On creating a usable culture
Subtitle: Margaret Mead and the emergence of American cosmopolitanism
By: Maureen A. Molloy.
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Published: 2008
Place of publication: Honolulu
Language: eng
Number of pages: 200
ISBN-13: 9780824831165
Subjects: Mead, Margaret, -- 1901-1978 -- Criticism and interpretation; Anthropology -- United States -- Popular works; Anthropology in popular culture -- United States; Anthropology in literature; Cosmopolitanism -- United States; World War, 1939-1945 -- Social aspects -- United States; United States -- Social life and customs
Genres: Popular works.
Description: "Margaret Mead's career took off in 1928 with the publication of Coming of Age in Samoa. Within ten years, she was the best known academic in the United States, a role she enjoyed all of her life. In On Creating a Usable Culture, Maureen Molloy explores how Mead was influenced by, and influenced, the meaning of American culture and secured for herself a unique and enduring place in the American popular imagination. She considers this in relation to Mead's four popular ethnographies written between the wars (Coming of Age in Samoa, Growing Up in New Guinea, The Changing Culture of an Indian Tribe, and Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies) and the academic, middle-brow, and popular responses to them." "On Creating a Usable Culture will be eagerly welcomed by those with an interest in American studies and history, cultural studies, and the social sciences, and most especially by readers of American intellectual history, the history of anthropology, gender studies, and studies of modernism."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 175-192) and index.
Table of contents: title: The problem of American culture; title: The "jungle flapper" : civilization, repression, and the homogenous society; title: "Lords of an empty creation" : masculinity, puritanism, and cultural stagnation; title: "Every woman deviating from the code" : cultural lag, moral contagion, and social disintegration; title: "Maladjustment of a worse order" : temperament, psychosexual misidentification, and the refuge of private life; title: On creating a usable culture.