За какво говорим, когато говорим за Маргарет Мийд?
The Meaning of Margaret Mead

Summary/Abstract: Margaret Mead, one of the founders of contemporary American anthropology, has been criticized by numerous conservative thinkers for decades. The criticisms have not been directed only at her but at the entire intellectual tradition that she represents – that of cultural determinism, according to which human nature is not biologically predetermined but is in fact flexible and formed by one’s culture. These attacks are based on the arguments of the anthropologist Derek Freeman against Mead’s work ‘Coming of Age in Samoa.’ In it, Mead claims that puberty is a social as well as a biological phenomenon and that teenagers in Samoa go through it with much less stress than Americans because their culture is more sexually tolerant. According to Freeman, her conclusions are based on falsehoods and cherry-picking. In fact, Freeman is the one who presents the facts in a misleading way. To this day, his claims are being repeated by proponents of biological determinism.

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