World Enough: Rethinking the Future

by Margaret Mead, Ken Heyman (Photographer)

218 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1975

About the author

Margaret 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.

Reviews

[Joseph Reiner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Famous anthropologist Margaret Mead’s words impart a sensitive and keenly informed view of the world as it was in the late 1970s (and in most ways, continues to be today). They function as a grand motif that tie together the striking visuals of Ken Heyman’s photographs, which precede each section of the book. “World Enough” is the story of us, of humanity on a global scale, where we’ve come from and where we’ve ended up, with some musings on where we may go tomorrow.

Divided into four sections (The Dream of Technological Salvation, The Waiting World, The Failure of the Dream, and Beginning Again), Mead tells the tale of post-WWII modernism, of the now naive hopes that technology would lift starving and impoverished masses of the planet out of misery, of the eagerness that developing countries accepted Euro-American dominion as a salvation, of the failure of these hopes to be realized. She opines of ways that we can both embrace technological innovation while not losing the ancient wisdom that makes us all uniquely human.

She challenges the reader not to be overwhelmed by the vast interconnectivity of the world today, but to see it as a fragile and dependent system that requires empathy and compassion. The ability to celebrate cultural differences and to see that which makes us more similar than disparate is a central theme throughout. There are many artfully worded and thought provoking passages that reinforce the tenderness of Heyman’s photos. This was a great and inspiring read, not in the least bit dated, and I highly recommend it to those able to secure a copy.

[Bill Clark]

Signed by Margaret Mead and by Ken Heyman