Behavior: Margaret Mead: 1901-1978

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She was fond grandmother to the global village

A reporter turning up at one of her lectures at Manhattan's American Museum of Natural History noted that the speaker somehow managed to discuss museums, stones, stuffed birds, cave paintings, Cro-Magnon man, children, parents, grandparents, dinosaurs, whales, the possibility of life in outer space, education, the youth revolution of the 1960s, the oneness of the human species, pollution, evolution, growing up in New Guinea, relations between the sexes, communes and the fragmentation of communities.

The list was typical. Margaret Mead was a small woman, but she got around. She spoke volubly and carried a forked stick. Her studies—and the two dozen books that resulted from them—revolutionized her chosen field of anthropology. Long before her colleagues recognized the validity of her approach, she studied the biological, psychological and sociological forces that shaped personality in primitive cultures, then used her findings to explain how individuals learn adult roles in modern societies. Her application of this approach to other areas and her willingness to speak out on almost any subject made her ideas—and her dumpy but 'somehow imposing figure topped by its . Buster Brown hairdo—famous around the world. By the time she died of cancer last week at the age of 76, Margaret Mead had become the grandmother of the global village, an all-wise matriarch whose often provocatively put, common-sense opinions were sought by millions. Her colleagues feel that no single individual will be able to fill her shoes. Says Paul Bohannan, president of the American Anthropological Association: "Margaret Mead was, in fact, a centipede; she had that many shoes."

Both observation and involvement came naturally to Margaret Mead, who was born in 1901 in Philadelphia to parents who quite literally raised her to be a social scientist. She was only eight when she was assigned to observe and record her younger sisters' speech patterns. Mead's university training—she studied at New York's Barnard College and Columbia University under such anthropology giants as Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict—only refined her talents.

But it was Margaret Mead's prodigious energy that launched her on a career that spanned more than half a century. In 1925 she sailed for Samoa with Boas' blessing and $1,000 from her father, and spent nine months observing the adolescent girls of three small coastal villages in the Manua Islands. The result of her study was published three years later as Coming of Age in Samoa.

The book, which described the easygoing, neurosis-free island way of life and suggested that the Western attitude toward sex could be relaxed without endorsing promiscuity, was an instant success. Many of the young researcher's colleagues condemned her way of reaching conclusions from observed evidence, which Mead called "disciplined subjectivity," and the quasi-novelistic style in which the book was written. But students snapped it up, partly because its ideas interested them, often because, as the author briskly explained, "I wrote it in English."