Mead, Margaret  ( born December Dec. 16, 1901 , Philadelphia, Pa., U.S.—died November Nov. 15, 1978 , New York, N.Y. )  American anthropologist whose great fame owed as much to the force of her personality and her outspokenness as it did to the quality of her scientific work.


Her other works include Growing Up in New Guinea (1930; new ed., 19752001), Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935; reprintednew ed., 19682001), Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis (1942, with Gregory Bateson, to whom she was married in 1936–51; reprinted 1962), Continuities in Cultural Evolution (1964; reissued 1999), and A Rap on Race (1971, with James Baldwin; reissued 1992).


As an anthropologist, Mead was best known for her studies of the nonliterate peoples of Oceania, especially with regard to various aspects of psychology and culture, the culture—the cultural conditioning of sexual behaviour, natural character, and culture change. As a celebrity, she was most notable for her forays into such far-ranging topics as women’s rights, childrearingchild rearing, sexual morality, nuclear proliferation, race relations, drug abuse, population control, environmental pollution, and world hunger.
