Margaret Mead: A Twentieth-Century Faith. By Elesha J. Coffman

Abstract

In Margaret Mead: A Twentieth-Century Faith, Elesha J. Coffman has written a critically compassionate “spiritual life” of Margaret Mead that both surprises and intrigues. One of the most—if not the most—famous anthropologists of the twentieth century, Mead was a prolific writer, tireless public speaker, museum curator, television personality, magazine columnist, advisor to presidents, anti-nuclear activist, and, eventually, a professor at Columbia University. She was also an Episcopalian from the age of eleven, when she chose to become baptized in the face of her father’s ridicule. Later in life, she took on national level churchwork on committees on liturgy, sacred spaces, and nuclear energy and frequently served as an (often frustrated) advisor to both the National and the World Council of Churches. Like many mid-century women academics, Mead found her pathway to professional life through cobbling together prestige and money in the cracks of a white, male-dominated, tenured hierarchy. From her attic rooms in the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, she directed a team of collaborators and students who saw anthropology as a practice of holding a mirror to American society by writing about the cultures of others.