Margaret Mead

THEORY

“I suggest that it is necessary to recognize that our knowledge of ourselves and of the universe within which we lives comes not from a single source but, instead two sources–from our capacity to explore human responses to events in which we and others participate through introspection and empathy, as well as from out capacity to make objective observations on physical and animate nature.” (Mead 1976)

“It was a simple–a very simple–point to which our materials were organized in the 1920’s, merely the documentation over and over of the fact that human nature is not rigid and unyielding, not an unadaptable plant which insists on flowering or becoming stunted after its own fashion, responding only quantitatively to the social environment, but that is extraordinarily adaptable, that cultural rhythms are stronger and more compelling than the physiological rhythms which they overlay and distort…” (Mead, 1939a:x)