Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years

by Margaret Mead

Book Overview

The autobiography of a pioneer, this is Margaret Mead's story of her life as a woman and as an anthropologist. An enduring cultural icon, she came to represent the new woman, successfully combining... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 156836069X
• ISBN13: 9781568360690
• Release Date: January 1995
• Publisher: Kodansha
• Length: 305 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.9" x 7.8"

Customer Reviews

Margaret Mead is a Joy to Read

This is a wonderful book to read for those interested in Mead's personality. I was surprised to read how innocent, delicate, loving, stubborn, and calculated this woman was. As she goes back through her life, she realizes how perfectly it all seemed to fit. She also seemed to realize, as she wrote this book, how much she always knew exactly what she wanted to do at each crossroad in her life. Margaret Mead tells us her story, from her perspective and it is a breath of fresh air. Yes, this book is a must for future anthropologists. She walks us through the many struggles in the field (I found her insights on language learning of great value) and sets the picture for an age where American anthropology was teeming with its most famous characters even today. Mead paints a unique picture of the personalities of Boaz, Benedict and her three husbands. Mead became something only the slightest fraction of us wannabe anthropologists could ever become. For those wanting fame and respect (come on admit it we all do at least a bit). There are few clues in this book to how Mead managed this. The book is nothing more than a beautiful account of being human. However, with her timing at a particular point in American history, her confidence and perhaps a splash of luck Mead became and remains an icon.

Fascinating Glimpses of Her Early Life

This book provides Mead's accounts of the people and events that most affected her thought and research. About half the book is devoted to her life before she began her career as an anthropologist. We meet her parents, Edward Mead and Emily Fogg Mead. Edward was an economics professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Emily divided her time between managing the household and pursuing her doctoral studies in the social sciences. Edward's mother, Martha Ramsay Mead, a former schoolteacher and principal, also lived with the family and was the primary director of their home schooling. Margaret describes her relationship with each of her parents and with her grandmother and siblings in turn. We learn how the family moved every season from one domicile to another, and how this shaped Margaret's concept of "home". Margaret also discusses how Edward related to his academic work and colleagues (such as when he organized a group to guarantee Scott Nearing's salary for a year after his dismissal). Margaret describes her schooling in detail, from the approach to learning that her grandmother and mother instilled with their home schooling efforts, to the various traditional schools that she attended and the social lessons she learned from them. She also discusses her college years and friends. The second part of the book describes Mead's adult and professional life. She explains her relationships with all three of her husbands, and how in the case of Reo Fortune and Gregory Bateson, they collaborated together in their fieldwork. She also relates how she came to work with Franz Boas, and how he directed her research early in her career. She tells us about how she came to know Ruth Benedict, and how she considered Benedict one of her closest colleagues and friends. The last part of the book, covering Margaret's experiences as a mother and grandmother, is not as detailed, but does provide some personal observations. For me, the most interesting aspects of this book were Mead's own interpretation of her motivations and accomplishments. She was a firm believer in both the value and necessity of studying cultures very different from her own. On the first page of the text, she tells us "I have spent most of my life studying the lives of other peoples, faraway peoples, so that Americans might better understand themselves." Later she notes, "to clear one's mind of presuppositions is a very hard thing to do and, without years of practice, all but impossible when one is working in one's own culture or in another that is very close to it." In summing up her work, she states, "I went to Samoa-as, later, I went to the other societies on which I have worked-to find out more about human beings, human beings like ourselves in everything except their culture. Through the accidents of history, these cultures had developed so differently from ours that knowledge of them could shed a kind of light upon us, upon our potentialities and our limitations, that

A Must For Future Anthropologists

This book is a must read for a future Anthroplogists. It clearly brings together all her theories and it is a heartfelt view on a extremly successful and inspiring person in this field. I truly enjoyed her book and herviews on culture and the future of Anthropology. I became a big fan of hers and will continue reading the rest of her books.If you are only slightly interested in Cultural Anthropolgythen I suggest you read her books. They are easy to read and very insightful about culture. It is worth every penny spend.

Woman of the Century

I've read this book and it's really amazing how a woman has transformed the field of anthropology covering almost her entire life. Margaret Mead presented a detailed account of her life which I'm sure will capture your hearts considering how she injected pieces of 'anthropological' truths or just simply, she'll let you savor every bit of joy in life. You'll love anthropology as a human science and not just some sickly academic subject. This is definitely a must-read!

Interesting memoir of the early years

This autobiography is especially interesting for its insight into the professional life of a woman scholar in the 1920's and 1930's in a then new field of inquiry, although Mead did not encounter the extreme levels of resistance that make heroes and role models. Greek societies at her first college seem to have been far more repressive and damaging than were her graduate programs or employers. The professional rivalries are interesting. The book is especially strong in its depiction of Mead's parents, whose contrasting traits we can easily see influencing the daughter's ideas and character. Mead seems to be a keen observer of them, frank about their strengths and weaknesses, as dispassionate as she was in describing people in New Guinea. Mead is far less interested in or detailed about her three husbands. In fact, the autobiography seems oddly reticent, considering that its author was open minded, professionally interested in the sexual habits of other peoples, and unintimidated. She was able to ask Pacific Islanders what positions they preferred for intercourse, but unable in the autobiography to give a sense of the life of her marriages. We learn in detail what she packed for a trip, but only discover in passing that a divorce occurred. This book rewards readers more with cultural history than with a sense of the author's emotional life.