Margaret Mead Research Articles

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

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.

HF01-17 PENILE STRETCHING PRACTICES THROUGH TIME AND CULTURE

You have accessJournal of UrologyCME1 May 2022HF01-17 PENILE STRETCHING PRACTICES THROUGH TIME AND CULTURE John Sigalos, Sriram Eleswarapu, and Jesse Mills John SigalosJohn Sigalos More articles by this author , Sriram EleswarapuSriram Eleswarapu More articles by this author , and Jesse MillsJesse Mills More articles by this author View All Author Informationhttps://doi.org/10.1097/JU.0000000000002541.17AboutPDF ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints ShareFacebookLinked InTwitterEmail Abstract INTRODUCTION AND OBJECTIVE: The medical literature suggests there is benefit to penile stretching and traction therapy in Peyronie’s disease, after prostatectomy to prevent shortening, erectile dysfunction prior to placement of an inflatable prosthesis, and for men concerned about penile length. We seek to present the historical practices regarding penile stretching and traction therapies. METHODS: Literature review via PubMed, Google scholar, and archive.org for books, journal articles, texts, and historical discussion detailing the practice of penile stretching and traction practices throughout history. RESULTS: Margaret Mead in her studies of Polynesian males described a woven device of plant fiber that was used to help men to stretch their penises. Working in a similar fashion to a Chinese finger trap, the penis is inserted into one end of the device while a weighted object is hung from the other end. The Cholomec tribe from Peru and some African tribes have used the direct hanging of weights on to their penises in attempts to increase penile length. This method of traction does not increase girth. Direct use of weights hanging from the penis has been shown to decrease girth and cause tissue damage. Certain Holy Men from the Sadhu tribes in India have practiced penile stretching via hanging stones from their penises using grass or lianas. Egyptian pharaohs as well may have used weights to increase penile length. The most prominently featured technique of penile stretching is the Arabic jelqing method. Jelqing is still practiced by some to this day, and it involves a regimented milking or massaging of the semi-erect penis from base to tip repeatedly. The man then stops jelqing prior to ejaculation so that the process can be restarted. Jelqing has not been rigorously studied in the medical literature, however one British physician reported on use of jelqing for penile length gain in the 1970s. Richards' study reported on 30 men, who followed a regular program of jelqing three months. According to Richards, 87 percent of the participants experienced increases in penile length with an average 1 inch increase in the length of their penises and a 1 inch increase in girth. A similar milking and exercise method has been used by Sudanese practioners to achieve increased penile size. CONCLUSIONS: There is a long-standing use of penile stretching and traction practices across many cultures and historical time points. Only recently has the medical literature begun to elucidate best practices and objective benefits that men have been seeking for many years. Source of Funding: John Sigalos has received funding from H H LEE Research Program via LB Research and Education Foundation in support of this work © 2022 by American Urological Association Education and Research, Inc.FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Volume 207Issue Supplement 5May 2022Page: e217 Advertisement Copyright & Permissions© 2022 by American Urological Association Education and Research, Inc.MetricsAuthor Information John Sigalos More articles by this author Sriram Eleswarapu More articles by this author Jesse Mills More articles by this author Expand All Advertisement PDF DownloadLoading ...

Speaking Back to Sheldon: Barbara Honeyman Heath as the New ‘Doyenne of Somatotyping’

In 1991, a reviewer of Somatotyping-Development and Applications celebrated author Barbara Honeyman-Heath as the ‘doyenne of somatotyping’, crediting her for ‘entering this embattled arena 50 years after the publication that started it all, William Sheldon's Varieties of Human Physique (1940)’. Sheldon, creator of the somatotype, had been disparaged since the late 1940s for drawing undue relationships among social deviance, temperament and physique. Yet, even as constitutional research was marred by its eugenic underpinnings, interest in the potential connections between physique and temperament persisted. During the 1960s, the somatotyping system was reorganized by Honeyman-Heath, Sheldon's former assistant, who claimed to modify connections between temperament and physique. Joining Margaret Mead in New Guinea she gained access to the Manus community, somatotyping its members and using the data to develop her modified somatotype technique. Collaborating with physical educator Lindsay Carter she was primed to advertise their system widely among physical educators, especially those interested in elite sport. Indeed, the ‘Heath-Carter’ method lent itself well to analyses of sporting performance, contributing to the ongoing fascination of scientists and coaches with the perceived advantages of certain kinds of body types and compositions for athletic achievement, as well as perpetuating simple minded questions about racial differences.

