For those anxious about the state of the world, Mead’s celebrated work shows how anthropology can help guide alternative futures.

If Samoan adolescents had a (comparatively) easier time adjusting to their maturing sexuality, as Mead claimed, couldn’t people in the U.S. raise their children in a similar way? Mead quickly dismissed that idea, but then offered up another possibility: Familiar U.S. ideals of freedom and liberal tolerance needed to be extended to adolescent women as they explored their own sexuality.

https://www.sapiens.org/culture/margaret-mead-different-futures/