Margaret Mead and paradigm shifts within anthropology during the 1920s

The debate between Derek Freeman and the silenced ghost of Margaret Mead re mains unintelligible to many renders because of the absence of historicist context for the early work of Mend. Despite Freeman's apparent attention to historical documents, he makes virtually no effort to situate Mead within Boasian anthropology or the interwar years more generally. This paper provi des such contexts in terms of the Boasian paradigm of the time and how Mead was understood by her contemporaries. This context dispels the black and w hite indictment of a disciplinary heroine with feet of clay, and provides t he baseline for a more balanced assessment.