Thinking through America’s Religious Crisis with James Baldwin

Thinking through America’s Religious Crisis with James Baldwin Darrius D. Hills In his candid published interview with anthropologist Margaret Mead, James Baldwin expounds upon life in the US, considering the making and meaning of his own development, and the scope of Black identity.1 He speaks not simply to a sustained critique of White supremacy but also to the interplays between race and gender that contour Black people’s displacement from the mainstream. Another significant feature of Baldwin’s perspective, one that has been taken up in subsequent Baldwin scholarship, is the role of religion and, in particular, Black church culture.2 In the back-and-forth between Mead and Baldwin, the former, at points, presses Baldwin to discuss how religion shapes his literary themes and content, his overall understanding of the spiritual, psychological, and social trajectory of African Americans. [End Page 1] No small part of Baldwin’s development was religious. Baldwin’s Christian background (he was, for a time, a Pentecostal child preacher) leads him to consider a crisis in White American Christianity—at odds with the faith and justice commitments they presume to be normative. Consider this admission, which I quote at length: I was raised in the church and I left when I was seventeen…. But I never understood white Christians. I still don’t. I remember the photographs of white women in New Orleans, several years ago, during the school integration crisis, who were standing with their babies in their arms, and in the name of Jesus Christ they were spitting on other women’s children, women who happened to be black, women with their babies in their arms. I have never been able to understand that at all. To put it in exaggerated primitive terms, I don’t understand at all what the white man’s religion means to him. I know what the white man’s religion has done to me. And so, I could— can—accuse the white Christian world of being nothing but a tissue of lies, nothing but an excuse for power, as being as removed as anything can possibly be from any sense of worship and, still more, from any sense of love. I cannot understand that religion.3 Baldwin describes—a crisis grounded in the dysfunction of (White) American Christianity and its failure to embody and inspire authentic and wholesome race relations. Such religiosity is marked by enforced separation, disunion, and, most strikingly, the dearth—really, the non-existence—of love. What I focus on in this short essay is another approach to the problem of religious crisis, accented by Baldwin’s critique of American Christianity, which is central to the US’s racial sins and moral disintegration. This crisis is the crisis of disunity and estrangement— this is both the inability and refusal to embrace the humanity and integrity of those deemed “others.” Following Baldwin, religion that is not grounded in love, connection, and mutual care, is illegible. American Christianity, in this way, was not authentic, “real” religion, but rather an insidious and offensive doppelganger that is “Christian in name only,” subject to moral apathies that topple mutual concerns of well-being and further broaden racial divides. The subject of Baldwin’s personal religious orientation has raised considerable scrutiny, particularly concerning the difficulty of pinpointing what Baldwin professed to believe. What emerges from most accounts is that Baldwin’s relationship to the meaning and scope of religious faith and its capacity for guiding human conduct was tortured at best. Some biographies reveal a younger Baldwin [End Page 2] who is disillusioned with both the arrogance and impotence of local ministers to address material suffering and with the racial provincialism shared by both White and Black Christians who adopted a segregated interpretation of Christian community.4 Baldwin’s attitude toward religion is marked by paradox. He was at once turned off by the church’s impotence to address race relations and the material existence of suffering people yet drawn to the Black Christian culture of his youth—so much so that the style, rhythms, and cadences of the Black church seem to have strong influence over themes in his writings and personal sensibilities. Regardless of these religious...

Review: How Do We Look? Resisting Visual Biopolitics, by Fatimah Tobing Rony

Review: <i>How Do We Look? Resisting Visual Biopolitics</i>, by Fatimah Tobing Rony

The Hidden 1950s: Narrative of Prefigurative Culture

In the history of the USSR, the 1950s are a period rarely comprehended by historians as a whole. Instead, they are interpreted as a time of transition from the high Stalinism culture to the thaw era. Meanwhile, at this time, the economic and military-technical basis of the Soviet legacy was laid, which became the basis of the Russian economy. The sociocultural factor that determined the specifics of the time is what Margaret Mead defined as a prefigurative culture — a state of society in which adults learn from their children, who are endowed with new rights. It found its expression in the fiction and art of the 1950s.

