Use the word modern to describe something.

It's usually a positive.

We're very appreciative and even a little smug about the miracles of modern science, modern technology and even the superiority of modern viewpoints.

But what if, in speeding towards a new and ever better future, we've left some important truths about ourselves behind one of the people who best helps us to explore this problem is Margaret Mead, perhaps the most famous anthropologist in the world.

Margaret Mead was born in the U.

S.

A.

In 1901 the oldest of five Children.

Her father was a professor of finance, and her mother was a sociologist.

After studying psychology is an undergraduate meet began a PhD in the relatively new field off anthropology.

Her supervisor, France Boas, was the founder of the discipline in the United States.

Unlike earlier anthropologists, who'd imagined that civilization was progressing in a linear fashion, from barbarism to savagery toe civilization, Boas argued that the world was teeming with separate cultures, each with their own unique perspectives, insights on deficiencies.

The modern Western world was not the pinnacle of human achievement, but simply one specific example of what humans could get up to Bo has suggested that meet travel for her fieldwork to Samoa, a few tiny volcanic tropical islands in the center of the Pacific Ocean.

Mead was particularly interested in primitive communities because she believed that such isolated cultures could serve as laboratories that would reveal ways of living that the modern world had for gotten about but needed to remember.

Starting in 1925 and lasting until the beginning of the Second World War Meet, lived in Samoa in a highly authentic way for long periods.

She let the language is dressed like a local and even carried babies around by having them cling to her neck.

Meet became fascinated by Samoan attitudes to sex in particular.

In the book that made her name coming of age in Samoa, published in 1928 Mead described Samoan culture a Sfar more open and comfortable with sex than the modern United States.

Little Children in Samoa knew all about masturbation and learned about intercourse in other acts through firsthand observation, but thought of it is no more scandalous or worthy of comment than death or birth.

Homosexuality was incidental, but also not a matter of shame on people's orientations, fluctuated naturally throughout their lives without defining them.

This intrigued and inspired Mead, who herself lead rather unconventional life simultaneously involved with successive husbands on an ever present female lover.

Another famous anthropologist called Ruth Benedict Media argued that the Samoan approach to sex made adolescence far easier for girls there because there was little pressure for them to conform to particular kinds of sexuality.

They were neither pressure to abstain from sex, nor to achieve particular milestones, like having boyfriends or getting married.

Gradually, Meat got interested in gender roles on discovered that modern societies are far more rigid in this area than primitive ones.

For example, Americans tend to think of men as productive, sensible and aggressive, while women are often told that they're more frivolous, peaceful and nurturing.

But in 1935 book sex and Temperament in three primitive societies, Mead's study tribes in Papua New Guinea on recorded that in the Arab pesh tribe, both men and women were peaceful and nurturing, while among the Monday game or tribe, men and women were both ruthless and aggressive.

In short, meet suggested that no gender traits are ever simply human nature.

They're all instead simply possibilities which are either taught, encouraged or shunned by any given culture meet.

Striking conclusion is it.

It isn't gender that makes women color their hair or listen to people's feelings or race that makes some nations regularly attacked their neighbors.

Rather, it's the social expectations and norms that have developed slowly over centuries and which have laid the groundwork for each individual psychological makeup we must recognize.

She reminded her readers that beneath the superficial classifications of sex and race, the same potentialities always exist recurring generation after generation, only to perish because society has no place for them.

Meet herself learned so much from her anthropological subjects.

She brought up her daughter according to some of the parenting ideas of the primitive people she worked with like breastfeeding on demand, which he helped to popularize in modern day America during World War Two, access to the South Pacific was impossible, so Mead began to study more complex cultures like her own.

After the war, Mead work for the U.

S military studying Russian responses to authority in order to try to predict what the Soviets might do.

During the Cold War, she grew increasingly famous, traveling widely, giving lectures and teaching at universities for 50 years.

From 1928 until her death in 1978 she worked on and off for the American Museum of Natural History in New York City as a curator for their special projects.

She wrote 20 books in all on was awarded 28 Honorary Degrees.

Means Work helps us to use the experiences of other nations and people as a storehouse of good ideas, as the traveler who has once bean from home is wiser than he who's never left his own doorstep, she suggested.

So a knowledge of another culture will always sharp in our ability to scrutinize our own more steadily.

In doing so, she suggested, we will always uncover and support undeveloped human potential for gotten in our rush towards modernity.