Margaret Mead (1901-1978) - American anthropologist, her scientific ideas were formed as a result of “field” research into the worldview, rituals and behavior of the inhabitants of New Guinea, Samoa, and Bali. Main work: “Culture and the world of childhood”, “National character”.

M. Mead is a supporter of cultural relativism, i.e. the principle of the relativity of cultural norms: what is necessary and good for one culture may be incomprehensible and unacceptable for another. From these positions, M. Mead does not accept Eurocentrism (idealization of Western civilization in comparison with “non-Western ones”) and rejects the division of cultures into “civilized” and “primitive”.

M. Mead is a supporter of cultural ecumenism; ecumenism (from Greek “ecumene” - the entire inhabited land) is the doctrine of the unity of the historical destiny of mankind, despite the differences between cultures. If globalism insists on the equalization of all cultures in accordance with Western standards, then ecumenism puts forward the idea of ​​unity in diversity, when the cultural characteristics of different cultures enrich the cultural fund of humanity. Mead explores the national characters of different cultures, in particular, he expresses the idea that the practice of tightly swaddling babies in Russia influences the formation of a culture based on patience.

Mead's research led to the sensational conclusion that conflicts between adults and adolescents (“fathers and sons”) systematically arise only in Western culture and those cultures that adhere to its developmental principles. It is in Western culture, built on progress, that the reverse side of progress arises: the young deny the culture of their fathers, and when they become fathers, their children deny their culture. In non-Western cultures, intergenerational contradictions are much less pronounced. Based on this, M. Mead identifies three types of cultures: 1) post-figurative (in which children learn from their parents and ancestors); 2) configurative (in which children and adults learn from peers); 3) prefigurative (in which adults also learn from their children).

M. Mead sought to destroy Western cultures' views of non-Westerns as “savages.” She believed that over time, an inclusive “culture of inclusion” based on diversity would emerge. Mead believes that after the common calendar has finally spread and a common language is gradually developed, the countries of the “third world” will technologically catch up with the developed countries. The new human generation will be focused on the embodiment of “paradise” on earth, the images of which will have to be developed by the new elite (scientists, religious figures, politicians, film directors, writers) on the basis of ancient myths, children’s dreams, and the fruits of creativity. In the new society, according to M. Mead, people will settle not in large cities (where cultural characteristics are erased and mass culture prevails), but in relatively small communities, larger than a family, but smaller than a clan.

“Axial Age” of human civilization in the teachings of K. Jaspers.

K. Jaspers (1883-1969) – German philosopher, cultural scientist, psychologist, psychotherapist. The main cultural works of Jaspers are: “The Origins of History and Its Purpose”, “The Meaning and Purpose of History”.

Jaspers was an existentialist thinker in his views. The concept of “existence” is translated from Latin as “existence” or dynamic change, remelting, restructuring of human essence. To explain this process, the author uses the philosophical concept of “transcendence,” which can be translated as going beyond one’s own limits, boundaries, expanding the possibilities of consciousness and creativity.

According to Jaspers, the history of a particular person and society as a whole is a process of going beyond one’s boundaries, re-melting, “sculpting” oneself. Existentialism is characterized by a paradoxical thesis: “a person is not identical (not equal) to himself.” This means that if physical objects hardly change in a short time, then man, as a sensitive, cognitive living system, changes every moment. That is, in a short time interval, in a moment, the state of human perception changes somewhat, differing from the previous one, concentrating on new goals, thoughts, plans, intentions. This suggests that a person is constantly in the process of “sculpting” himself, and society as a whole is also constantly building, re-creating or sculpting itself. Therefore, every historical situation of any society is individual, it gives the culture a chance to “learn”, not repeat past mistakes, and overcome problems, difficulties, and dangers. Jaspers calls these factors (threats, risks, dangers, problems, trials) “borderline situations”, which are catalysts that accelerate the process of culture going beyond its limits; “borderline situations” “force” one to become better. Let us recall examples when creativity helped the Cro-Magnons to surpass the physically more powerful Neanderthals due to collectivism and imagination, trained through rituals. Or when the people who created the civilizations of the Ancient East were able to turn a disadvantage (swampy terrain in the valleys of large rivers) into an advantage (favorable conditions for agriculture).

The history of this expansion of human capabilities, according to Jaspers, includes the following stages. 1) Prehistory I. In the prehistoric period, a smart human body is formed, which does not have a narrow specialization like animals, fish and birds, but can be an operator for solving a wide variety of problems. 2) Promethean eras a (the invention by man of speech, myth, tools, the ability to use fire). 3) An important “milestone” in the collective learning of cultures was the so-called "Axial Age" human civilization (8-2 centuries BC) during this period, mainly in the civilizations of the Ancient East, new forms of consciousness, different from mythology, were formed simultaneously and independently of each other. Mythological ideas were perceived by people as rigid “programs” that were supposed to be reproduced automatically. Human perception functioned like an automaton according to the principle: “I don’t act, but what happens to me” (when we reason: “I wanted the best, but it didn’t work out” - this is a rudiment of the mythological worldview, because the main thing in it is not the individual, but her intentions and responsibility, and the environment). Instead of automatisms, forms of consciousness are developing (Confucianism, Taoism in Ancient China, Buddhism in Ancient India, philosophy in Ancient Greece, Zaraostrianism in Ancient Iran), built on self-control, self-awareness, the ability to independently regulate one’s emotional state, behavior, life, destiny and be responsible for what is happening, manage yourself. 4) The second “Promethean” era, associated with the development of science and technology, from the New Age to the present. 5) In the near future, a new Axial Time is possible, in which a person will become able to invade his destiny, relationships with people and nature, in order to rebuild them to more harmonious, perfect forms. According to Jaspers, the basis of a new worldview that facilitates this transition should be a philosophical belief in the possibility of raising the level of organization of oneself, one’s family, one’s people, and humanity as a whole.

Margaret Mead

Culture and the world of childhood. M., 1983. P. 322-361 (fragments)

VI.Culture and continuity. Study of conflict between generations

Chapter 1. The Past: Postfigurative Cultures and Well-Known Ancestors

The distinction I make between three types of crops is - postfigurative, where children primarily learn from their predecessors, cofigurative, where both children and adults learn from their peers, and prefigurative, where adults also learn from their children, reflects the times in which we live. Primitive societies, small religious or ideological enclaves, are primarily postfigurative, basing their power on the past. Great civilizations, having necessarily developed procedures for introducing innovations, turn to some form of cofigurative learning from peers, playmates, and their colleagues in study and work. Now we are entering a period new to history, when youth, with its prefigurative grasp of an as yet unknown future, is endowed with new rights.

Postfigurative culture is a culture where every change occurs so slowly and imperceptibly that grandfathers, holding newborn grandchildren in their hands, cannot imagine any other future for them, different from their own past. The past of adults turns out to be the future of each new generation; what they have lived is a blueprint for the future for their children. Children's future is shaped in such a way that everything their predecessors experienced in their adult years also becomes what children will experience when they grow up.

