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Culture and Commitment: A Study of the Generation Gap
The renowned anthropologist argues that the gap between the generations in the seventies is qualitatively different in depth and extent than any previous generational break and probes efforts to mold coherent cultural patterns and search for commitment
1000 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1970
About the author
Margaret Mead
201 books512 followersMargaret Mead was an American cultural anthropologist who was frequently a featured writer and speaker in the mass media throughout the '60s and '70s as a popularizer of the insights of anthropology into modern American and western life but also a respected, if controversial, academic anthropologist.
Her reports as to the purportedly healthy attitude towards sex in South Pacific and Southeast Asian traditional cultures amply informed the '60s "sexual revolution" and it was only at the end of her life and career that her propositions were – albeit controversially – challenged by a maverick fellow anthropologist and literate members of societies she had long before studied and reported on. Mead was a champion of broadened sexual mores within a context of traditional western religious life.
Excerpted from Wikipedia.
Her reports as to the purportedly healthy attitude towards sex in South Pacific and Southeast Asian traditional cultures amply informed the '60s "sexual revolution" and it was only at the end of her life and career that her propositions were – albeit controversially – challenged by a maverick fellow anthropologist and literate members of societies she had long before studied and reported on. Mead was a champion of broadened sexual mores within a context of traditional western religious life.
Excerpted from Wikipedia.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
February 10, 2025
Te dwie gwiazdki za to, że dało się zrozumieć
June 16, 2019
The final chapter, though written in 1970, has great resonance for today. Mead discusses the loneliness caused by the break in generational wisdom: what our grandparents knew about the world has little bearing on the world we now live in. This rift causes loneliness for the young and the old. She talks about the future of parenting, the power of children, and the need for open structures for children, by which to create new realities.
Good quick read, though it starts very slowly and contains some reductive viewpoints on progress, race, and gender (though these reductive viewpoints almost underscore the point she is making about how what she teaches could never be wholly relevant for generations to come).
The last chapter alone is what I’d recommend to anyone.
Good quick read, though it starts very slowly and contains some reductive viewpoints on progress, race, and gender (though these reductive viewpoints almost underscore the point she is making about how what she teaches could never be wholly relevant for generations to come).
The last chapter alone is what I’d recommend to anyone.
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January 16, 2023ambicje nieskończone pracuje więcej, chce więcej robie więcej staram się ulepszać swoją wersje 💪
October 5, 2017
Recuerdo ahora las palabras discrepantes que un obispo me dijo hace 28 años sobre alguna interpretación etnológica de Margaret Mead con relación a los intercambios matrimoniales. No me sorprendió la discrepancia sino el hecho de que en sus lecturas estuvieran textos de una antropóloga americana.- ¿Qué pensaría el obispo, represantante de una institución marcadamente postfigurativa, de la visión que Margaret Mead nos ofrece sobre el conflicto generacional?.
A mí esta visión me ha interesado porque el libro se escribió hace casi 50 años, cuando aún ni se intuían los enormes cambios que han acentuado algunas de las características de ruptura generacional que Mead describe.
La categorización en culturas postfigurativas, cofigurativas y prefigurativas ilustradas mediante culturas ampliamente estudiadas por ellas y culturas de su propio entorno para explicar las relaciones - de poder - entre generaciones me ha parecido un hallazgo para entender los cambios actuales en nuestra sociedad.
Mead explica cómo se transmiten conocimientos y valores en cada uno de los tipos identificados, y cómo la transmisión de las generaciones mayores a las más jóvenes, típica de culturas tradicionales, ha dado paso a otro tipo de relaciones cuando ocurren cambios en los que las generaciones jóvenes pierden la vinculación con los valores que sus mayores consideran inmutables.
La lectura es muy entretenida y, aunque yo he leído la traducción española, la calidad literaria es alta, por lo que lo recomeindo encarecidamente para todo aquel que tenga un mínimo interés en este tema.
La calidad literaria y la habilidad argumentativa pueden ocultar sesgos ideológicos que hay que desentrañar desde las posiciones de cada cuál. Id a por ellos y ya me contais.
A mí esta visión me ha interesado porque el libro se escribió hace casi 50 años, cuando aún ni se intuían los enormes cambios que han acentuado algunas de las características de ruptura generacional que Mead describe.
La categorización en culturas postfigurativas, cofigurativas y prefigurativas ilustradas mediante culturas ampliamente estudiadas por ellas y culturas de su propio entorno para explicar las relaciones - de poder - entre generaciones me ha parecido un hallazgo para entender los cambios actuales en nuestra sociedad.
