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On Creating a Usable Culture : Margaret Mead and the Emergence of American Cosmopolitanism / Maureen A. Molloy.

By: Material type: TextTextPublisher: Honolulu : University of Hawaii Press, [2008]Copyright date: ©2008Description: 1 online resource (216 p.) : 10 illusContent type:
Media type:
Carrier type:
ISBN:
  • 9780824831165
  • 9780824863777
Subject(s): DDC classification:
  • 973
LOC classification:
  • E184.A1 M63 2008
Other classification:
  • online - DeGruyter
Online resources: Available additional physical forms:
  • Issued also in print.
Contents:
Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- 1 .Introduction -- 2. The Problem of American Culture -- 3. The "Jungle Flapper" Civilization, Repression, and the Homogenous Society -- 4. "Lords of an Empty Creation" Masculinity, Puritanism, and Cultural Stagnation -- 5. "Every Woman Deviating from the Code" Cultural Lag, Moral Contagion, and Social Disintegration -- 6. "Maladjustment of a Worse Order" Temperament, Psychosexual Misidentifi cation, and the Refuge of Private Life -- 7. On Creating a Usable Culture -- Notes -- References -- Index
Summary: Margaret Mead's career took off in 1928 with the publication of Coming of Age in Samoa. Within ten years, she was the best-known academic in the United States, a role she enjoyed all of her life. In On Creating a Usable Culture, Maureen Molloy explores how Mead was influenced by, and influenced, the meanings of American culture and secured for herself a unique and enduring place in the American popular imagination. She considers this in relation to Mead's four popular ethnographies written between the wars (Coming of Age in Samoa, Growing Up in New Guinea, The Changing Culture of an Indian Tribe, and Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies) and the academic, middle-brow, and popular responses to them.Molloy argues that Mead was heavily influenced by the debates concerning the forging of a distinctive American culture that began around 1911 with the publication of George Santayana's "The Genteel Tradition." The creation of a national culture would solve the problems of alienation and provincialism and establish a place for both native-born and immigrant communities. Mead drew on this vision of an "integrated culture" and used her "primitive societies" as exemplars of how cultures attained or failed to attain this ideal. Her ethnographies are really about "America," the peoples she studied serving as the personifications of what were widely understood to be the dilemmas of American selfhood in a materialistic, individualistic society. Two themes subtend Molloy's analysis. The first is Mead's articulation of the individual's relation to his or her culture via the trope of sex. Each of her early ethnographies focuses on a "character" and his or her problems as expressed through sexuality. This thematic ties her work closely to the popularization of psychoanalysis at the time with its understanding of sex as the key to the self. The second theme involves the change in Mead's attitude toward and definition of "culture"-from the cultural determinism in Coming of Age to culture as the enemy of the individual in Sex and Temperament. This trend parallels the consolidation and objectification of popular and professional notions about culture in the 1920s and 1930s.On Creating a Usable Culture will be eagerly welcomed by those with an interest in American studies and history, cultural studies, and the social sciences, and most especially by readers of American intellectual history, the history of anthropology, gender studies, and studies of modernism.
Holdings
Item type Current library Call number URL Status Notes Barcode
eBook eBook Biblioteca "Angelicum" Pont. Univ. S.Tommaso d'Aquino Nuvola online online - DeGruyter (Browse shelf(Opens below)) Online access Not for loan (Accesso limitato) Accesso per gli utenti autorizzati / Access for authorized users (dgr)9780824863777

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- 1 .Introduction -- 2. The Problem of American Culture -- 3. The "Jungle Flapper" Civilization, Repression, and the Homogenous Society -- 4. "Lords of an Empty Creation" Masculinity, Puritanism, and Cultural Stagnation -- 5. "Every Woman Deviating from the Code" Cultural Lag, Moral Contagion, and Social Disintegration -- 6. "Maladjustment of a Worse Order" Temperament, Psychosexual Misidentifi cation, and the Refuge of Private Life -- 7. On Creating a Usable Culture -- Notes -- References -- Index

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http://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_16ec

Margaret Mead's career took off in 1928 with the publication of Coming of Age in Samoa. Within ten years, she was the best-known academic in the United States, a role she enjoyed all of her life. In On Creating a Usable Culture, Maureen Molloy explores how Mead was influenced by, and influenced, the meanings of American culture and secured for herself a unique and enduring place in the American popular imagination. She considers this in relation to Mead's four popular ethnographies written between the wars (Coming of Age in Samoa, Growing Up in New Guinea, The Changing Culture of an Indian Tribe, and Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies) and the academic, middle-brow, and popular responses to them.Molloy argues that Mead was heavily influenced by the debates concerning the forging of a distinctive American culture that began around 1911 with the publication of George Santayana's "The Genteel Tradition." The creation of a national culture would solve the problems of alienation and provincialism and establish a place for both native-born and immigrant communities. Mead drew on this vision of an "integrated culture" and used her "primitive societies" as exemplars of how cultures attained or failed to attain this ideal. Her ethnographies are really about "America," the peoples she studied serving as the personifications of what were widely understood to be the dilemmas of American selfhood in a materialistic, individualistic society. Two themes subtend Molloy's analysis. The first is Mead's articulation of the individual's relation to his or her culture via the trope of sex. Each of her early ethnographies focuses on a "character" and his or her problems as expressed through sexuality. This thematic ties her work closely to the popularization of psychoanalysis at the time with its understanding of sex as the key to the self. The second theme involves the change in Mead's attitude toward and definition of "culture"-from the cultural determinism in Coming of Age to culture as the enemy of the individual in Sex and Temperament. This trend parallels the consolidation and objectification of popular and professional notions about culture in the 1920s and 1930s.On Creating a Usable Culture will be eagerly welcomed by those with an interest in American studies and history, cultural studies, and the social sciences, and most especially by readers of American intellectual history, the history of anthropology, gender studies, and studies of modernism.

Issued also in print.

Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.

In English.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 02. Mrz 2022)