Post-figurative cultures, cultures in which adults cannot imagine any change and therefore pass on to their descendants only a sense of the unchanging continuity of life, according to modern data, were characteristic of human communities for thousands of years or before the beginning of civilization.

Without written or other means of recording the past, people were forced to incorporate every change into their consciousness, store it in the memory and practiced forms of action of each generation of adults. Basic skills and knowledge were passed on to the child so early, so unquestioningly and so reliably - because adults here expressed their sense of confidence that this is exactly how the world should be for him, since he is a child of their body and soul, their land, their special tradition - that the child could not have even a shadow of doubt in understanding his own personality, his own destiny. ...

True, continuity in every culture depends on the simultaneous residence of at least three generations of representatives in it. An essential feature of postfigurative cultures is the postulate that finds its expression in every act of the representatives of the older generation, the postulate that their way of life, no matter how many changes it actually contains, is unchanged and remains forever the same. In the past, before modern increases in life expectancy, living great-grandparents were extremely rare and there were few grandfathers. Those who were the longest living witnesses to events in a given culture, who served as models for younger ones, those on whose slightest sound or gesture the approval of an entire way of life depended, were few and strong. Their sharp eyes, strong limbs, and tireless work were evidence not only of their survival, but also of the survival of the culture as such. In order to preserve such a culture, old people were needed, and were needed not only to sometimes lead groups of people to new places in times of famine, but also to serve as a complete model of life as it was. When the end of life is known to a person in advance, when the prayers that will be read after death, the sacrifices that will be made, the piece of earth where his bones will rest are known in advance, then each, according to his age, gender, intellect and temperament, embodies the entire culture. .

... Of course, the conditions leading to change always exist in a latent form, even in the simple repetition of traditional actions, since no one can enter the same stream twice, there is always the possibility that some technique, some custom , some belief, repeated for the thousandth time, will be realized. This possibility increases when representatives of one post-figurative culture come into contact with representatives of another. Then their perception of what their culture actually is becomes sharper.

...In the 1940s in Venezuela, a few miles from the city of Maracaibo, Indians still hunted with bows, but cooked their food in aluminum pans stolen from Europeans. And in the 1960s, living in enclaves in foreign countries, European and American occupation forces and their families looked with the same uncomprehending and unacceptable eyes at the “natives” - Germans, Malays or Vietnamese - who lived outside the walls of their settlements. The sense of contrast can only enhance the consciousness of the permanence of the elements that constitute the specific feature of the group to which the person belongs.

Although postfigurative cultures are characterized by a close relationship with the place where they spread, this place does not have to be one area where twenty generations have plowed the same soil. Cultures of the same kind can be found among nomadic peoples who move twice a year, among diasporic groups such as the Armenian or Jewish, among Indian castes represented by a small number of members scattered across villages inhabited by representatives of many other castes. They can be found among small groups of aristocrats or social outcasts... People who once belonged to complex societies may forget in foreign countries those dynamic reactions to perceived change that forced them to emigrate, and rally in a new place, reasserting the immutability of their identity with their ancestors.

The various peoples of the Pacific Rim with which I have studied for forty years demonstrate different types of post-figurative cultures. The mountain Arapesh of New Guinea, as they were forty-five years ago, show us one form of this culture. In the confidence, precision with which every action is carried out - whether they are picking something up from the ground with their big toe or biting leaves for mats, one felt that consistency of every movement, every gesture with all the others, in which the past is reflected, no matter how it has changed. neither has undergone, in itself already lost. For for the Arapesh there is no past except the past embodied in the old and in younger forms in their children and in their children's children. There were changes, but they were so completely assimilated that the differences between the earlier customs and those acquired later disappeared in the consciousness and attitudes of the people.

When an Arapesh child is fed, bathed, held and decorated, a myriad of hidden, unspoken skills are transmitted to him by the hands that hold him, by the voices that sound around him, by the cadences of lullabies and funeral chants. When a child is carried through a village or to another village, when he himself begins to walk along beaten paths, even the most unexpected unevenness on a familiar path is already an event registered by his feet. When a new house is being built, the reaction of a person passing by is a signal for the child that something new is emerging here, something that was not there a few days ago, and at the same time a signal that in front of him is something quite ordinary, not striking the imagination of other people. This reaction is as weak as the reaction of a blind person to a different sensation of sunlight breaking through the crown of trees with leaves of a different shape. But she was still there. The appearance of a stranger in the village is recorded with the same accuracy. Muscles tense as people think to themselves how much food will have to be prepared to appease the dangerous guest, and where the men who left the village are now. When a hollow baby was born on the edge of a steep bank, in a “bad place” where menstruating and giving birth women are sent, a place of defecation and childbirth, thousands of small but understandable signs announced this, although no herald announced it.

...The sense of timelessness and all-conquering custom that I found in the Arapeshya, a feeling tinged with despair and fear that the knowledge necessary for a good deed might be lost, that people, seeming smaller and smaller in each successive generation, might disappear altogether, seems to be the what is more strange is that these people are not isolated, like the inhabitants of separate islands, not cut off from other peoples. Their villages stretched from the coast to the plains on the other side of the mountain range. They trade with other peoples, travel among them, and host people who speak a different language and have different but similar customs. This sense of identity between the known past and the expected future is all the more striking since small changes and exchanges between cultures occur here all the time. It is all the more amazing where so much can be exchanged - pots and bags, spears and bows and arrows, songs and dances, seeds and spells. Women run from one tribe to another. There are always one or two women from a foreign tribe living in the village, who do not yet know how to speak the language of the men who called them wives and hid them in menstrual huts upon their arrival in the village. This is also part of life, and children learn from their experience that women can run away. Boys begin to understand that one day their wives can run away, girls - that they themselves can run away and will have to learn other customs and other languages. All this is also part of the unchanging world.

...This same property of timelessness can be found even among those peoples whose ancestors belonged to great civilizations that were fully aware of the possibility of changes in life. Some European immigrants to America, especially those who were united by a common cult, when they settled in the New World, consciously built communities that revived this same sense of timelessness, the sense of the inevitable identity of one generation with another. The Hutterites, the Amish, the Dunkerds, the Sikhs, the Doukhobors—they all had similar desires. Even now, in these communities, children are raised in such a way that the life of their parents, their parents' parents, turns out to be a post-figurative model for their own. With such an upbringing it is almost impossible to break with the past; a break would mean, both internally and externally, a serious modification of the sense of identity and continuity, and would be tantamount to being born again - being born into a new culture.

Under the influence of contacts with non-postfigurative cultures or postfigurative missionary cultures that make the absorption of other cultures one of the aspects of their own essence, individuals can leave their culture and join another. They bring with them an established consciousness of their cultural identity and an attitude that in the new culture they will preserve this originality in the same way as in the old one. In many cases, they simply create a system of parallel meanings, speak a new language using the syntax of the old one, consider the home as something that can be changed, but decorate and inhabit it in the new society as they would have done in the old one. This is one of the common types of adaptation practiced by adult immigrants who find themselves in a foreign society. The integrity of their inner world does not change; it is so durable that many substitutions of its constituent elements can be made in it, and it will not lose its individuality. But then, for many adult immigrants, there comes a time when these new elements come together.

