Margaret Mead and Elise Boulding made great contributions to the social sciences world of the United States. Margaret Mead was an American cultural anthropologist, and during the 1960s and 1970s she was featured in the mass media frequently. Elise Boulding was a sociologist and author of great works regarding peace research. Both Boulding and Mead wanted to change society in their own ways, and they both ventured in male dominated careers in order to follow their goals. This essay will detail the major theoretical positions of both Margaret Mead and Elise Boulding, how it changed the way social scientists view culture, and the major factors that led the sociologists to conduct the research the way they did. .
Theoretical Position.
Margaret Mead studied human beings and their origins and relationships. She developed the field of personality and culture research, and she was one of the leading influences that introduced the concept of culture in medicine, education, and public policy. She completed fieldwork in Samoa after completing her studies. She studied the lives of the adolescent girls and she even learned their native language. After her fieldwork, she worked in the American Museum of Natural History as an assistant curator of ethnology (Billings, 2010). Ethnology is the science of classifying mankind into races. Her goal was to make Americans understand cultural anthropology in the same manner that they understood archaeology. Elise Boulding has been labeled as the matriarch of the twentieth century peace research movement (Morrison, 2005). Boulding participated in and played pivotal roles in the studies regarding the movements of peace, women's studies and futures. She was a peace educator and activist before starting her scholarly career. She conducted theoretical work on the role of families and social change. She also studied the role that women played in peacemaking. "Elise Boulding's ideas on transnational networks and their relationship to global understanding are considered seminal contributions to twentieth century peace education thought" (Morrison, 2005).