Study of Religion in Anthropology

The present article examines the pervasiveness of non-scientific/anti-scientific hermeneutical perspectives in the study of religion in anthropology, tracing their foundations to the works of Mircea Eliade and Clifford Geertz. Pseudo- and anti-scientific approaches have also been bolstered by a long-standing paranormalism in anthropology championed by Margaret Mead and others. Hermeneutical/interpretive approaches, which emphasize the insider’s perspective and treat religion as an independent variable, have not only hampered scientific studies of religious phenomena, but they have also enabled the development of approaches advocating paranormal beliefs and religious supernaturalism as scholarship. The article concludes by highlighting the problematic nature of these non-scientific and pro-paranormal and religious perspectives as scholarly enterprises.

Margaret Mead by Paul Shankman

Reviewed by: Margaret Mead by Paul Shankman Nancy McDowell Margaret Mead, by Paul Shankman. Anthropology's Ancestors 1. New York: Berghahn, 2021. isbn hardback, 978-1-80073-141-7; paper, 978-1-80073-143-1; e-book, 978-1-80073-142-4; x + 186 pages, photographs, references, index. Hardback, us $145.00; paper, us $24.95; e-book, us $24.95. Margaret Mead, by Paul Shankman, is the first volume in a series from Berghahn Books focusing on anthropology's ancestors (the second is on William Robertson Smith, and the third is on Françoise Héritier). The prospect of examining and evaluating Mead's work and influence is necessarily a daunting one, and Shankman is well aware of the challenges involved. Mead herself was a complex person and lived a very active professional life from the early 1930s, when she did fieldwork in Sāmoa, until her death, over forty-five years later, in 1978. Shankman does an admirable job addressing the complexities of Mead's work and the value it had and continues to have for anthropology. Although he clearly admires Mead and her accomplishments, he fairly evaluates her work and gives adequate voice to her critics. The book is a comprehensive introduction not only to Mead but also to the nature of American anthropological inquiry during the middle of the twentieth century. Shankman divides the book into two sections that mirror Mead's own activities: the first covers the early years when her anthropological activities, both fieldwork and publications, were prominent; the second explores her work after World War II, when her field of interest reached beyond the boundaries of academic anthropology. Although her PhD dissertation was not based on field research, Mead had an almost unquenchable thirst for firsthand fieldwork. Shankman describes the research she conducted in seven different cultural groups (Sāmoan, Omaha, Arapesh, Mundugumor, Tchambuli [Chambri], Balinese, and Iatmul), noting what a remarkable accomplishment that was. He highlights the importance of the new questions, methods, and topics for research that she introduced. It is only in historical context that the value of these contributions can be assessed. One of the strengths of Shankman's analysis is his scrupulousness throughout in carefully placing Mead's work in this context. Too many of Mead's critics err when judging her work because they do not do so. In discussing the publications resulting from Mead's fieldwork, Shankman is careful to distinguish her work written for professional colleagues from that designed for the general public. It is unfair to judge her work on Sāmoa exclusively from The Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) without considering Bishop Museum Bulletin 76, which is essentially a monograph-length description of "The Social Organization of Manua" (1930). As Shankman observes, "The two books stood in stark contrast to one another" (40). Nor should one evaluate her work on Manus from Growing Up in New Guinea (1930) without Kinship in the Admiralty Islands (1934). Mead was cognizant of the importance of the data she collected and was committed to [End Page 517] making it generally available. Ironically, she received considerable criticism from her anthropological colleagues for writing books for the general public and facilitating the public's access to her ideas and data; these works allowed her detractors to "label her a 'popularizer' and to pay less attention to the professional side of her work" (4). World War II had a profound impact on Mead, as it "took precedence over Mead's personal life and professional trajectory" (86). It was during and after the war that she turned her attention to the colonizers as well as the colonized, and she initiated the idea that a culture could be studied "from a distance," a necessity during the war when it was impossible to conduct fieldwork in locations such as Japan. Anthropologists did assist the war effort in a variety of ways. Mead, Gregory Bateson, and Rhoda Métraux, for example, conducted top secret research for the agency that later became the US Central Intelligence Agency (94). Mead's wartime activities were focused primarily on the strategic interests of the United States and its allies; however, her focus changed after the war to...

