Paper short abstract:

Margaret Mead's vision for a public serving humanistic anthropology developed in a museum context. Mead was always concerned with the biggest questions and became future looking. This paper revisits her late career, public roles and humanist vision that arose when breaking out from anthropology.

Paper long abstract:

Margaret Mead was based in the Division of Anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History from 1926 up until her death in 1978. Throughout an extended and deliberately diverse career, Mead experimented with textual, photographic and curatorial representation, and had become adept at positioning anthropology in public facing, inter-disciplinary and extra-academy contexts. By the time humanistic anthropology was formalized in the mid-1970s, Mead had anticipated and confronted many of the challenges that anthropology would later face, had fashioned an answer to the question of anthropology's relevance and had worked through the implications of human individualism in the context of global culture and ecological endangerment. Mead was always ahead of her time and towards the end of her life became future looking, and had in many ways long since left anthropology behind. Having grown up on the cultural relativism of Boaz and Benedict, Mead considered traditional markers of division entirely redundant and was instead searching for something that all of humanity might share equally - such as the 'future' or the 'atmosphere' - and put forward her own humanist vision at the pioneering climate change conference which she organized in 1975. Whilst Mead provides an enduring example of museum-based humanism, this paper revisits the defining concerns of her late career, alongside the public roles and humanist vision that arose from breaking out from anthropology. Mead's answers to her own questions hold future relevance for re-thinking humanism in the anthropology museum.