The Study of Culture At a Distance

by Margaret Mead (Editor), Rhoda Metraux (Editor)

The United States on the eve of the Second World War was still a society largely isolated from the world. Facing enemies with unfamiliar cultural traditions, the U.S. government turned to anthropologists for insight. The result was a research effort that continued long after the war, aimed, in the words of Margaret Mead, at analyzing the cultural regularities in the characters of individuals who are members of societies that are inaccessible to direct observation. In 1953, Margaret Mead and Rhoda Métraux produced The Study of Culture at a Distance , a compilation of research from this period. This remarkable work, long unavailable, presents a rich and complex methodology for the study of cultures through literature, film, informant interviews, focus groups, and projective techniques. The book also provides fascinating insights into such diverse cultures as China, Thailand, Italy, Syria, France, Germany, Russia, Romania, and Great Britain, and includes some highly original analysis such as that of the Soviet style of chess, a study of Jean Cocteau's classic film La Belle et la Bête , and the cultural interpretations of Rorschach tests administered to Chinese subjects.

Genres: Anthropology, Nonfiction

560 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1953

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.