Relations between generations in a post-figurative society are not necessarily conflict-free. In some societies, every younger generation is expected to rebel - to defy the wishes of their elders and seize power from people older than themselves. Childhood can be a harrowing experience, and little boys can live in constant fear that their adult aunts and uncles will capture them and subject them to terrifying rituals in their honor. But when these little boys grow up, they will expect their brothers and sisters to perform the same ceremonies in the name of their children, ceremonies that so frightened and tormented them.

…It was on the basis of acquaintance with societies of this kind that anthropologists began to develop the concept of culture. The apparent stability and sense of immutable continuity that characterized these cultures was incorporated into the model of “culture as such,” a model that they offered to others, non-anthropologists, who wished to use anthropological categories to interpret human behavior. But there has always been a clear contradiction between ethnographic descriptions of small, primitive, homogeneous, slowly changing societies and the diversity of primitive tribes inhabiting regions such as New Guinea and California. It is obvious that over time, although within the same technological level, great changes must occur. Peoples are divided, languages ​​diverge. People speaking the same languages ​​find themselves living hundreds of miles apart, groups of people sharply opposing physical types can speak the same language, belong to the same culture.

...Culture in childhood can be assimilated so completely and unconditionally, and contact with representatives of other cultures can be so superficial, hostile, or contain such contrasts, that a person’s sense of his own cultural individuality can be almost impossible to change. Individuals can therefore live for many years among representatives of other cultures, working and eating with them, sometimes even marrying and raising children with them, without questioning their cultural individuality or seeking to change it. Those around them, for their part, do not offer them to do this. Or entire groups may develop a custom of limited migration, as in Greece or China. All men, having reached a certain age, can go to sea, go to work in the mines, vineyards or factories of another country, leaving their women and children at home. After several generations, new habits of living in the absence of fathers are developed, but the culture, although in a modified form, is still transmitted in its integrity.

However, the possibilities of change increase significantly when the group moves to a different environment, and all three generations leave their country and settle in an area whose landscape is comparable to the previous one - here the rivers also flow and the sea beats against the shore with the same noise. Under these conditions, the old way of life can be preserved to a significant extent, and the memories of grandfathers and the experiences of grandchildren turn out to be parallel. The fact that in the new country it is already cold at the beginning of September, but in the old place they basked in the sun until October, that there are no sunflower seeds here, that the berries collected at the beginning of summer are black and not red, that the nuts collected in the fall have a different form, although they are called as before - all these changes introduce a new element into the judgment of the grandfathers: but “in the old country” it was different.

This awareness of differences confronts the child with a new choice. He can listen and understand that “here” and “there” are different places, thereby making the fact of migration and change part of his own consciousness. Having realized what has happened, he can either keep the contrast in his memory and look with love at the little that was inherited from the old way of life, or he can consider all these memories of his ancestors boring, unattractive and discard them. The government of a new country may demand that immigrants accept a new ideology, discard the living habits of the past, vaccinate their children, pay taxes, send their youth to the army, and send their children to schools to learn the state language. But even without these requirements, there are many other factors that prevent young people from listening to old people. If their memories are too nostalgic - if they talk about the high-rise buildings in which they once lived, as the Yemenis did when they arrived in Israel, or romanticize the old cozy peasant cottages, as the Irish do in the cages of the city slums - then they will only irritate the their grandchildren. Past greatness is poor compensation for an empty pan, and it does nothing to stop modern drafts from roaming around.

Therefore, it is not surprising that many of the immigrants, even living together with their community in the country where they immigrated, discard much of the past, exclude from their narrowed lives a significant part of the riches of their pre-migration past.

The situation of those who acquire a new culture as adults may similarly involve a large number of postfigurative learning mechanisms. In fact, no one teaches immigrants from another country how to walk. But when a woman buys the clothes of her new homeland and learns to wear them - first clumsily pulling on from below the clothes that she sees on the street on women, and then adapting to its style, begins to put them on over her head - at the same time she gradually acquires posture and shape women in a new culture. Other women also react to this subconsciously and begin to treat the newcomer more as one of her compatriots than as a foreigner, they let her into the bedrooms, and trust her. When men put on strange new clothes, they learn at the same time when it is decent and when it is indecent to stand with their hands in their pockets without causing comments or insults from others. This is a multifaceted process, and in many respects it seems to be as effortless and as unconscious as the process in which the child learns in his culture everything that has not been the subject of special forms of instruction and attention. The people among whom a stranger has found refuge question their own habitual behavior just as little as do old people who have lived their entire lives within the framework of a single culture.

These two conditions - the absence of doubt and the absence of awareness - seem to be key to the preservation of any post-figurative culture. The frequency with which postfigurative styles of cultures recover from periods of rebellion and revolution deliberately directed against them indicates that this form of culture remains, at least in part, as accessible to modern man as it was to his ancestors thousands of years ago. All contradictions embedded in written and historical monuments, in archives and legal codes can be reabsorbed by such systems, since they are accepted uncritically, are beyond the threshold of consciousness and therefore cannot be attacked by analytical thinking.

The closer such unanalyzed, culturally determined behavioral reactions are to the reactions of the observer himself, the more difficult it is for even an experienced and well-trained researcher to recognize them. During the Second World War there was rarely any psychological resistance to scientific cultural analysis as long as Japan, China, Burma or Thailand were concerned (such resistance was usually limited to those who used other styles of observation - the "Old Chinese School" as they were called ). But the same intellectuals who readily accepted the analysis of Asian or African cultures objected stubbornly and agitatedly when it came to the analysis of European cultures, which contained many subconscious elements similar to their own. In these cases, the defensive reaction against self-analysis, the reaction that allowed any representative of one Euro-American culture to think of himself as a freely acting, unfettered individual, also acted against the analysis of a related cultural type, for example, German, Russian, English.

Accordingly, the sudden recognition of some specific post-figuratively developed form of cultural behavior, when it is found in the observer’s own environment, in people of his educational level, turns out to be especially instructive.

…It is precisely these deep, undesignated stable behavioral structures, learned from undoubting elders or from undoubting representatives of the culture where the aliens settled, that must become the subject of analysis, so that a certain understanding of culture can become part of the intellectual sciences about man, part that spiritual atmosphere in which only these sciences can flourish. Once people know that they speak a language different from that of their neighbors, that their language was acquired by them in childhood and can be acquired by foreigners, they become capable of learning a second and third language, of constructing a grammar, of consciously modifying their native language . Language, taken from this point of view, is simply that aspect of culture which has long been recognized as having nothing to do with human heredity. The task of understanding another culture in its entirety, understanding the deepest mechanisms of emotions, the most subtle differences in postures and gestures is no different from the task of understanding another language. But the task of analyzing such wholes requires other tools - supplementing the experienced analytical eye and ear with cameras, tape recorders and analysis tools.

