Female (1949), p. 84 as cited in: John Whiting, Eleanor Hollenberg Chasdi, Roy D'Andrade (2006) Culture and Human Development: The Selected Papers of John Whiting. p. 240

“There is no necessary connection between warfare and human nature. Human nature is potentially aggressive and destructive and potentially orderly and constructive.”

Margaret Mead

Source: 1940s, And Keep Your Powder Dry: An Anthropologist Looks at America (1942), p. 134

“The differences between the two sexes is one of the important conditions upon which we have built the many varieties of human culture that give human beings dignity and stature.”

Margaret Mead

Source: 1940s, Male and Female (1949), p. 7

“In contrast to our own social environment which brings out different aspects of human nature and often demonstrated that behavior which occurs almost invariably in individuals within our society is nevertheless due not to original nature but to social environment; and a homogeneous and simple development of the individual may be studied.”

Margaret Mead

Source: 1930s, Growing Up in New Guinea (1930), p. 281, as cited in: Lenora Foerstel, Angela Gilliam (1994) Confronting Margaret Mead: Scholarship, Empire, and the South Pacific. p. 84

“Today, as we are coming to understand better the circular processes through which culture is developed and transmitted, we recognize that man's most human characteristic is not his ability to learn, which he shares with many other species, but his ability to teach and store what others have developed and taught him. Learning, which is based on human dependency, is relatively simple. But human capacities for creating elaborate teachable systems, for understanding and utilizing the resources of the natural world, and for governing society and creating and creating imaginary worlds all these are very complex. In the past, men relied on the least elaborate part of the circular system, the dependent learning by children, for continuity of transmission and for the embodiment of the new. Now, with our greater understanding of the process, we must cultivate the most flexible and complex part of the system; the behavior of adults. We must, in fact, teach ourselves how to alter adult behavior so that we can give up postfigurative upbringing, with its tolerated configurative components, and discover prefigurative ways of teaching and learning. We must create new models for adults who can teach their children not what to learn but how to learn and not what they should be committed to, but the value of commitment.”

Margaret Mead

1970s, Culture and commitment, 1970

“Because of their age — long training in human relations — for that is what feminine intuition really is — women have a special contribution to make to any group enterprise, and I feel it is up to them to contribute the kinds of awareness that few men… have incorporated through their education.”

Margaret Mead

Source: 1970s, Blackberry Winter, 1972, Ch. 14

“Female animals defending their young are notoriously ferocious and lack the playful delight in combat which characterizes the mock combats of males of the same species. There seems very little ground for claiming that the mother of young children is more peaceful, more responsible, and more thoughtful for the welfare of the human race than is her husband or brother.”

Margaret Mead

Introduction
1940s, Male and Female (1949)

“For Immanuel Kant, the term anthropology embraced all the human sciences, and laid the foundation of familiar knowledge we need, to build solidly grounded ideas about the moral and political demands of human life. Margaret Mead saw mid-twentieth-century anthropology as engaged in a project no less ambitious than Kant's own, and her Terry Lectures on Continuities in Cultural Evolution provide an excellent point to enter into her reflections.”

Margaret Mead

Source: 1960s, Continuities in Cultural Evolution (1964), p. xii

“If a society insists that warfare is the major occupation for the male sex, it is therefore insisting that all male children display bravery and pugnacity. Even if the insistence upon the differential bravery of men and women is not made articulate, the difference in occupation makes this point implicitly. When, however, a society goes further and defines men as brave and women as timorous, when men are forbidden to show fear and women are indulged in the most flagrant display of fear, a more explicit element enters in. Originally two variations of human temperament, a hatred of fear or willingness to display fear, they have been socially translated into inalienable aspects of the personalities of the two sexes. And to that defined sex-personality every child will be educated, if a boy, to suppress fear, if a girl, to show it.”

Margaret Mead

Source: 1930s, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935), p. 287

“In every human society of which we have any record, there are those who teach and those who learn, for learning a way of life is implicit in all human culture as we know it. But the separation of the teacher's role from the role of all adults who inducted the young into the habitual behavior of the group, was a comparatively late invention. Furthermore, when we do find explicit and defined teaching, in primitive societies we find it tied in with a sense of the rareness or the precariousness of some human tradition.”

Margaret Mead

&quot;An Anthropologist Looks at the Teacher&#x27;s Role&quot; http://varenne.tc.columbia.edu/bib/texts/med00marg42anthlook.html, in Educational Method, Vol 21, (1942) p. 219-223 <br class="br">1940s

“Our humanity rests upon a series of learned behaviors, woven together into patterns that are infinitely fragile and never directly inherited.”

Margaret Mead

As quoted in Familiar Medical Quotations (1968) by Maurice Benjamin Strauss, p. 288
1960s

“I have tried, in this book, to do three things. I try first to bring a greater awareness of the way in which the differences and the similarities in the bodies of human beings are the basis on which all our learnings about our sex, and our relationship to the other sex, are built. Talking about our bodies is a complex and difficult matter. We are so used to covering them up, to referring to them obliquely with slang terms or in a borrowed language to hiding even infants' sex membership under blue and pink ribbons. It is difficult to become aware of those things about us which have been, and will always be, patterned by our own particular modesties and reticences. We reject, and very rightly, catalogues of caresses arranged in frequency tables, or accounts of childhood that read like a hospital chart…”

Margaret Mead

Source: 1940s, Male and Female (1949), p. 4-5

“Women should be permitted to volunteer for non-combat service, […] We have no real way of knowing whether the kinds of training that teach men both courage and restraint would be adaptable to women or effective in a crisis. But the evidence of history and comparative studies of other species suggest that women as a fighting body might be far less amenable to the rules that prevent war from becoming a massacre and, with the use of modern weapons, that protect the survival of all humanity. That is what I meant by saying that women in combat might be too fierce.”

Margaret Mead

"Remarks about the Military Draft" (June 1968) in Margaret Mead, Some Personal Views (1979), edited by Rhoda Metraux, pp. 35–36
1960s

“How are men and women to think about their maleness and their femaleness in this twentieth century, in which so many of our old ideas must be made new? Have we over-domesticated men, denied their natural adventurousness, tied them down to machines that are after all only glorified spindles and looms, mortars and pestles and digging sticks, all of which were once women's work? Have we cut women off from their natural closeness to their children, taught them to look for a job instead of the touch of a child's hand, for status in a competitive world rather than a unique place by a glowing hearth? In educating women like men, have we done something disastrous to both men and women alike, or have we only taken one further step in the recurrent task of building more and better on our original human nature?”

Margaret Mead

Source: 1940s, Male and Female (1949), p. 1; Start of first chapter entitled "The Significance of the Questions We Ask"

“The first step in the direction of a world rule of law is the recognition that peace no longer is an unobtainable ideal but a necessary condition of continued human existence. But to take even this step we must return to a calm and responsible frame of mind in which we can face the long patient tasks ahead.”

Margaret Mead

"Are Shelters the Answer?", in The New York Times Magazine (26 November 1961), p. 125
1960s