Anthropologist Margaret Mead Quotes

Never believe that a few caring people can't change the world. For indeed that's all who ever have.

A student once asked anthropologist Margaret Mead, “What is the earliest sign of civilization?” The student expected her to say a clay pot, a grinding stone, or maybe a weapon. Margaret Mead thought for a moment, then she said, “A healed femur.” A femur is the longest bone in the body, linking hip to knee. In societies without the benefits of modern medicine, it takes about six weeks of rest for a fractured femur to heal. A healed femur shows that someone cared for the injured person, did their hunting and gathering, stayed with them, and offered physical protection and human companionship until the injury could mend. Mead explained that where the law of the jungle—the survival of the fittest—rules, no healed femurs are found. The first sign of civilization is compassion, seen in a healed femur.

The anthropologist Margaret Mead concluded in 1948, after observing seven different ethnic groups in the Pacific Islands, that different cultures made different forms of female sexual experience seem normal and desirable. The capacity for orgasm in women, she found, is a learned response, which a given culture can help or can fail to help its women to develop. Mead believed that a woman's sexual fulfillment, and the positive meaning of her sexuality in her own mind, depend upon three factors: 1: She must live in a culture that recognizes female desire as being of value; 2: Her culture must allow her to understand her sexual anatomy; 3: And her culture must teach the various sexual skills that give women orgasms.

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. —Margaret Mead, anthropologist

gullible but immensely influential American anthropologist Margaret Mead,* and

There’s nothing naive about believing that concerted democratic campaigning can change the world. As the anthropologist Margaret Mead said: “It’s the only thing that ever has.

Long ago, Margaret Mead, the world-famous anthropologist, noted that we should "never underestimate the power of a small group with dedication to change the world; it is, in fact, the only thing that does.

Anthropologist and teacher Margaret Mead said in Redbook magazine in 1963, “If one cannot state a matter clearly enough so that an intelligent twelve-year-old can understand it, one should remain within the cloistered walls of the University and laboratory until one gets a better grasp of one’s subject matter.

Nora Ephron is a screenwriter whose scripts for Silkwood, When Harry Met Sally, and Sleepless in Seattle have all been nominated for Academy Awards. Ephron started her career as a journalist for the New York Post and Esquire. She became a journalist because of her high school journalism teacher. Ephron still remembers the first day of her journalism class. Although the students had no journalism experience, they walked into their first class with a sense of what a journalist does: A journalists gets the facts and reports them. To get the facts, you track down the five Ws—who, what, where, when, and why. As students sat in front of their manual typewriters, Ephron’s teacher announced the first assignment. They would write the lead of a newspaper story. The teacher reeled off the facts: “Kenneth L. Peters, the principal of Beverly Hills High School, announced today that the entire high school faculty will travel to Sacramento next Thursday for a colloquium in new teaching methods. Among the speakers will be anthropologist Margaret Mead, college president Dr. Robert Maynard Hutchins, and California governor Edmund ‘Pat’ Brown.” The budding journalists sat at their typewriters and pecked away at the first lead of their careers. According to Ephron, she and most of the other students produced leads that reordered the facts and condensed them into a single sentence: “Governor Pat Brown, Margaret Mead, and Robert Maynard Hutchins will address the Beverly Hills High School faculty Thursday in Sacramento. . .blah, blah, blah.” The teacher collected the leads and scanned them rapidly. Then he laid them aside and paused for a moment. Finally, he said, “The lead to the story is ‘There will be no school next Thursday.’” “It was a breathtaking moment,” Ephron recalls. “In that instant I realized that journalism was not just about regurgitating the facts but about figuring out the point. It wasn’t enough to know the who, what, when, and where; you had to understand what it meant. And why it mattered.” For the rest of the year, she says, every assignment had a secret—a hidden point that the students had to figure out in order to produce a good story.