Today we have an abundance of examples of various forms of post-figurative cultures of peoples, representing all successive phases of human history - from the times of hunting and gathering to the present. We have at our disposal the theory and technology of their research. And although primitive peoples, uneducated peasants and the poor from rural backwaters and urban slums cannot directly tell us everything they saw and heard, we can record their behavior for later analysis, we can also put cameras in their hands so that they can record and help us see what, due to our upbringing, we cannot see directly. The known past of humanity is open to us and can tell us how, after a millennium of postfigurative culture and cofigurative culture, in which people learned old things from their parents and new things from their peers, we have arrived at a new stage in the evolution of human cultures.

Chapter 2. The Present: Cofigurative Cultures and Familiar Peers

Cofigurative culture is a culture in which the predominant model of behavior for people belonging to a given society is the behavior of their contemporaries. A number of post-figurative cultures are described in which older people serve as models of behavior for the young and where the traditions of their ancestors are preserved in their integrity right up to the present time. However, there are few societies where configuration would become the only form of cultural transmission, and not a single one is known in which only this model would be preserved throughout the lives of several generations. In a society where configuration has become the only model of cultural transmission, both old and young will consider it “natural” for each generation to have different forms of behavior compared to the previous one.

In all cofigurative cultures, older people still dominate in the sense that it is they who determine the style of cofiguration and set the limits of its manifestation in the behavior of young people. There are societies in which the approval of elders is decisive in the adoption of a new form of behavior, that is, young people look not at their peers, but at their elders as the last authority on whose decision the fate of the innovation depends. But at the same time, where it is generally accepted that representatives of a certain generation will model their behavior on the behavior of their contemporaries (especially when it comes to adolescent peer groups) and that their behavior will differ from the behavior of their parents and grandfathers, each individual, As soon as he manages to express a new style, he becomes to some extent a model for other representatives of his generation.

Configuration begins where the crisis of the postfigurative system occurs. This crisis can arise in different ways: as a consequence of a catastrophe that destroys almost the entire population, but especially the elders who play the most significant role in the leadership of a given society; as a result of the development of new forms of technology unknown to the elders; following relocation to a new country where the elders will always be considered immigrants and outsiders; as a result of conquest, when the conquered population is forced to adopt the language and customs of the conquerors; as a result of conversion to a new faith, when newly converted adults try to raise their children in the spirit of new ideals that were not realized by them either in childhood or adolescence, or, as a result of measures deliberately carried out by some kind of revolution, which asserts itself by introducing new and other lifestyles for young people.

…In a post-figurative culture, youth may turn away from the weaknesses of the old, they may yearn to master the wisdom and power they personify, but in both cases, they themselves will eventually become what the old are now. But for the descendants of immigrants, regardless of whether this immigration was voluntary or forced, whether the older generation turned away from the poverty and lawlessness of their past or yearned for their old life, the generation of grandfathers represents the past remaining somewhere out there... Looking at This generation, children see in them people whose footsteps they will never follow, and at the same time those people who they themselves would become in a different environment, where the influence of old people would affect them through their parents.

In slowly developing societies, small ascertainable changes in behavior that distinguish the older generation from the younger can be interpreted as a change in fashion, that is, as minor innovations introduced by young people in clothing, manners, types of recreation, innovations about which the elders have no reason to worry. In New Guinea, where peoples are constantly borrowing new styles of clothing from each other or even trading them, all women of the same tribe, young and old, may adopt a new fashionable style of grass skirt, making it long in front and short in back (instead of short in front and long in back ). An old woman who continued to wear old, out-of-fashion skirts would be branded as old-fashioned. Small variations within the dominant style of a culture do not change the character of post-figurative culture. In any case, the girls know that they will have to act the same way their grandmothers acted. When they themselves become grandmothers, they too will either adopt new fashions or leave it to the youth to follow the changing fashions. Behind the idea of ​​fashion is the idea of ​​cultural continuity. By emphasizing the fashionability of something, they want to say that nothing important changes.

Analysis of New Guinea cultures shows how continuous small changes on the surface can actually create stable continuity and stability at deeper levels of culture.

In contrast, the situation in which configuration takes place is characterized by the fact that the experience of the younger generation is radically different from the experience of their parents, grandfathers and other older representatives of the community to which they directly belong. Whether these young people are the first generation born in exile, the first by birthright representatives of a new religious cult, or the first generation raised by a group of victorious revolutionaries, their parents cannot serve as living examples of behavior befitting their age. Young people themselves must develop new styles of behavior and serve as models for their peers. Innovations carried out by the children of pioneers - those who were the first to enter new lands or entered a new type of society - have the nature of adaptation and can be interpreted by representatives of older generations who understand their own inexperience in the life of a new country, their inexperience in matters of a new religion or affairs post-revolutionary world, as a continuation of their own purposeful activities. After all, they were the ones who migrated; they cut down trees in the forests or developed wastelands, creating new settlements in which children, growing up, received new opportunities for their development. These adults, already partially oriented to their new life, although they still make mistakes here and there, are rightly proud of the better adaptation of their children.

In situations of this kind, conflict between generations begins not through the fault of adults. It arises when new methods of raising children turn out to be insufficient and unsuitable for creating the lifestyle in adulthood that, according to the concepts of the first generation of immigrants, pioneers, their children should adhere to.

The pioneers and immigrants who arrived in the United States, Canada, Australia or Israel had no precedents in their past experience on which they could without hesitation build a system for raising their children. How much freedom should children be given? How far from home should they be allowed to travel? How to control their behavior - just as their fathers once controlled them, by the threat of disinheritance? But children who grew up in new conditions, children who create strong connections with each other, who struggle both with the conditions of the new environment and with the outdated ideas of their parents, copy each other’s behavior still on a very subconscious level. In the United States, where in one family after another, one son broke with his father and went to the West or to another part of the country, the very prevalence of this conflict gave it the appearance of a natural relationship between fathers and sons.

In societies where we are faced with strong conflict between generations, conflict that finds expression in the desire to separate or in the long struggle for symbols of power as it passes from one to another, it is quite possible that this conflict itself is the result of some serious change environment. Once included in a culture and accepted as inevitable, conflicts of this kind become an integral part of post-figurative cultures. The great-grandfather left home, the grandfather did the same, and the father, in turn, did the same. Or, on the contrary, the grandfather hated the school where his father sent him; The father also hated her, but this does not prevent him from sending his son to school, knowing full well that he will hate her too. The emergence of a gap between generations, when the younger, deprived of the opportunity to turn to experienced elders, is forced to seek guidance from each other, is a very old phenomenon in history and is constantly repeated in any society where there is a gap in the continuity of experience. ...

