Impact of Culture on Personality Formation (nature vs nutrure stuides)
A student of Franz Boas, she is a pioneer of Culture and Personality School along with Ruth Benedict. Mead through her work explains the Impact of culture on the personality formation. She opines that it is the culture that shapes the personality of people . This is because cultures are different and different cultures have different socialization processes impacting personalities of their people.
She did fieldwork in Samoa, Polynesia(1925) , New Guinea (1929-31) , Manus of Admiralty Islands, off coast of New Guinea (1934) and America ( 1944 – 46 ).
Her works include various personalities
- Coming of Age in Samoa – Adolescent personality
- Growing Up in New Guinea – Child personality
- Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies – gender personality.
Coming of Age in Samoa (Adolescent girl personality)
In her well-known book Coming of Age in Samoa, based on nine months intensive fieldwork, compares Samoan with American adolescent girls. She hypothesized that the stresses related to puberty in girls were culturally and not biologically determined, as her study showed such stresses were mainly associated with American adolescents whereas the Samoan adolescents had relatively an easy transition into sexual maturation.
While studying Samoa she found that the whole cultural mood in Samoa was much less emotional than that in America. For example, the facts of birth, death and sex were not hidden from Samoan children. Premarital sex was considered natural and did not demand strong emotional involvements and adolescents were not confronted with the necessity of selecting from a variety of often conflicting standards of ethics and values. Adolescence was, thus, not marked by storm and stress in Samoa, but was simply a part of the gradual development of life. The major point of the study was, in Mead’s own words (1939) “the documentation, over and over, of the fact that human nature is not rigid and unyielding”.
In her study on Samoan, Margaret Mead claims that children are taught early in their life that if they behave well or are quiet and obedient they can have their good way of life. Arrogance, flippancy and courage are not the qualities emphasised either for boy or girl. The children are expected to get up early, be obedient and cheerful, play with children of their own sex, etc. and the adults are expected to be industrious, skillful, loyal to their relatives, wise, peaceful, serene, gentle, generous, altruistic, etc.
During fieldwork she observed that, little girls move about together and have antagonistic and avoidance relationship with boys. On the other hand, when they grow up boys and girls begin to interact during parties and fishing expeditions. As long as a boy and a girl are not committing incest any amorous activities between them, including slipping into the bush together, are considered natural and adults pay little attention to such relationships. As a result, the transition from adolescence to adulthood is smooth and stress-free unlike such transition among the Americans. Hence she concluded that cultural conditioning, not biological changes associated with adolescence, makes it stressful. Criticisms notwithstanding, subsequent studies have lent support to her basic theory that childhood upbringing influences formation of adult personality.
| Samoan Girl | American Girl |
|---|---|
| No tension ridden | Tension ridden |
| period of relative calm, stability and intergenerational cooperation. | Period of relative tension, emotional disturbance, intergenerational conflict, rebellion against authority |
| Social interaction is characterized by a high degree of casualties:; and ease | Social interaction is characterized by a high degree of formality and tension |
| Premarital relations are common and people do not invest high degree of emotion in these relations | Premarital relations are taken seriously |
Criticism
- Derek Freeman strongly criticised whose findings are completely contradictory to those of Meads. In her Samoan study she found the girls carefree about sexual experimentation whereas Freeman found a strict virginity complex among them. During their studies Mead noticed a free male-female relationship, while he found male-female hostility. The differences occur in their studies because their fieldwork was conducted in different Samoan villages at the time-gap of 15 years.
- Prior to Freeman, Marvin Harris has criticised Mead for being too generalised about the emotions of Samoan girls. In her defense she emphasised on the significance of providing clarification rather than demonstration of facts particularly about intangible and psychological aspects of human behaviour.
Growing Up in New Guinea: Child Personality
Following the sensational success of her first book, Coming of Age in Samoa, Margaret Mead continued her brilliant work in Growing Up in New Guinea, detailing her study of the Manus, a New Guinea people still untouched by the outside world when she visited them in 1928. Mead studies parent-child relationships in the Manus tribe of the Admiralty Islands and draws certain parallels between the civilization and education in this tribe and in America. The work is the result of a 6 months’ sojourn in the native villages, where the language was learned and where intimate association with the people was possible. Manus society is puritanical(believe in hardwork), requiring virtue in its women and industry and restraint in its men. Economic success is the mark of greatness. In the family the father is the dominant figure and through this plus the association with his sons he molds their personalities. Boys are trained in fishing, canoeing, and swimming so that they grow up “wholly admirable from a physical standpoint.” Social discipline, however, is very loose.
