Margaret Mead (December 16, 1901–November 15, 1978) intended to make a life out of painting. Instead, she became the world’s best-known cultural anthropologist, becoming the discipline’s most revered patron saint. A 1959 audio interview captured Mead’s deceptively ordinary extraordinariness: Doctor Mead is of small build, she has blue eyes, she’s plain folks – there are no wares about her. You get the impression that she’d be at home anywhere – in an igloo, a native hut, or a ...