the National Research Council (NRC) hired a team of anthropologists, led by the venerable Margaret Mead, to study American food habits. How do people decide what’s good to eat, and how do you go about changing their minds? Studies were undertaken, recommendations drafted, reports published—including Mead’s 1943 opus “The Problem of Changing Food Habits: Report of the Committee on Food Habits,” and if ever a case were to be made for word-rationing, there it was. The

You and I are learning to see our trait as a neutral thing—useful in some situations, not in others—but our culture definitely does not see it, or any trait as neutral. The anthropologist Margaret Mead explained it well. Although a culture’s newborns will show a broad range of inherited temperaments, only a narrow band of these, a certain type, will be the ideal. The ideal personality is embodied, in Mead's words, in 'every thread of the social fabric—in the care of the young child, the games the children play, the songs the people sing, the political organization, the religious observance, the art and the philosophy.' Other traits are ignored, discouraged, or if all else fails, ridiculed. What is the ideal in our culture? Movies, advertisements, the design of public spaces, all tell us we should be as tough as the Terminator, as stoic as Clint Eastwood, as outgoing as Goldie Hawn. We should be pleasantly stimulated by bright lights, noise, a gang of cheerful fellows hanging out in a bar. If we are feeling overwhelmed and sensitive, we can always take a painkiller.

It is an attention rebellion,' [Ben Stewart] said. I realised this requires a shift in how we think about ourselves. We are not medieval peasants begging at the court of King Zuckerberg for crumbs of attention. We are free citizens of democracies, and we own our own minds and our own society, and together, we are going to take them back. At times it seemed to me that this would be a hard movement to get off the ground - but then I remembered that all the movements that have changed your life and my life were hard to get off the ground. ...What we face is, in many ways, vastly less challenging than the cliff they had to scale. They didn't give up. Often, when a person argues for social change, they are called 'naive.' The exact opposite is the truth. It's naive to think we as citizens can do nothing, and leave the powerful to do whatever they want, and somehow our attention will survive. There's nothing naive about believing that concerted democratic campaigning can change the world. As the anthropologist Margaret Mead said, it's the only thing that ever has. I realised that we have to decide now: do we value attention and focus? Does being able to think deeply matter to us? Do we want it for our children? If we do, then we have to fight for it. As one politician said - you don't get what you don't fight for.

In the classic case of the Mountain Arapesh, Margaret Mead maintained they were and had been peaceful, yet there is solid evidence that no more than a generation earlier they had engaged in substantial warfare, thus demonstrating the problem that arises involving warfare with all such studies.25 Thus research by university-trained anthropologists of the twentieth century is much less useful for understanding forager warfare than the early accounts of explorers, missionaries and patrol officers. Such early historic and ethnographic data on the Alaskan Iñupiaq and Aboriginal Australians can be extremely enlightening.26 These early accounts have the potential for bias and lack of completeness and must be used with caution, but such is the case with all data. It appears that the failure to comprehend the problems with recent, twentieth-century ethnographic studies renders the opinions of people like Douglas Fry and Brian Ferguson about peaceful societies virtually worthless.” (Steven Leblanc)

