Reading Benedict / Reading Mead: Feminism, Race, and Imperial Visions

by Dolores Janiewski (Editor), Lois W. Banner (Editor)

Overview

As anthropologists, public intellectuals, and feminists, Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead played remarkable roles in twentieth-century life and thought—and far beyond the academy. Their work helped to popularize anthropology while introducing such terms as culture and racism into common parlance. At the same time, they contributed to wider debates about environmentalism, sexuality, the women's movement, and American foreign policy. In this collection, prominent international scholars come together to explore the lives, works, and legacies of two influential figures in American anthropology.

The contributions reflect a wide range of topics and perspectives: Benedict and Mead's complicated personal and professional relationship; their activities as scholars and outspoken intellectuals; their efforts to promote feminism and undermine racism; their contributions to (and the challenges they posed to) the imperialist project; and the stories behind their best-known works, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword and Coming of Age in Samoa. Together, the essays provide a useful and provocative introduction to Benedict and Mead as well as to the ongoing debate about the legacy they left behind.

Contributors: Lois Banner, University of Southern California; Margaret M. Caffrey, University of Memphis; Nanako Fukui, Kansai University; Angela Gilliam, Evergreen State College; Pauline Kent, Ryukoku University; C. Douglas Lummis, Okinawa International University; Nancy Lutkehaus, University of Southern California; Judith Schachter Modell, Carnegie Mellon University; Maureen Molloy, University of Auckland; Louise M. Newman, University of Florida; Dolores E. Janiewski, Victoria University of Wellington; Christopher Shannon, University of Notre Dame; Gerald Sullivan, University of Notre Dame; Sharon Tiffany, University of Wisconsin, Whitewater; Jean Walton, University of Rhode Island; Virginia Yans, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780801879746
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date:	02/23/2005
Series:	New Studies in American Intellectual and Cultural History
Pages:	312
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.99(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Dolores Janiewski is a senior lecturer in the department of history at Victoria University of Wellington and the author of Sisterhood Denied: Race, Gender and Class in a New South Community.

Lois Banner is a professor of history and gender studies at the University of Southern California and the author of several books, including Intertwined Lives: Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Their Circle.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Being and Becoming Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead
Part I: Becoming Benedict, Becoming Mead
Chapter 1. Woven Lives, Raveled Texts: Benedict,Mead, and Representational Doubleness
Chapter 2. "The Bo-Cu Plant": Ruth Benedict and Gender
Chapter 3. Margaret Mead, the Samoan Girl and the Flapper: Geographies of Selfhood in Coming of Age in Samoa
Part II: Erasures and Inclusions
Chapter 4. Coming of Age, but Not in Samoa: Reflections on Margaret Mead's Legacy for Western Liberal Feminism
Chapter 5. "A World Made Safe for Differences": Ruth Benedict's The Chrysanthemum and the Sword
Chapter 6. White Maternity, Rape Dreams, and the Sexual Exile in A Rap on Race
Part III: Imperial Visions
Chapter 7. Of Feys and Culture Planners:Margaret Mead and Purposive Activity as Value
Chapter 8. The Lady of the Chrysanthemum: Ruth Benedict and the Origins of The Chrysanthemum and the Sword
Chapter 9. Ruth Benedict's Obituary for Japanese Culture
Chapter 10. The Parable of Manus: Utopian Change, American Influence, and the Worth of Women
Part IV: Echoes and Reverberations
Chapter 11. Imagining the South Seas:Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa and the Sexual Politics of Paradise
Chapter 12. Symbolic Subordination and the Representation of Power in "Margaret Mead and Samoa"
Chapter 13. Misconceived Configurations of Ruth Benedict
Part V: Re-Thinking Benedict and Mead
Chapter 14. Margaret Mead: Anthropology's Liminal Figure
Chapter 15. "It is besides a pleasant English word"—Ruth Benedict's Concept of Patterns Revisited
Chapter 16. On the Political Anatomy of Mead-bashing, or Re-thinking Margaret Mead
Notes
Contributors
Index
Illustrations

What People are Saying About This

Howard Brick

A handy compendium of current writing on Benedict and Mead—enormously informative, stimulating, and intellectually sound.

From the Publisher

A handy compendium of current writing on Benedict and Mead—enormously informative, stimulating, and intellectually sound.
—Howard Brick, Washington University, St. Louis