The situation, however, takes on a completely different character when parents encounter in their children and grandchildren a style of behavior that is exemplified by representatives of some other groups: the victors in a conquered society, the dominant religious or political group, the indigenous inhabitants of the country where they arrived like immigrants, old-timers of some city to which they migrated. In situations of this kind, parents are forced, whether through external coercion or their own desire, to encourage their children to become part of the new order (to allow the children to move away from them), learning a new language, new customs and new manners. All this, from the parents’ point of view, can be presented as the children’s acceptance of a new value system.

The new cultural heritage is passed on to these children by adults who are not their parents, grandparents, or residents of their own immigrant villages where they recently arrived or where they were born. Often access to the full inner life of the culture to which they must adapt is very limited, and their parents have none at all. But when they go to school, start working, or join the military, they come into contact with their peers and have the opportunity to compare themselves with them. These peers are able to give them more practical models of behavior than those that can be offered by adults, officers, teachers and officials - people with a past that is incomprehensible to them and a future that is as difficult for them to imagine as their own.

In such situations, newcomers discover that their peers within the system are the best mentors. The same is true in institutions such as prisons or mental hospitals, where there is a sharp disconnect between their residents or patients and the all-powerful administration and their commissioners. In institutions of this kind it is usually assumed that the staff - doctors and nurses, guards and other guards - are very different from the patients and prisoners. That's why newcomers model their behavior on the behavior of prisoners and patients who arrived here earlier.

Researchers of adolescence emphasize its inherent conformity. But this adolescent conformism is characteristic of two types of cultures: cultures in which cofigurative behavior has become socially institutionalized over the lives of many generations, for example, in a society with institutionalized age gradations, or - the opposite case - cultures where the majority of adolescents, without finding an example in the behavior of their parents whose experience is alien to them are forced to rely on outside instructions that can give them a sense of belonging to a new group.

In its simplest form, a cofigurative society is a society in which there are no grandparents. Young adults migrating from one part of the country to another may leave their parents in their old place or, emigrating to a new country, in their homeland. Likewise, older generations are often absent from a modern mobile society such as the United States, where both young and old move frequently from place to place. This phenomenon is also characteristic of industrial, highly urbanized societies, in which wealthy or very poor people separate the elderly from themselves, providing them with special houses or areas to live.

The transition to a new way of life, requiring the acquisition of new skills and forms of behavior, seems easier when there are no grandfathers who remember the past, shape the experience of a growing child, and involuntarily reinforce all the non-verbalized values ​​of the old culture. The absence of an older generation, as a rule, also means the absence of closed, narrow ethnic communities. Conversely, if the grandfathers are part of a group that has immigrated to a foreign society, close ties within the village community can ensure its integrity.

…With the physical removal of a generation of grandparents from the world in which a child is raised, his life experience is shortened by a generation, and his connections with the past are weakened. A characteristic feature of post-figurative culture - the reproduction of past experiences in a person’s relationship with his child or his parents - disappears. The past, once represented by living people, becomes hazy and easier to discard or distort in memories.

The nuclear family, that is, a family consisting only of parents and children, is indeed a very flexible social group in those situations in which the majority of the population or each successive generation must learn new life habits. It is easier to adapt to the style of life in a new country or to new conditions if immigrants and pioneers are separated from their parents and other older relatives and surrounded by people of their own age. And the host society can also gain more from immigrants coming from many cultures if they all learn a new language and new technology and support each other's commitments to the new way of life.

In large organizations that are required to change, and change quickly, retirement is a social expression of the same need for flexibility. The removal of senior officials, elderly personnel, all those who, with their personality, memory, and unchanging style of attitude towards young people, strengthens and supports the outdated, is similar in nature to the removal of grandfathers from the family circle.

When this generation is gone or when it has lost power, youth may deliberately ignore or be indifferent to the standards of behavior of their elders. The teenager plays his limited and clearly defined role before an audience of younger ones, and a complete configuration arises in which those who serve as examples are only a few years older than those who learn from them.<...>

Nuclear families, which exclude the generation of grandfathers and greatly weaken all other kinship ties, are typical of immigration conditions in which large numbers of people move long distances or are forced to adapt to a new style of life that is very different from the previous one. Over time, this attitude towards organizing a nuclear family is adopted by the new culture; even in cases where the family includes representatives of the older generation, their influence is minimized. They are no longer expected to serve as role models for their grandchildren or to exercise strict control over their adult children's marriages and careers. The expectation that children will leave their parents or will find themselves outside their influence, as the parents themselves did at one time, becomes part of such a culture.

...In the context of rapid cultural change in a new country or in a new environment, men and women may react to it completely differently. New ways of earning a living can radically change the situation of men, who move, for example, from full participation in the life of everyone in a village community, or from the inert, strictly controlled life of a tenant, to the anonymous life of an urban unskilled worker. But living conditions for women may change very little, since they continue to prepare food and raise children in much the same way as their mothers did. In such circumstances, those parts of the culture that are transmitted by women during the formation of the personality of the child in his early years may remain intact, while other parts of it, associated with a sharp change in the working conditions of the man, change radically and, in turn, lead to character changes in children. ...

As they adapted to American culture, all non-English speaking immigrant groups had to abandon their language and their distinct culture. The main mechanism of adaptation was the education of children. Parents did not determine the nature of the new education; Moreover, in most cases they had no influence on the education system in the countries from which they came. They were forced to entrust their children to the schools and accept their children's interpretation of what proper American behavior was. The children here were guided only by the instructions of their teachers and the example of their peers. Over time, the experience of immigrant children became the experience of all American children, now representatives of a new culture and people of a new century. Their authority, their ability to serve as a model of behavior in the eyes of the parent generation has grown significantly.

Living conditions in rapidly developing countries can lead to similar results. In India, Pakistan or the new countries of Africa, children also become experts in the new way of life and parents lose their right to evaluate and guide their behavior. But where changes occur in one country, the total weight of the old culture, the reintegrating power of old guidelines, the physical existence of the older generation weaken the claims to power put forward by children. In countries of multiethnic immigration, however, the force of the configuration doubles and parents, displaced in time and space, find it doubly difficult to maintain any authority over their children or even the belief that such control is both possible and desirable.

When configuration among peers is institutionalized by culture, we are faced with the phenomenon of youth culture or “teenage” culture; age stratification, supported by the school system, is becoming increasingly important. In the United States, the culture-wide effects of configuration began to be felt by the early twentieth century. The form of the nuclear family was established, close relationships between the older generation and grandchildren lost the force of the norm, and parents, who had lost their dominant position, left the task of developing standards of behavior to their children. By 1920, the task of developing a style of behavior began to shift to the media, which solved it in the name of successive groups of teenagers, and parental power passed into the hands of an increasingly hostile and embittered community. Culturally, configuration has become the dominant, predominant form of cultural transmission. Very few of the older people claimed any connection to modern culture. Parents were expected, no matter how much they grumbled, to give in to the insistent demands of their children, demands that they were taught not by school, not by other, more culturally adapted children, but by the media.

