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This volume introduces a side of Margaret Mead that few people know. Coffman provides a fascinating account of Mead's life and reinterprets her work, highlighting religious concerns.
List of contents
- 1: Choosing Church
- 2: Student Marriage
- 3: Coming of Age
- 4: Bread and Wine
- 5: War Work
- 6: Building the World New
- 7: Back to Church
- 8: Margaret Mead Answers
- 9: Spiritual Significance
- 10: For the Joy of the Working
- Selected Bibliography
About the author
Elesha J. Coffman is Assistant Professor of history at Baylor University. She is the author of The Christian Century and the Rise of Mainline Protestantism (OUP, 2013).
Summary
For 50 years, Margaret Mead told Americans how cultures worked, and Americans listened. While serving as a curator at the American Museum of Natural History and as a professor of anthropology at Columbia University, she published dozens of books and hundreds of articles, scholarly and popular, on topics ranging from adolescence to atomic energy, Polynesian kinship networks to kindergarten, national morale to marijuana. At her death in 1978, she was the most famous anthropologist in the world and one of the best-known women in America. She had amply achieved her goal, as she described it to an interviewer in 1975, "To have lived long enough to be of some use."
As befits her prominence, Mead has had many biographers, but there is a curious hole at the center of these accounts: Mead's faith. Margaret Mead: A Twentieth-Century Faith introduces a side of its subject that few people know. It re-narrates her life and reinterprets her work, highlighting religious concerns. Following Mead's lead, it ranges across areas that are typically kept academically distinct: anthropology, gender studies, intellectual history, church history, and theology. It is a portrait of a mind at work, pursuing a unique vision of the good of the world.
Additional text
Coffman's reconstruction of Margaret Mead's spiritual life is a commendable intervention in our popular understanding of Margaret Mead. Like her faith, Margaret Mead cannot be easily categorized, and readers will walk away from this biography not only with a reminder of Mead's complex identity, but also with a view into what kinds of existences were possible within liberal Protestantism.