Mead explica cómo se transmiten conocimientos y valores en cada uno de los tipos identificados, y cómo la transmisión de las generaciones mayores a las más jóvenes, típica de culturas tradicionales, ha dado paso a otro tipo de relaciones cuando ocurren cambios en los que las generaciones jóvenes pierden la vinculación con los valores que sus mayores consideran inmutables.
La lectura es muy entretenida y, aunque yo he leído la traducción española, la calidad literaria es alta, por lo que lo recomeindo encarecidamente para todo aquel que tenga un mínimo interés en este tema.
La calidad literaria y la habilidad argumentativa pueden ocultar sesgos ideológicos que hay que desentrañar desde las posiciones de cada cuál. Id a por ellos y ya me contais.
May 29, 2024
THE FAMED ANTHROPOLOGIST LOOKS AT 1970s CULTURE
Margaret Mead (1901-1978) was a famous American cultural anthropologist. She wrote in the Preface to the Revised (1978) edition of this original 1970 book, “This book is based on what I have learned about the way human cultures are transmitted and changed, as I have watched primitive cultures come into the modern world during my last fifty years of field work in the Pacific. Since the first edition of this book, I have made three trips to the Pacific, revisiting the Manus, whom I first studied in 1928, and revisited four other groups in various stages of transition. In between I have attended international conferences and discussed issues like food and population, transition and change… with people from many countries. At Columbia University I have taught a great variety of students, and I have lectured to and held discussions with student audiences all over the country and carefully considered their questions. It is on these experiences that I base my statements. As a cultural anthropologist, I am concerned with the cultural aspects of the generation gap and generational change and their implications for the world community. It was to these concerns that the old pages in the book were addressed.”
She states in the first chapter, “I believe that the reason we can look at all the great civilizations of the past and at successive stages in the history of our own era as a succession of repetitive traps is that we do not know enough about them. It is upon great historical emptiness---the lives of unknown peoples lived out within high-standing broken walls now in ruins… that the human imagination can project its fantasies and its despair. In history, as in science, the grand design without the detail shakes belief and trust to the core. (Pg. 10)
She explains, “In past studies on the way in which culture is transmitted, I have found it useful to distinguish between those cultures in which change is so slow that it seems as if a child’s cultural expectations could be defined at birth and those in which change was more rapid so that some young people and even some adults had to learn from their peers rather than from their elders. We have now entered a new phase, in which adults all over the world have to recognize that all children’s experience is different from their own. To distinguish these three cultural styles I am using the words ‘postfigurative,’ when the future repeats the past, ‘cofigurative,’ in which the present is the guide to future expectations, and ‘prefigurative’ for the kind of culture in which the elders have to learn from the children about experiences which they have never had.” (Pg. 13)
She notes, “What has not been emphasized enough, I believe, is that when there is no written language, no documentation of the past, the perception of the new is rapidly engulfed by the style of the old. The elders who edit the version of the culture that is passed on to the young mythologize or deny change.” (Pg. 30)
She observes, “Today, suddenly, because all the peoples of the world are part of one electronically based, intercommunicating network, young people everywhere share a kind of experience that none of the elders ever have had or will have. Conversely, the older generation will never see repeated in the lives of young people their own unprecedented experience of sequentially emerging change. This break between generations is wholly new: it is planetary and universal. Today’s children have grown up in a world their elders never knew, but few adults knew that this would be so. Those who did know it were the forerunners of the prefigurative cultures of the future in which the prefigured is the unknown.” (Pg. 64)
She acknowledges, “It was when I realized that the anthropological experience itself was too special to provide recommendations which would be of much use to the vast majority of the present generation, as neither they themselves nor their children would be anthropologists, that I decided to write my autobiography ‘Blackberry Winter,’ as a record of how children could be brought up, conscious of the changes which their forebears had undergone, treated as persons with immediate contributions to make, rather than merely as learners not yet deserving of notice.” (Pg. 103)
She says, “I pictured what had happened in the mountains of New Guinea, as naked, aspiring men, who had washed the pig fat out of their hair, arrived at a government post saying,’ We have built a school and hospital. Please send us a doctor and a teacher’---calling for emissaries of that modern world they had heard bout and craved to enter. And the picture is true, in the sense that this is what really happened and is happening all over the world. People who have only seen airplanes in the sky and have heard of the wonderful ways of radio, satellites…. Are eager to experience these marvels for themselves.” (Pg. 121)
She says of a prefigurative society, “The sense that the children are a little better prepared to face these unknowns because they are at least birthright members of the newer order can be either comforting and give hope or be twisted into a philosophy of despair. But there is a constant danger, more constant than I realized ten years ago, that the struggle will prove too difficult, and the by-products too destructive. Hope for the future must also be balanced, and rooted in memory of the past. Without such deep roots, then shallowly rooted plants… will wither in the first drought.” (Pg. 135)
She concludes, “If we know how to cherish and cultivate this urge for participation until it becomes a safeguard for human evolution, then we can contain the kind of exploitative engineering and power-seeking, profit-seeking, prestige-seeking motives which produce runaway feedbacks that threaten the whole planet. It will become impossible to sacrifice one group for another, for everyone will be there… Today the demand that everyone listen and be listened to is the hope of an endangered but potentially self-healing world.” (Pg. 156-157)
Nearly fifty years after the first edition of this book was written, many aspects of it seem predictably ‘dated.’ But Mead’s anthropological perspective also provides some insights of lasting value.
