Margaret Mead

Margaret Mead was an anthropologist, who was born in 1901 and died in 1978. She was a student of Francis Boaz who was the representative of a way of thinking called “Historical Particularism”. She was very influenced by his ideas, but when she made a travel to made an etnography, she started to change. She wanted to investigated the young people because in occidental culture all the people wanted to explain why the adolescents were rebels in that period. Margaret Mead traveled to Papua New Guinea,exactly to Samoa, to studied the culture there, the samoans. They were a culture that have not been studied in depth. She wanted to see if the young people there passed a difficult adolescence or not. She wanted to know if this hard moment were result of the same adolescence or for the influence of the civilization. She conclude that the adolescence in Samoa was soft and whitout concerns; they lived the adolescence in freedom. After this she became a recognized person, specially for the young people, she was a symbol of freedom.
I like Margaret Mead because she broke whit the stereotypes that the society put on us. She started to open the “antropology world” to the people than didn’t know it. Also she was very brave because she went to a place were she didn’t know anyone, and the samoans didn’t know her too. She is an example of love of knowledge.