Sounding, Historically, Anthropology’s Current Crisis

Sounding, Historically, Anthropology’s Current Crisis Richard Handler A. Elisabeth Reichel. Writing Anthropologists, Sounding Primitives: The Poetry and Scholarship of Edward Sapir, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021. 430 pp. A. Elisabeth Reichel’s meticulously researched and relentlessly argued study is one among several publications resulting from a collaborative project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and focused on “cultural, poetic, and medial alterity” in the work of Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead.1 Like the larger project, Reichel’s book analyzes how these anthropologists described and conceptualized cultural alterity in alternative genres (poetry, film, ethnography), in the process often commenting in one medium (written language) on other media (music, film). Reichel asks how generic and medial alterity reflected or even contributed to the anthropologists’ models of cultural alterity. Her answers lead to her most important argument concerning the degree to which Boasian anthropology continued to rely on some central assumptions of the socio-evolutionary theory it challenged. Reichel frames her analysis with essays by George Stocking on “the dark-skinned savage” (1968) and “the dualism of the anthropological tradition” (1989), Michel-Rolph Trouillot on “the savage slot” (1991), as well as Johannes Fabian’s Time and the Other (1983). In Stocking’s account, both romanticism-primitivism and Enlightenment progressivism haunted Boasian anthropology. At times, Boasian anthropologists romanticized [End Page 185] so-called primitive peoples as “genuine cultures” (Sapir 1924) that presented a healthy contrast to what they saw as the ills of modernity. At other times, they celebrated modern rationality and science even as they mourned what they saw as the inevitable disappearance of their discipline’s object. How, Reichel prompts us to ask, could the anthropology of any school or period escape these tensions, dependent as it has been on Trouillot’s savage slot (encompassing the dual image of the savage as noble and ignoble) and Fabian’s allochronism (the placement of the primitive in a time antecedent to the present) to establish the reality of the phenomenal object that warranted its existence? Also central to Reichel’s analysis is work in sound studies and intermedial studies, areas of research more developed in Europe and Canada than in the United States. Reichel notes that mid-20th century forerunners of contemporary sound studies—who sought to reassert orality’s value in the face of the dominance of the visual in modern culture—were nonetheless ensnared by the kind of noble/ignoble dichotomy that has marked anthropology’s conceptualization of the primitive. They entertained, in her terms, both “sonophilic” and “sonophobic” approaches to sound (35). Sonophilic theorists praised the immediacy of sound and the way it immerses hearers in direct experience in contrast to their contention that sight, especially in “literate” cultures, distances people from that experience. Sonophobic theorists reversed the polarity, imagining people in oral cultures imprisoned in (and sometimes terrified by) sensory immediacy in contrast to the detached, rational observers of visual cultures. Subsequent work in sound studies has tried to transcend that dichotomy by paying attention to the cultural construction and evaluation of acoustic phenomena across time and space without treating any particular relationship of sound to other sensory modes as given in nature or predictable in terms of any purported developmental laws.2 The sonic and intermedial sensibilities of Sapir, Mead, and Benedict, however, were underpinned by the philia/phobia dichotomy that marked early sound studies, which, as Reichel finds, is especially evident in their poetry. Writing Anthropologists, Sounding Primitives includes a 62-page appendix listing “the complete poetry” of the three anthropologists along with “publication details and archival locations” of this corpus that consists of more than 400 published and 600 unpublished poems (6). This is itself a substantial scholarly accomplishment, but it is merely the prelude [End Page 186] to Reichel’s main contribution, which she describes as “the first sustained study” of these anthropologists’ poetry (5). By this, she means that she has brought to bear the methods of literary studies, including “close reading” and “new historicism” (24), to analyze the poems both as discrete literary objects and in relation to the historical conditions of their production. Reichel contrasts her approach with that of the...

Antepassados da Antropologia: Uma recensão da nova coleção da Berghahn

Abstract Anthropological history is today a growth area. This essay reviews the new collection Anthropology’s Ancestors that Aleksandar Boskovic is editing at Berghahn. The three short books he has published so far are very engaging intellectual histories of three anthropologists of the past who have recently received increased critical attention and whose legacy certainly deserves it: Robertson Smith, Margaret Mead and Françoise Héritier.