Margaret Mead (1901-1978) was a famous American cultural anthropologist. She wrote in the Preface to the Revised (1978) edition of this original 1970 book, “This book is based on what I have learned about the way human cultures are transmitted and changed, as I have watched primitive cultures come into the modern world during my last fifty years of field work in the Pacific. Since the first edition of this book, I have made three trips to the Pacific, revisiting the Manus, whom I first studied in 1928, and revisited four other groups in various stages of transition. In between I have attended international conferences and discussed issues like food and population, transition and change… with people from many countries. At Columbia University I have taught a great variety of students, and I have lectured to and held discussions with student audiences all over the country and carefully considered their questions. It is on these experiences that I base my statements. As a cultural anthropologist, I am concerned with the cultural aspects of the generation gap and generational change and their implications for the world community. It was to these concerns that the old pages in the book were addressed.”
She states in the first chapter, “I believe that the reason we can look at all the great civilizations of the past and at successive stages in the history of our own era as a succession of repetitive traps is that we do not know enough about them. It is upon great historical emptiness---the lives of unknown peoples lived out within high-standing broken walls now in ruins… that the human imagination can project its fantasies and its despair. In history, as in science, the grand design without the detail shakes belief and trust to the core. (Pg. 10)
She explains, “In past studies on the way in which culture is transmitted, I have found it useful to distinguish between those cultures in which change is so slow that it seems as if a child’s cultural expectations could be defined at birth and those in which change was more rapid so that some young people and even some adults had to learn from their peers rather than from their elders. We have now entered a new phase, in which adults all over the world have to recognize that all children’s experience is different from their own. To distinguish these three cultural styles I am using the words ‘postfigurative,’ when the future repeats the past, ‘cofigurative,’ in which the present is the guide to future expectations, and ‘prefigurative’ for the kind of culture in which the elders have to learn from the children about experiences which they have never had.” (Pg. 13)
She notes, “What has not been emphasized enough, I believe, is that when there is no written language, no documentation of the past, the perception of the new is rapidly engulfed by the style of the old. The elders who edit the version of the culture that is passed on to the young mythologize or deny change.” (Pg. 30)
She observes, “Today, suddenly, because all the peoples of the world are part of one electronically based, intercommunicating network, young people everywhere share a kind of experience that none of the elders ever have had or will have. Conversely, the older generation will never see repeated in the lives of young people their own unprecedented experience of sequentially emerging change. This break between generations is wholly new: it is planetary and universal. Today’s children have grown up in a world their elders never knew, but few adults knew that this would be so. Those who did know it were the forerunners of the prefigurative cultures of the future in which the prefigured is the unknown.” (Pg. 64)
She acknowledges, “It was when I realized that the anthropological experience itself was too special to provide recommendations which would be of much use to the vast majority of the present generation, as neither they themselves nor their children would be anthropologists, that I decided to write my autobiography ‘Blackberry Winter,’ as a record of how children could be brought up, conscious of the changes which their forebears had undergone, treated as persons with immediate contributions to make, rather than merely as learners not yet deserving of notice.” (Pg. 103)
She says, “I pictured what had happened in the mountains of New Guinea, as naked, aspiring men, who had washed the pig fat out of their hair, arrived at a government post saying,’ We have built a school and hospital. Please send us a doctor and a teacher’---calling for emissaries of that modern world they had heard bout and craved to enter. And the picture is true, in the sense that this is what really happened and is happening all over the world. People who have only seen airplanes in the sky and have heard of the wonderful ways of radio, satellites…. Are eager to experience these marvels for themselves.” (Pg. 121)
She says of a prefigurative society, “The sense that the children are a little better prepared to face these unknowns because they are at least birthright members of the newer order can be either comforting and give hope or be twisted into a philosophy of despair. But there is a constant danger, more constant than I realized ten years ago, that the struggle will prove too difficult, and the by-products too destructive. Hope for the future must also be balanced, and rooted in memory of the past. Without such deep roots, then shallowly rooted plants… will wither in the first drought.” (Pg. 135)
She concludes, “If we know how to cherish and cultivate this urge for participation until it becomes a safeguard for human evolution, then we can contain the kind of exploitative engineering and power-seeking, profit-seeking, prestige-seeking motives which produce runaway feedbacks that threaten the whole planet. It will become impossible to sacrifice one group for another, for everyone will be there… Today the demand that everyone listen and be listened to is the hope of an endangered but potentially self-healing world.” (Pg. 156-157)
Nearly fifty years after the first edition of this book was written, many aspects of it seem predictably ‘dated.’ But Mead’s anthropological perspective also provides some insights of lasting value.