... An individual raised in a nuclear family with its two-generational fixation of attitudes at an early age knows that his father and mother are different from their parents and that when his children grow up, they will be different from him. In modern societies, this prediction is complemented by another: the education received in childhood will, at best, only partially prepare the child for membership in groups other than the family. All this taken together - life in a changing nuclear family and the individual's experiences of membership in new groups - makes him realize that he lives in a constantly changing world. The stronger the difference between generations in the family is felt, the stronger the social changes that are consequences of a person’s involvement in new groups, the more fragile the social system becomes, the less confident the individual is likely to feel. The idea of ​​progress, which gives meaning and purpose to these unstable situations, makes them somewhat bearable. Immigrants to America hoped that their children would receive a better education and be more successful in life, and this hope sustained them through the difficulties of transition.

... I think that a new cultural form is being born now, I call it prefiguration. This is how I understand it. Children today face a future that is so unknown that it cannot be controlled in the way we are trying to do today, effecting change in one generation through configuration within a stable, elder-controlled culture that carries many post-figurative elements.

I think we can, and it would be better for us, to apply to our present situation the model of the first generation immigrant pioneers in an unknown and uninhabited country. But we must replace the idea of ​​migration in space (geographical migration) with a new image - migration in time.

Over two decades, 1940-1960, events occurred that irreversibly changed man's relationship to man and to the natural world. The invention of the computer, the successful splitting of the atom and the invention of the atomic and hydrogen bombs, discoveries in the field of biochemistry of the living cell, exploration of the surface of our planet, the extreme acceleration of the growth of the Earth's population and the realization of the inevitability of disaster if this growth continues, the crisis of cities, the destruction of the natural environment, the unification of all parts world jet aviation and television, preparations for the creation of satellites and the first steps in space, the only recently realized possibilities of unlimited sources of energy and synthetic materials and the transformation in the most developed countries of age-old problems of production into problems of distribution and consumption - all this has led to a sharp irreversible gap between generations .

Just recently, elders could say: “Listen, I was young, and you were never old.” But today the young can answer them: “You have never been young in a world where I am young, and you will never be.” This always happens with pioneers and their children. In this sense, all of us born and raised before the 1940s are immigrants. Like the first generation of pioneers, we were taught skills and instilled in us a respect for values ​​that only partially corresponded to the new times. The nomes, the elders, still control the mechanisms of governance and power. And as immigrant pioneers from colonizing countries, we still cling to the belief that children will eventually resemble us in many ways. However, this hope is accompanied by fears: children become complete strangers before our eyes, teenagers gathering on street corners are to be feared, like the vanguard of invading armies.

We encourage ourselves with the words: “Boys are always boys.” We console ourselves with explanations, telling each other, “What turbulent times,” or, “The nuclear family is very unstable,” or, “Television is very harmful to children.” We say the same thing about our children and about new countries that, having just arisen, now demand airliners and embassies in all the world's capitals: “Oh, they are very immature and young. They will learn. They will grow up."

In the past, despite the long history of cofigurative mechanisms of cultural transmission and the widespread recognition of the possibilities of rapid change, there were enormous differences in what people belonging to different classes, regions and specialized groups in a country knew, as well as differences in the experience of peoples living in different parts of the world. Change was still relatively slow and uneven. Young people living in certain countries and belonging to certain class groups knew more than adults in other countries or adults from other classes. But there were always adults who knew more, whose experience was greater than the knowledge and experience of any young person.

Today, suddenly, in all parts of the world, where all nations are united by an electronic communication network, young people have a common experience, an experience that their elders never had and never will have. Conversely, the older generation will never see in the lives of young people a repetition of their unprecedented experience of change, one after another. This generation gap is completely new, it is global and universal.

Today's children are growing up in a world that their elders did not know, but some of the adults foresaw it would be so. Those who foresaw turned out to be the harbingers of a prefigurative culture of the future, in which the future is unknown.

M. Mead

CULTURE AND WORLD OF CHILDHOOD

Selected works

From the editorial board

I. Frost on a blooming blackberry

Chapter 11. Samoa: Teenage Girl

Chapter 12. Return from the expedition

Chapter 13. Manus: the thinking of children among primitive peoples

Chapter 14. Years between expeditions

Chapter 15. Arapesh and Mundugumor: Sex Roles in Culture

Chapter 16. Chambuli: gender and temperament

Chapter 17. Bali and the Iatmuls: a qualitative leap

II. Growing up in Samoa

I. Introduction

II. A day in Samoa

III. Raising a Samoan Child

IV. Samoan family

V. The girl and her age group

VII. Accepted forms of sexual relations

VIII. The role of dance

IX. Attitude to personality

XIII. Our pedagogical problems in the light of Samoan antitheses

III. How to grow in New Guinea

I. Introduction

III. Early Childhood Education

IV. Family life

VII. Child's world

XIV. Upbringing and personality

Appendix I. An Ethnological Approach to Social Psychology

IV. Mountain Arapesh(chapters from the book “Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies”)

1. Life in the mountains

2. Joint work in society

3. Birth of a child among the Arapesh

4. Influences shaping the Arapesh personality in early childhood

6. Growing up and betrothal of a girl among the Araneshas

8. The Arapesh ideal and those who deviate from it

V. Human paternity is a social invention

VI. Culture and continuity. Study of conflict between generations

Chapter 1. The Past: Postfigurative Cultures, and Well-Known Ancestors

Chapter 2. The Present: Cofigurative Cultures and Familiar Peers

VII. Spiritual Atmosphere and the Science of Evolution

Comments

Application. I. S. Kon. Margaret Mead and the ethnography of childhood

Bibliography of the most important works of M. Mead

FROM THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Institute of Ethnography named after. N. N. Miklukho-Maclay of the USSR Academy of Sciences and the Main Editorial Board of Oriental Literature of the Nauka Publishing House have been publishing the book series “Ethnographic Library” since 1983.

The series publishes the best works of domestic and foreign ethnographers, which had a great influence on the development of ethnographic science and retain their important theoretical and methodological significance to this day. The series includes works in which, using ethnographic materials, the patterns of life of human societies at a particular historical stage are illuminated, and major problems of general ethnography are considered. Since the integral task of the science of peoples is the constant replenishment of factual data and the depth of theoretical generalizations depends on the reliability and detail of the factual material, works of a descriptive nature will also find their place in the “Ethnographic Library”, which are still of outstanding interest due to the uniqueness of the information they contain and the importance of the methodological principles underlying field research.

The series is intended for a wide range of specialists in the field of social sciences, as well as teachers and students of higher educational institutions.

The series opened with the publication of two books: “The League of the Chodenosaunee, or Iroquois” by L. G. Morgan and “Structural Anthropology” by C. Lévi-Strauss. Both were published in 1983 (in 1985, Lévi-Strauss's book was published in an additional edition). Suggested book by Margaret Mead “The Culture and World of Childhood. Selected Works" introduces the Soviet reader for the first time to the works of the famous American scientist, the founder of the ethnography of childhood.

The work of the Russian scientist - Turkologist, linguist and ethnographer - Academician V.V. Radlov (1837-1918) “From Siberia. Diary pages" (translation from German). In the future, the series also includes works by D. I. Zelenin, M. Moss, L. Ya. Sternborg, V. G. Bogoraz, I. F. Sumtsov and others.

HOARFROST ON BLOWING BLACKBERRY

Chapter 11. Samoa: Teenage Girl

When I went to Samoa, my understanding of the obligations imposed on a researcher by working in the field and writing reports about it was vague. My decision to become an anthropologist was based in part on the conviction that a simple scientist, even one without the special gifts required of a great artist, can contribute to the advancement of knowledge. This decision was also associated with the acute sense of anxiety conveyed to me by Professor Boas 1 and Ruth Benedict 2 . In remote parts of the earth, under the onslaught of modern civilization, ways of life about which we know nothing are breaking down. We need to describe them now, now, otherwise they will be lost to us forever. Everything else can wait, but this has become the most pressing task. Such thoughts came over me at meetings in Toronto in 1924, where I, the youngest participant in the convention, listened to others constantly talk about “their people.” I had no people to talk about. From that time on, I had a firm determination to go out into the field, and not sometime in the future, after reflection at my leisure, but immediately, as soon as I had completed the necessary preparation.

Then I had very little idea of ​​what field work was. The course of lectures on her methods, given to us by Professor Boas, was not devoted to field work, as such. These were lectures on theory - how, for example, to organize material to justify or challenge a certain theoretical point of view. Ruth Benedict spent one summer on an expedition with a group of completely domesticated Indians in California, where she took her mother with her on vacation. She also worked with Zuni 3. I read her descriptions of the landscape, the appearance of the Zuni, the bloodthirstiness of the bugs, and the difficulty of cooking. But I gleaned very little from them about how it worked. Professor Boas, speaking of the Kwakiutl 4 , called them his “dear friends,” but there was nothing that followed that would help me understand what it was like to live among them.

When I decided to take a teenage girl as my research subject, and Professor Boas allowed me to go into the field in Samoa, I listened to his half-hour pep talk. He warned me that on an expedition I should be prepared for the apparent loss of time, to simply sit and listen, and that I should not waste time doing ethnography in general, the study of culture in its entirety. Fortunately, many people - missionaries, lawyers, government officials and old-school ethnographers - had already been to Samoa, so the temptation to “waste time” on ethnography, he added, would be less strong for me. In the summer, he wrote me a letter in which he once again advised me to take care of my health and again touched on the tasks facing me:

I am sure you have thought carefully about this issue, but there are some aspects of it that particularly interest me that I would like to draw your attention to, even if you have already thought about them.

I am very interested in how young girls react to the restrictions on their freedom of behavior imposed on them by custom. Very often, in our teenage years, we are faced with a rebellious spirit, which manifests itself either in gloominess or in outbursts of rage. Among us we meet people who are characterized by humility accompanied by suppressed rebellion. This manifests itself either in the desire for loneliness, or in obsessive participation in all social events, behind which lies the desire to drown out internal anxiety. It is not entirely clear whether we can encounter similar phenomena in a primitive society and whether our desire for independence is not a simple consequence of the conditions of modern life and more developed individualism. I am also interested in the extreme shyness of girls in primitive society. I don't know if you will find it in Samoa. It is typical for girls of most Indian tribes and manifests itself not only in their relationships with outsiders, but also within the family circle. They are often afraid to talk to older people and are very shy in their presence.

Another interesting problem is the outburst of feelings among girls. You should pay special attention to cases of romantic love among older girls. According to my observations, it can in no way be considered excluded, and it naturally appears in its most striking forms where parents or society force marriages on girls against their will.

Look for the individual, but also think about the scheme, pose the problems as Ruth Bunzel 5 posed them in her study of art among the Pueblos and Heberlins on the northwest coast. I assume you have already read Malinowski's article 6 in Psyche on family behavior in New Guinea 7 . I think he was heavily influenced by the Freudians, but the problem he posed is one that confronts me as well.

Here it is also necessary to mention G. Stanley Hall's voluminous book 8 on adolescents, in which, identifying the stages of human growth with the stages of human culture, he argued that the development of each child reproduces the history of the human race. The textbooks started from the premise, borrowed largely from German theory, 9 that puberty was a period of rebellion and stress. At that time, puberty and adolescence were strongly identified by everyone. Only much later did researchers involved in child development begin to talk about a hypothetical “first adolescence” - around the age of six - and about a second crisis - during puberty, about the continuation of adolescence after twenty years, and even about some manifestations of it. in adults over forty.

My training in psychology gave me an understanding of samples, tests, and systematic behavioral questionnaires. I also had even a little practical experience with them. My Aunt Fanny worked for the Association for the Protection of Youth at Hull House in Chicago, and I devoted one summer to reading the reports of that Association. They gave me an idea of ​​what the social context of individual behavior is, what the family should be considered and what its place in the structure of society is.

I understood that I would need to learn the language. But I did not know anyone, except the missionaries and their children who became ethnologists, who could speak the spoken language of the people they were studying. I read only one essay by Malinovsky and did not know to what extent he spoke the Trobriand language 10 . I myself didn’t know a single foreign language, I only “learned” Latin, French and German in high school. Our language training in college consisted of brief exposure to the most exotic languages. During classes, without any prior preparation, we were bombarded with the following sentences:

And it was kind of a great teaching method. He taught us, like our seminars on kinship patterns and religious beliefs, to expect to encounter anything on expeditions, no matter how strange, incomprehensible, or bizarre it may seem to us. And of course, the first commandment that a practicing ethnographer must learn is: it is very likely that you will encounter new, unheard of and unthinkable forms of human behavior.

This attitude towards the possibility of a collision at any moment with a new, not yet recorded form of human behavior is the reason for frequent clashes between anthropologists and psychologists who try to “think with natural scientific precision” and do not trust philosophical constructs. This attitude was the reason for our clashes with economists, political scientists and sociologists who use the model of the social organization of our society in their studies of other social structures.

The good school we received from Professor Boas destroyed our inertia and instilled in us a readiness to face the unexpected and, let it be said, the extremely difficult. But we were not taught how to work with an exotic foreign language, bringing knowledge of its grammar to such an extent that we could learn to speak. Sapir 11 noted in passing that learning a foreign language is devoid of a moral aspect: one can be honest, he believed, only in one’s native language.

Thus, in our education there was no knowledge of how to. It only gave us the knowledge of what to look for. Many years later, Camilla Wedgwood, during her first expedition to Manam Island, would address this issue in her first letter home: “How do you know who is someone’s mother’s brother? Only God and Malinovsky know this.” In Lowy's question 12, "How do we know who someone's mother's brother is unless someone tells us?" - the striking difference between his methods of field work and mine is clearly visible.

The education we received instilled in us a sense of respect for the people we studied. Every nation consists of full-fledged human beings leading a way of life comparable to our own, people possessing a culture comparable to the culture of any other people. No one among us ever spoke of the Kwakiutl, or the Zuni, or any other people as savages or barbarians. Yes, these were primitive peoples, that is, their culture was unwritten, it took shape and developed without the support of writing. But the concept “primitive” meant only that to us. In college we learned firmly that there is no correct progression from simple, “primitive” languages ​​to complex, “civilized” languages. In fact, many primitive languages ​​are much more complex than written ones. In college we also learned that while some art styles evolved from simple patterns, there were others that evolved from more complex forms to simpler ones.

Of course, we also had a course on the theory of evolution. We knew that it took millions of years for humanoid creatures to develop language, learn to use tools, and develop forms of social organization capable of transmitting the experience acquired by one generation to another. But we went into the field not to look for early forms of human life, but for forms that were different from ours, different because certain groups of primitive people lived in isolation from the main stream of great civilizations. We did not make the mistake of Freud, who assumed that primitive peoples living on distant atolls, deserts, jungles or the Arctic North were identical to our ancestors. Of course, we can learn from them how long it takes to fell a tree with a stone axe, or how little food a woman can bring into the house in societies where the main source of food is hunting by men. But these isolated peoples are not links in the family tree of our ancestors. It was clear to us that our ancestors were at the crossroads of trade routes, where representatives of different nations met and exchanged ideas and goods. They crossed the mountains, went overseas and returned home. They borrowed money and kept records. They were influenced greatly by the discoveries and inventions made by other peoples, which was impossible for peoples living in relative isolation.

We were prepared to encounter differences in our field work that far exceeded those we find in the interconnected cultures of the Western world or in the lives of people at different stages of our own history. Reports on what was found and on the way of life of all the peoples studied will be the main contribution of anthropologists to the treasury of accurate knowledge about the world.

This was my intellectual background in the field of theoretical anthropology. I, of course, to some extent learned to use methods for a generalized description of such, for example, phenomena as the people’s use of their natural resources or the forms of social organization developed by them. I also had some experience analyzing observations made by other researchers.

But no one talked about what real skills and abilities a young anthropologist entering the field must have - whether he is able, for example, to observe and accurately record what he sees, whether he has the intellectual discipline necessary to work hard day after day when there is no one to guide him, to compare his observations, to whom he could complain or to whom he could boast of his success. Sapir's letters to Ruth Benedict and Malinowski's personal diaries are full of bitter complaints about idleness, and they were written at a time when, as we well know, they were doing magnificent work. No one was interested in our ability to endure loneliness. No one asked how we would establish cooperation with the colonial authorities, with the military or with officials of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, but we had to work with their help. No one here gave us any advice.

This style, which developed at the beginning of the century, when the researcher was given a good theoretical training and then sent to live among primitive people, assuming that he would figure out everything else on his own, has survived to this day. In 1933, when I gave advice to a young explorer traveling to Africa on how to deal with the drunkenness of British officials, anthropologists in London grinned. And in 1952, when, with my help, Theodore Schwartz 14 was sent to learn new skills - operating a generator, recording on magnetic tape, working with a camera - all the things that were expected to be encountered in the field, the professors at the University of Pennsylvania thought it was ridiculous. Those who teach students now teach them the way their professors taught them, and if young ethnographers do not fall into despair, do not undermine their health, or die, then they will become ethnographers of the traditional style.

Mead " Culture And world childhood" What aspects of mental development makes... I.S. Child and society. M., 1988. Ch. 1. pp. 6-65. 4. Mead M. Culture And world childhood. M., 1988. Chapter VII MENTAL DEVELOPMENT...

It was translated into 17 languages ​​and became a bestseller. A number of new scientific ideas are associated with the name M. - about the nature of parental feelings, the relationship between maternal and paternal roles, the origin of male and female initiations. No ethnographer in the world before her had enjoyed such popularity in the world. In human history, she distinguished three types of cultures in terms of the nature of the transmission of experience between generations. Post-figurative cultures - children learn from their ancestors. Thus, in a patriarchal society based on tradition and its living carriers, the elderly, relations between age groups are strictly regulated, innovations are not approved, everyone knows their place, and feelings of continuity and fidelity to traditions prevail. Cofigurative cultures - children and adults learn from peers, i.e. from their peers. The influence of elders decreases, while that of peers increases. The extended family is being replaced by the nuclear family, and the integrity of traditions is being shaken. The importance of youth groups is increasing, and a special youth subculture is emerging. The term “cofigurative” (the prefix “ko” means together, together) reflects the fact of co-creation between the teacher and students. Prefigurative cultures - adults learn from their children. Such cultures have emerged since the mid-20th century and are united by an electronic communication network. They define a new type of social connection between generations, when the lifestyle of the older generation does not weigh heavily on the younger one. The rate at which knowledge is updated is so high that young people are more knowledgeable than old people. Intergenerational conflicts are intensifying, youth culture is developing into a counterculture. Post-figurative cultures are oriented toward the past and are characterized by very slow, snail-like progress. Cofigurative cultures are focused on the present and a moderate pace of progress, while Prefigurative cultures are focused on the future and accelerated movement. M. was called a “lifetime classic” who made an outstanding contribution to the understanding of human culture and problems of socialization.

Trip to Samoa.

See also the article from Khoruzhenko’s encyclopedic dictionary.

MFA MARGARET (1901-1978) - American. ethnographer, founder of childhood ethnography as an independent scientific field. disciplines, follower of Amer. cultural anthropologist F. Boas; researcher of relations between different age groups in traditional (Papuans, Samoans, etc.) and modern ones. societies, as well as children's psychology. from the position of the so-called ethnopsychological school. The results of field research were published in the late 20s - early. 30s in a number of interesting works. In them, M. showed a wide variety of cultures of different peoples, as well as the decisive role of culture in the formation of social life. attitudes and behavior of people. M. was the first anthropologist to study the practice of raising children among different peoples. Considering the relationship between culture and the world of childhood, M. distinguished between three types of culture: postfigurative (children primarily learn from their predecessors), configurative (children and adults learn from their peers) and prefigurative (adults also learn from their children). In 1944, M. founded the Institute of Comparisons. cultural studies, which represented a non-profit organization where behavior, customs, psychology were studied. and social organization in all cultures of the world. Basic cultural studies ideas were reflected in the following works: “Coming of Age in Samoa” (1928); "Growing Up in New Guinea: A Comparative Study of Primitive Education" (1930); "The Changing Culture of an Indian Tribe" (1932); Mind Self and Society: From the Standpoint of Social Behaviorist (C. W. Morris, Ed., 1934); "Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies" (1935); "The School in American Culture" (1951); "Anthropology: A Human Science" (1964); Culture and Commitment: A Study of the Generation Gap (1970); “Culture and the world of childhood” (collection of translations in Russian, 1988), etc.

Excerpt from Margaret Mead’s book “The Culture and World of Childhood”: