“Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.” – Margaret Mead
About Margaret Mead
Margaret Mead (December 16, 1901 – November 15, 1978) was an American cultural anthropologist who featured frequently as an author and speaker in the mass media during the 1960s and 1970s. She earned her bachelor’s degree at Barnard College in New York City and her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University.
Mead was a respected and often controversial academic who popularized the insights of anthropology in modern American and Western culture. Her reports detailing the attitudes towards sex in South Pacific and Southeast Asian traditional cultures influenced the 1960s sexual revolution. She was a proponent of broadening sexual mores within a context of traditional Western religious life.
During World War II, Mead served as executive secretary of the National Research Council’s Committee on Food Habits. She served as curator of ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History from 1946 to 1969. She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1948. She taught at The New School and Columbia University, where she was an adjunct professor from 1954 to 1978 and was a professor of anthropology and chair of the Division of Social Sciences at Fordham University’s Lincoln Center campus from 1968 to 1970, founding their anthropology department. In 1970, she joined the faculty of the University of Rhode Island as a Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Anthropology.
She held various positions in the American Association for the Advancement of Science, notably president in 1975 and chair of the executive committee of the board of directors in 1976. She was a recognizable figure in academia, usually wearing a distinctive cape and carrying a walking-stick.
Mead was featured on two record albums published by Folkways Records.
She is credited with the pluralization of the term “semiotics.”
Mead died of pancreatic cancer on November 15, 1978 and is buried at Trinity Episcopal Church Cemetery, Buckingham, Pennsylvania.
(Source – Wikipedia)