Margaret Mead's Cultural Influences On Culture

1. Cultural influences comes from family, friends, coworkers; just what you would aspect. Also the songs, movies, books, video games and media that you use to spend your time in. the language you speak and the food you eat are also part of your culture. Culture includes our favorite movie, art, hero but it also includes the things that we have very little control over like which family we are born into. Cultural determinism is the certainty that the values in which we grew up in determines who we are at an expressive and controlled way which we are instead of biologically inherited. Margaret mead was an American Anthropologist who was featured writer and speaker in mass media from 1960s and 1970s. She was the first women to go into anthropology.

In later life, she remember what a daunting time this was for a young women at 23. Against the developing trend in anthropological fieldwork methods, Mead chose not to immerse herself entirety in Soma culture. But she did spend most of her day with the adolescent girls that she was to make famous.

Because there was a well-established mission on the island, some of the girls spoke in English and several of them became close friends which helped to build up a detailed portrait of Soma adolescence. Those girls that Mead studied now are the elders of the island. It was their answer to her question about life and love infidelity that had such an impact on the people back home. Mead’s findings were published in her first book, Coming of Age in Samoa, but there are some problems with her accountant of life in Samoa in the 1920s. Critics have claimed that she missed certain important aspects of Samoan life. She spent only six months on the island and most of the time living with an American family rather than amongst the Samoa people. This had made people wander whether she could have really grasped the full complexity of cement culture and whether for that matter she could’ve fully mastered the unusually difficult Samoan time. Asking people about personal and intimate areas of their lives is not easy even in your own language. What can be said is that Mead was suddenly struck by the differences between adolescents in Samoa and

America. Whether she knew enough about Samoa life to be sure that those stressed and strains were really absence is a question that anthropologists are still arguing about today. Margaret mead was an advocate of cultural determinism and free love. She contributed to cross- cultural research in relation to cultural determinism by how she studied human growth in a cross-cultural viewpoint and enclosed topics on gender roles as well as nurturing children in both American and foreign cultures.

2. The global dimension of environmentalism in the film “Weather the Storm”, shows that the world’s ocean supply of fish have been attacked. Big floating factories scan for where there are a lot of fish, and move to a different place once there is little to no fish left in the fish stock. An example of local dimension of environmentalism in the film “Weather the Storm” is, in France, the bigger companies take all the fish from all local regions so there are no fish left for the smaller companies to grab. Its hard work, back breaking, times tedious. It’s more than just a job, it’s a way of life. Fishing took a dramatic turn in the 1980s. Privatization, free trade of fish and new more devastating technology. If people knew what was happening to these oceans, that big companies are raping the smaller companies for the fish, maybe it might be a little better. Because the world is changing, the ocean is an international space.

3. We live in a diverse world full of differences. A world that associates different languages and cultures. It is our language and culture that describes who we are and gives us our sense of self. Language is an arrangement of signs that is seen as having itself a traditional value. People identify themselves and others through their use ad comprehension of languages. People view their language as a representation of their social identity. Instances of cultural language differences are shown in some languages have particular words for perceptions. While other languages use several words to represent a particular concept. Language is vital because it helps in communication. It builds our socioeconomic interest and develops our value. It helps to share thoughts, emotions and opinions. When we talk about language, we often narrow down the universal categories like nouns and vowels, phrases and sentences, and verbs, consonants, we end up with these cross-language notions that individual languages are built on. Almost as if the interesting variety found in the world’s languages is stuck in our way of processing and thinking information which itself is universal among humans. So cultures and language are taunted, but language and cognition run profound. From this viewpoint, language is a certain way of hypothesizing the world, and has close connection to culture. It improves knowledge and communities. It is culture which defines our language. Culture is an outstanding total which includes religious and customs passed down by society and decides the organization of our life. Cultural norms decide the importance and use of language from diverse aspects such as religion, history, environment, customs, and standpoint of viewing things. One way of thinking about culture is to compare it with nature. Culture and language are essential for our life. From this, one can see that learning a new language contains the learning of a new culture. Anthropologist are interested in language because they are interested how different people from all over the world communicate with each other.

4. I was not in class during the prensentation.