Beeman, William O. (2003). MARGARET MEAD--STUDYING CONTEMPORARY WESTERN CULTURE: METHOD AND THEORY. New York: Berghahn Books.

IntroductionMargaret Mead: Americas Premier Analyst

Methodological Insights Beeman (2003) mentions when Mead began her career, anthropology was still very young as a discipline and anthropologists were continually working to define the nature of anthropological praxis. Mead wrote broadly on anthropology on the familiar standards of cultural relativity, fieldwork, and anthropological praxis is systematically laid out which is conventionally used in many classrooms today. In the address, she both situates anthropology firmly within the realm of the sciences, and extends the range of anthropology. She makes it clear that a truly human science should be addressing matters of contemporary importance. She additionally points out the essential importance of understanding how humans function in conjunction with each other as essential for developing an understanding of the universe. Science in her view, therefore, cannot take place outside of a closely examined human framework. She goes on to insist that these two areas of learning are complementary and supportive of each other, rather than antagonistic, and that just as the understanding of human processes is not easily incorporated into the science laboratory, the methods of the physical sciences can become stultifying and dangerous when applied to the investigation of human behavior. Mead modulated the concept of 'nationhood' to emphasize the interdependency of nations as contingent cultural unit. Overall she champions the treatment of each nation as a unit of dignity of its own, and makes the interesting observation that civilizations no longer will rise and fall as in the past, because they now exist in an interconnected world. Finally, in Changing Styles of Anthropological Work, written for the Annual Review of Anthropology, and published just 5 years before her death, Mead makes a complete assessment of anthropology and its development to that date.

She advocates for her most influential methodological innovations in this article. These are the use of multi-disciplinary approaches to the study of human culture, fieldwork using teams of investigators, group generation of methodology and analysis, and the extensive use of the most modern methodologies in visual and sound recording. These ideas are so commonplace today, we rarely attribute them to Mead, but we also fail to acknowledge her mastery of these ways of going about this work. Her example both as an organizer of research and an advocate for these methodologies sets her apart from others, although she notes with pleasure the complex and fruitful fieldwork increasingly undertaken by teams of researchers, as opposed to individuals working in isolation. She discusses such modern trends as computer analysis, general systems theory, the ecological movement, and gender equality as important ideas that anthropology must embrace. She notes too, the trend in anthropology toward the study both of complex civilizations and of sub-groups within contemporary Western societies such as occupational or sexual minorities. In doing this she makes an explicit break with Franz Boas, who was wary of studying ones own society for fear of an inability to sustain objectivity. Meads answer is as fresh as yesterday, and sounds like a pronouncement from cultural studies: