Aspects of the Present

by Margaret Mead

Presents provocative commentary on our changing world, touching upon the women's movement, marriage, and divorce, contemporary taboos, and children's rights

320 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1980

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.

Excerpted from Wikipedia.

Reviews

[Andrew · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mead provides her stance on issues ranging from UFOs to summer camp to air pollution. Beside her positive views on abortion and welfare she rarely states anything controversial. What I didn't like most of all was a real lack of her work as an anthropologist shining through in these short essays.