Burma, Greece, the Palau Islands, Nigeria, the Spanish Americans of New Mexico…ancient cultures where the oxcart and the hand plow work side by side with the helicopter and the tractor…where modern methods in child care, farming, health, and manufacturing are enriching old ways of life…
This provocative and authoritative study of the impact of modern technical advances on the traditional life in five representative old societies was prepared by an outstanding group of international social scientists under the direction of the renowned anthropologist, Margaret Mead.
About the Author
Margaret Mead was an American cultural anthropologist who was frequently a featured writer and speaker in the mass media throughout the '60s and '70s as a popularizer of the insights of anthropology into modern American and western life but also a respected, if controversial, academic anthropologist.
Her reports as to the purportedly healthy attitude towards sex in South Pacific and Southeast Asian traditional cultures amply informed the '60s "sexual revolution" and it was only at the end of her life and career that her propositions were – albeit controversially – challenged by a maverick fellow anthropologist and literate members of societies she had long before studied and reported on. Mead was a champion of broadened sexual mores within a context of traditional western religious life.