Pragmatist Feminist Utopias: Gilman, Mead, and the Problem of Choice

AbstractThis article focuses on the pragmatist feminist theories of social reformer Charlotte Perkins Gilman and cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead. It begins by delineating Gilman's understanding of how the material-cultural environment affects the lives of women. Believing the American way of life to be too individualistic, Gilman developed a theory of social change aimed at generating more collectivist ways of living and promoting the economic independence of women. To achieve these ends, Gilman advocated for the reconstruction of the Victorian nursery, which she believed would afford women the choice to pursue a professional career outside of the home, and promote the health of the community. Gilman's social theory is contrasted with that of Margaret Mead, who believed that plans for social reform are best left to readers. Rather than advocate for the adoption of an entirely new cultural practice, Mead sought to acquaint her culturally diverse American readership with the Samoan way of life, so that they might collectively decide how to best address the problem of choice facing young women in the 1920s.

Trance and Dance in Bali (1951). On the Musical Selections of Mead and Bateson’s Film

This article discusses the soundtrack used for the ethnographic film Trance and Dance in Bali made by anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson in 1951. The soundtrack consists of a selection of Balinese gamelan and voice pieces, recorded by the labels Odeon and Beka in 1928, and chosen and arranged by Colin McPhee to fit the on-screen action. The film depicts a reenactment of a calonarang ceremony, a ritual which takes place in villages in Bali during the night, consisting in a sacred dance-drama that is highly regionally specific in its execution. However, for the purposes of Mead and Bateson, this calonarang was performed outside its ritual context in order to provide footage for the ethnographers. The aim of this article is to determine the original source of the soundtrack, discuss what is presented visually in the film, assess the adequacy (or inadequacy) of the choices of music in relation to the image, and in the case of inadequacy, to provide suggestions for musical alternatives. The musical and ritual regionalisms inherent to Balinese musical and ritual practice render some of the soundtrack choices inadequate. We argue that the chosen pieces do not all appropriately support the calonarang performance and ceremony depicted, due to inaccurate musical and ritual regionalisms.

Anthropological research on coming of age and “extended youth”: Youth “well-spent” in Serbia

While focusing on the phenomenon of ?extended youth?, this paper presents the results of anthropological research on coming of age: classical and contemporary. The paper questions the parameters of ?normality? when it comes to ?extending? phases, youth in particular. While examining what it means to be young, the paper emphasises anthro?pological contributions to life course research. First of all, the paper focuses on research that highlights concepts seen as universal and biological. Moreover, it approaches classical anthropological research that analyses lifecycle customs and rites of passage. By emphasising classic an?thropological works, such as the contributions of Margaret Mead, the paper shows how ethnographic examples have helped present the diversity of the perception of ?ade?quate?, ?normal?, and ?good? when it comes to life stages or transitions from one life stage to another. In addition to the work of Mead, special attention is paid to the work of Arnold van Gennep, whose research on rites of passage had a great influence on generations of Serbian ethnologists and anthropologists. Van Gennep?s scheme of successive stages made up of the pattern of rites of passage (separation, transition/liminality, and ag?gregation) has been particularly important in the context of the transition into adulthood. Finally, this paper analy?ses how young people in Serbia perceive their youth and life stages in the contemporary context. The presented results are part of a qualitative research study based on in-depth interviews conducted in 2019 and 2020. The re?sults highlight the cultural representations of the ?normal? life course and life stage transitions, then present how some young people manage their transition to adulthood in order to perceive their youth as ?well-spent?. The con?clusion examines how time, life phases, and expectations have been constructed in the local context. Moreover, the paper highlights the layers of the transition to adulthood and autonomy (residential, financial, emotional etc.) that, furthermore, show the complexity of the phenomenon of ?extended youth?. By questioning the mainstream explanations of extended youth as an exclusive consequence of structural factors and political crisis, the paper offers an alternative explanation of extended youth through the analysis of cultural logic.

A Mystery in the Archives: The Historiography of Denial, Henrietta Schmerler's Rape and Murder, and Anthropology's Project of Prevention

ABSTRACT In July 1931, a young student of anthropology at Columbia University named Henrietta Schmerler was raped and murdered while researching the White Mountain Apache in Arizona. Although anthropologists have for decades repeated a received narrative that uses idealized fieldwork tropes to blame Schmerler for her own rape and murder, a careful historiographical analysis reveals most scholarly work on Schmerler's case relies on archival sources that have been deliberately censored or else on unfounded assertions about Apache culture. By investigating Schmerler's death and treating historical archives as crime scenes, this article demonstrates how archival restrictions have prevented an honest, evidence‐based reckoning with the legacies of American anthropology's founding figures, untangles the origins of anthropology's belief that rape in the field can be prevented, and argues that the denial Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Gladys Reichard display upon hearing that an Indigenous person might have raped and murdered Schmerler still haunts anthropology today. [history of anthropology, sexual violence, archival research, denial, Boasian anthropology]

Rudolf Modley and the Americanization of Isotype

Abstract Rudolf Modley was an associate at Otto Neurath’s Social and Economic Museum in interwar Vienna, where the Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics was developed. It became Isotype (International System of Typographic Picture Education) from the mid-1930s. Modley went to the United States as early as 1930 and founded Pictorial Statistics, Inc., in New York in 1934 and Pictograph Corporation in 1940. In the decades after 1945 Modley’s activity profile fanned out, but he continued to be active in the field of information design. In his last twelve years, he codesigned the Glyphs Project with cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead, which aimed to create a limited number of universally understood symbols. Although Modley was strongly influenced by his early professional experiences with Otto Neurath, he evolved in the United States away from the visual education work practiced in Vienna. His work was therefore not a linear continuation of Isotype, but an attempt to adapt the visual language to American conditions.

Natural relativism in lieu of moral absolutism

Natural relativism in lieu of moral absolutism

THE INDONESIAN ALCOVE AT THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY: Art, Culture Areas, and the Mead‐Bateson Bali Project

abstract Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson were iconic figures whose contributions to visual anthropology are well documented, but what is less well known is their role as collectors and curators of Indonesian objects. The American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) houses a large Balinese collection with numerous textiles, paintings, carvings, and puppets. Some of these objects were housed in permanent exhibits, such as the AMNH’s Hall of Pacific People (HOPP), curated by Mead, or displayed temporarily in the Museum of Modern Art’s traveling exhibit, curated by Bateson. Against this backdrop, this article adds to the critical discussion of curating, anthropological history, and categorization schemes in Western museums by exploring how Bali and Java came to be so prominent in the AMNH’s Indonesian alcove. Stimulated by visitor responses to exhibits, museum archives, ethnographic notes, and actual physical displays, it traces how Mead and Bateson’s study (1936–1938) of “culture areas” and traits such as “art” in Bali influenced the representation of Indonesia. The alcove’s emphasis on art and aesthetics as forms of cultural equanimity and consistency can be related to prevailing hierarchies of religion and technological development as well as how ahistoricism became an anthropological device of freezing, categorizing, and representing. [Bali, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, art, ahistoricism]

World

World

On globes, the Earth and the Cybernetics of Grace

The article presents an enquiry into conceptions of ‘global’ that began at the American Society for Cybernetics 2020 Global Conversation conference. Following the traces of Margaret Mead’s statement that emphasized that the first photographic images of the Earth from space presented notions of fragility, the article contextualizes the recent critique of the dominant representation of the Earth as a globe that emerged in conjunction with the discourse on the Anthropocene. It analyses the globe as an image and the sentiments that accompanied it since the first photographs of our planet from space were published in 1968. The article outlines how the cultural meaning of the whole Earth representation changed in parallel with the appropriation of the image by the large technological enterprises that emerged from America’s counterculture. It returns to the possibility of a coexistence of ‘views from within’ and ‘views from without’ following a detour with Gregory Bateson via Bali and proposes a Cybernetics of Grace as a practice of resistance against pure exteriority. The article concludes by linking the Cybernetics of Grace with the second-order conversations of Gordon Pask.

Staying well in uncertain times.

![Figure][1]</img> > It is in the shelter of each other that the people live . This Irish proverb is at the heart of my message today, together with the well-known quote often attributed to Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world.