February 18, 2026
Interesante y certero. Aún escrito décadas atrás, resuena profundamente con el mundo de hoy (especialmente el último capítulo).
En un mundo marcado por los avances abismales producidos por las nuevas tecnologías, Mead nos recuerda que el futuro es hoy.
Siempre es un agrado leer sus escritos como estudiante de antropología!
En un mundo marcado por los avances abismales producidos por las nuevas tecnologías, Mead nos recuerda que el futuro es hoy.
Siempre es un agrado leer sus escritos como estudiante de antropología!
June 28, 2023
Bardzo ciekawa książka o tym, jak zmieniała się szerokopojęta kultura.
February 7, 2025
Książka napisana jest prostym i przyjemnym językiem. Jest ona podstawą dla przyszłych antropologów i socjologów. Mimo, że jest stara to uważam, że jest jak najbardziej aktualna.
August 26, 2020
I have the softcover version but there it is. Interesting comparisons.
I am generally cynical of anthropology and at its best it is one biased cultural observing another through its lens. Granted, there are things that can help to dampen the observer's issues. It is also fairly difficult to study the thing that you are in from an objective stance.
But let's throw that away. Objectivity is not necessary to describe something as it is. In this, the concepts that she discusses about three types of breaks between generations, seems to be good ones. They are still valid today.
Though written in 1970 ish, there is still a lot of the same issues. Which is funny, because one of her arguments is that there is a break and the new generation will be taking these on. Her hope is summarized by the last lines So, as the youth say, The Future Is Now. A few short years, the refrain became No Future Now as the punk movement gained force.
The problems of sexism, racism and other things that are briefly mentioned here, are still an issue. There is still a grind against educators and the youth. Maybe the tech hasn't caught up or maybe the youth need more to break away from previous generations issues because they are still here.
I am generally cynical of anthropology and at its best it is one biased cultural observing another through its lens. Granted, there are things that can help to dampen the observer's issues. It is also fairly difficult to study the thing that you are in from an objective stance.
But let's throw that away. Objectivity is not necessary to describe something as it is. In this, the concepts that she discusses about three types of breaks between generations, seems to be good ones. They are still valid today.
Though written in 1970 ish, there is still a lot of the same issues. Which is funny, because one of her arguments is that there is a break and the new generation will be taking these on. Her hope is summarized by the last lines So, as the youth say, The Future Is Now. A few short years, the refrain became No Future Now as the punk movement gained force.
The problems of sexism, racism and other things that are briefly mentioned here, are still an issue. There is still a grind against educators and the youth. Maybe the tech hasn't caught up or maybe the youth need more to break away from previous generations issues because they are still here.
May 20, 2014
A book that i would consider "dated". I have a very different viewpoint than the author, which made this book hard to read. I found her attitude distasteful, which made it impossible to finish. I'm okay with not inviting this author's words into my life.
April 8, 2015
I enjoyed hearing Mead reflect on some questions I had been pondering my whole life, even though its was a little pedantic. It's surprisingly still relevant after 45 years! Some good topics to think about especially if people want to go live on other planets, or whatever our future holds.
April 18, 2021
An intense read that at times meant reading and re-reading to understand the complex thoughts in a sentence. The last chapter 'the Future' was the most interesting because like a time traveller, i sitting in 2021, WAS from the future generations she was writing about.
September 3, 2012
Made me wonder what Margaret Meade would think about the internet.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews