Synopses & Reviews
Often far from home and loved ones, famed anthropologist Margaret Mead was a prolific letterwriter, always honing her writing skills and her ideas. To Cherish the Life of the World presents, for the first time, her personal and professional correspondence, which spanned sixty years. These letters lend insights into Mead's relationships with interconnected circles of family, friends, and colleagues, and reveal her thoughts on the nature of these relationships. In these letters--drawn primarily from her papers at the Library of Congress--Mead ruminates on family, friendships, sexuality, marriage, children, and career. In midlife, at a low point, she wrote to a friend, "What I seem to need most is close, aware human relationships, which somehow reinstate my sense of myself, as no longer living 'in the season of the narrow heart." This collection is structured around these relationships, which were so integral to Mead's perspective on life. With a foreword by her daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson, a renowned author and anthropologist in her own right, this volume of letters from Mead to those who shared her life and work offers new insight into a rich and deeply complex mind.
Review
andldquo;Fredrik Barth was an extraordinary ethnographer who did path-breaking fieldwork in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Indonesia and New Guinea. He was also an original and influential theorist, working often against the grain of disciplinary orthodoxies. Thomas Hylland Eriksen, a friend and colleague of Barth, and a distinguished anthropologist in his own right, tells Barthandrsquo;s story with sympathy, insight and great verve.andrdquo;
Synopsis
This first collection of Margaret Mead's personal correspondence creates a vivid and intimate portrait of an American icon--with a foreword by Mead's daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson
Synopsis
Fredrik Barth, editor of the influential
Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, is one of the towering figures of twentieth-century anthropology. In this accessible but penetrating intellectual biography, Thomas Hylland Eriksen explores Barthand#8217;s six-decade career, following Barth from his early ecological studies in Pakistan to political studies in Iran, to groundbreaking fieldwork in Norway, New Guinea, Bali, and Bhutan. Along the way, Eriksen raises many of the questions that emerge from Barthand#8217;s own work: questions of unity and diversity, of culture and relativism, and of art and science. This will surely be the definitive biography of Barth for many years to come.
About the Author
Margaret Caffrey is an associate professor of history at the University of Memphis and the author of a book about Margaret Mead's mentor, colleague, and lover, entitled Ruth Benedict: Stranger in This Land. She lives in Memphis, Tennessee. Patricia Francis was curator of "Margaret Mead: Human Nature and the Power of Culture," an exhibition at the Library of Congress, in 2002. She lives in Washington, D.C.
Table of Contents
Preface
Part I and#8226; A man of action
1. Watching and wandering
2. The power and the glory
3. Nomadic freedom
4. Entrepreneurship
5. The global theorist
6. Ethnic groups and boundaries
Part II and#8226; An anthropology of knowledge
7. Baktaman vibrations
8. A new complexity
9. Turbulent times
10. Cultural complexity
11. The guru and the conjurer
12. Between art and science
Fredrik Barth's published work
Notes
Bibliography
Index