Nothing is demanded beyond “physical efficiency and respect for property except a proper observance of the canons of shame.” Manu children spent most of time with playmates.
| Manus children | American children |
|---|---|
| children are not closely supervised by their elders | closely supervised by their elders |
| children were left pretty much to their way | children are trained accordance to their norms |
| children live most of time with peers | live with peer , adults , young etc.. |
| most of time playing and few responsibilities | most time playing but many responsibilities |
| imagination is very poor because they dont learn story telling , guessing games, puzzels etc from their elders | good imaginary because they learnt folklore, songs, stories, etc grom elders |
| no fantasy observed lack of imagination | fantasies observed due to high imaginations |
Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies – gender personality.
Mead compared gender personality of Americans with three primitive societies namely The Arapesh, The Mundugamor and The Tchambuli , all three socities live in single geography but may vary in gender personalities. She found after the study personality is not sex linked but culturally derived changes with society.
- The Arapesh
For the Arapesh tribe, the observations that Mead made conclude that the individuals belonging to this tribe were peace-lovers, with no awareness about concepts such as ‘war’ and the usage of ‘warfare.’ This inclination towards peace and absence of warfare directly led to a state where no individuals where required to attain leadership positions. They enjoyed many recreational activities such as gardening, hunting and some maternal-oriented activities such as raising children and taking care of them. This tribe placed a significant emphasis on ‘mildness’ and viewed it as an attractive, desirable quality. The most distinctive feature of this tribe was the involvement and role of both sexes-male and female- in so called ‘maternal roles’ such as the rearing of the child. These children then grew up to be passive, content individuals with high sense of comfort and emotional security. The tribe depicted a sense of equality in the division of labour between men and women. As mentioned above, rearing of child was a task both mother and father, performed dutifully and gave equal importance to. Therefore, Mead concluded that, “ Arapesh are predominantly maternal in their paternal aspects and feminine in their social aspects.”
- The Mundugumor
This tribe had a sharp distinction with the Arapesh because of the qualities they posses and value: suspiciousness, competition, quarrelsomeness, ego, jealousy, and unkindness. Both male and females show aggressiveness towards each other. As a result children also receive same qualities from parents. The root cause lies in their marriage system , where polygyny is seen high status for males . More wifes leads to high status in the society. The captivating feature of this tribe is the system of ‘trade’ (exchange of daughters or sisters for new wife) that carries on within the family social structures. This meant that the men of the family, be it father or son, had the right to trade women in their family in exchange of another ‘wife’. Thus, the father could his trade the daughter or sister and the son could trade the sister in exchange of a wife. As a result of this, there was a sense of competition and hostility that prevailed between the father and the son. Moreover, mothers often viewed their daughters as a “sexual rival” and inhabited feelings of jealousy towards their own daughters.
In this family structure, the daughters were seen as allies to their father and the sons were seen as allies to their mother. This depicted a sort of divide in the family wherein feelings of hostility, suspicion and brutality, shared equally by both men and women, further worsened this divide. The announcement of pregnancy within the family, led to a “spousal conflict” since the birth of child (be it male or female) implied the commencement of a rivalry.
For the children in the Mundugumor tribe, the journey of life begins with negativity due to the hostile environment that they grow in. This negative experience continues for the entire life-span of the child, all the way up to adulthood.
The strong, hostile and brutal personalities of these individuals translated into their occupation as well, which made them a “head hunting tribe.” (Mead, 1935) (Sex and Gender Classic, n.d.)
- The Tchambuli
The Tchambulis or “lake-dwelling people” had characteristics and features that contrasted highly with that of the Arapesh and Mundugumor.
Their tribe depicted a reversal in the roles performed by men and women, that is, the conventional sexual roles of men and women were interchanged in this society. If we were to apply the concept of instrumental and expressive roles put forward by Talcott Parsons, we can conclude that the women in this tribe performed the instrumental as well as the expressive roles. They were seen as the bread-winners and performed activities like trading, weaving and fishing to sustain the livelihoods of themselves and their families. They were also seen as providers of emotionality and nurtures wherein they not only looked after their children but also treated their husbands as little boys and not their counterparts. On the other hand, the men in this tribe took to more recreational or leisure-providing activities such as adorning and dressing up, immersing themselves in different art forms and making arrangements for different ceremonial festivals.
The dwellings that were created by these tribal people were called “houses of women” wherein women cooked, worked and enjoyed each other’s company. Men, on the other hand, resided in the “ceremonial houses.” (Mead, 1935) (Sex and Gender Classic, n.d.)
An observation can be made about how, even though, the authority is in the hands of the women, they still emerge as the primary parents and seek to balance their domestic life and professional life.
Conclusion :
Her study on these three tribes helped us in understanding how the gender roles vary on several factors such as geography, culture and conditioning. She made four conclusions from her study.
- First, there is no basis or foundation for “sex-linked masculine or feminine behaviour.”
- Second, the differences in the sexual roles of the men and women in these three tribes served as a corroboration to prove that the cultural and social conditioning of individuals had a larger impact on their behaviour as compared to their biology.
- Third, different cultures lead to the formation of different personalities (nurture)
- Fourth, the nurture of an individual was more important than the nature.