Obviously the most enduring way to make this commitment is through marriage. Yet because sexual liberals deny the differences between the sexes, their explanations of why there are marriages and why marriage is needed and desired ignore the central truth of marriage: that it is built on sex roles. Pressed to explain the institution, they respond vaguely that human beings want "structure" or desire "intimacy." But however desirable in marriage, these values are not essential causes or explanations of it. In many cultures, the wife and husband share very few one-to-one intimacies. Ties with others of the same sex--or even the opposite sex--often offer deeper companionship. The most intimate connections are between mothers and their children. In all societies, male groups provide men with some of their most emotionally gratifying associations. Indeed, intimacy can deter or undermine wedlock. In the kibbutz, for example, where unrelated boys and girls are brought up together and achieve a profound degree of companionate feeling, they never marry members of the same child-rearing group. In the many cultures where marriages are arranged, the desire for intimacy is subversive of marriage. Similarly, man's "innate need for structure" can be satisfied in hundreds of forms of organization. The need for structure may explain all of them or none of them, but it does not tell us why, of all possible arrangements, marriage is the one most prevalent. It does not tell us why, in most societies, marriage alone is consecrated in a religious ceremony and entails a permanent commitment. As most anthropologists see it, however, the reason is simple. The very essence of marriage, Bronislaw Malinowski wrote, is not structure and intimacy; it is "parenthood and above all maternity." The male role in marriage, as Margaret Mead maintained, "in every known human society, is to provide for women and children." In order to marry, in fact, Malinowski says that almost every human society first requires the man "to prove his capacity to maintain the woman." Marriage is not simply a ratification of an existing love. It is the conversion of that love into a biological and social continuity. . . . Regardless of what reasons particular couples may give for getting married, the deeper evolutionary and sexual propensities explain the persistence of the institution. All sorts of superficial variations--from homosexual marriage to companionate partnership--may be played on the primal themes of human life. But the themes remain. The natural fulfillment of love is a child; the fantasies and projects of the childless couple may well be considered as surrogate children.

The renowned anthropologist Margaret Mead said that what marks the beginning and assures the continuity of civilization is compassion.

Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else. Margaret Mead, anthropologist (1901–78) F

In her 1975 essay “Ethnicity and Anthropology in America,” anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote, “Being American is a matter of abstention from foreign ways, foreign food, foreign ideas, foreign accents.

Simms began by presenting the facts of the story: “Kenneth L. Peters, the principal of Beverly Hills High School, announced today that the entire high school faculty will travel to Sacramento next Thursday for a colloquium in new teaching methods. Among the speakers will be anthropologist Margaret Mead, college president Dr. Robert Maynard Hutchins, and California governor Edmund ‘Pat’ Brown.” The students hammered away on their manual typewriters trying to keep up with the teacher’s pace. Then they handed in their rapidly written leads. Each attempted to summarize the who, what, where, and why as succinctly as possible: “Margaret Mead, Maynard Hutchins, and Governor Brown will address the faculty on …”; “Next Thursday, the high school faculty will …” Simms reviewed the students’ leads and put them aside. He then informed them that they were all wrong. The lead to the story, he said, was “There will be no school Thursday.” “In that instant,” Ephron recalls, “I realized that journalism was not just about regurgitating the facts but about figuring out the point.

When they hear the term “anthropology,” they think of Margaret Mead and her sexually liberated Samoans, or Jane Goodall and her colony of chimps, not physical anthropologists and their calipers and bones.

The cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead supposedly told her students, “You’re absolutely unique, just like everyone else.” Projects are like that. Whatever sets a project apart, it shares other characteristics with projects in its class.

Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else. Margaret Mead, US anthropologist (1901–78)

Anthropologist Margaret Mead is famously supposed to have said, “Never think that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens cannot change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.

I reflect on Bicycle Bob Silverman, who prodded and pushed Montreal into being one of the best biking cities in the world. I think about Dan Buettner and the Blue Zones gang, who’ve shown entire cities of people how to live healthier and longer lives. I think about Bea Johnson, who through her passion and pint jar of trash has changed the way thousands of us view our garbage. I think about Dr. June McCarroll in California and Dadarao Bilhore in India – on their hands and knees – painting center lines and filling potholes, one by one, to make our roads safe. These are people so passionate about changing some sliver of the world that they just rolled up their sleeves and dug in. They forged ahead without job title, majority vote, business card, salary, office, or political affiliation. Writer Thomas Friedman refers to these people as “leaders without authority.” Where do we find more? Well, we can start by taking a selfie. And listening to a pair of voices from the past. Alexis de Tocqueville – a man absolutely smitten by democracy in America – reminds us that one of the beauties of living in a democracy is that policies aren’t decreed from on high by “church and state” but from the bottom up, by “village and congregation.” And anthropologist Margaret Mead expounds, “never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.