Three Boasian Women: Margaret Mead,Ruth Benedict,and Ruth Landes

Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Ruth Landes each made significant contributions to American anthropology that have been obscured by enemies and by time. Recent reappraisals of their work suggest that these women and their ideas are of much more than antiquarian interest. They either prefigured or provided sophisticated visions on a variety of issues including processes of embodiment, cultural selection, and improvisation in the face of power. A reexamination of these women's work and times may yet provide anthropology with a cautionary yet useful past as well as revivify the greater Boasian project.     

学科、学会与学术:中国现代学术共同体之建构

中国近代新式学会的基本功能,是增进本学科或相关学科学者之间的学术交流。学会、期刊与年会,构成了"三位一体"的学术体制:有学会必有会刊,有会刊必有年会。学术社团之建立及其活动,学术研讨会之举办,为中国现代学者提供了学术交流的平台,促进了中国现代学术的发展。近代学科是新式学会创立和发展的基础,新式学会是伴随着西方近代诸多新学科在中国的引入而逐渐建立并发展的;同时,新式学会又反过来促进了本学科及相关学科的发展。新式学会不仅成为中国现代学术体制之重要组成部分,而且有力地推进了中国现代学科的确立及学术发展。学术团体数量之增多,是学术发展的重要衡量指标;学术团体活动的频繁,是学术活跃之重要标志。故学科、学会与近代学术发展呈现出互动多赢的格局。     

Margaret Beaufort,Royal Tapestries,and Confinement at the Tudor Court

The English royal household ordinances document the important role tapestries played in Tudor court ceremony. This paper re-examines one specific aspect of the 1493 ordinances: whether or not Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII, dictated the textile practices surrounding royal childbirth. Once widely believed to have done so, scholars have abandoned the idea for lack of evidence. The issue is more complicated than it seems, in part because of longstanding bibliographic error and also because texts associated with two events involving Margaret — the birth of Princess Margaret and the publication of William Caxton’s Blanchardyn and Eglantine — suggest that she was highly attuned to the importance of royal spectacle as mandated by the household ordinances.     

Sex and Sensibility: Margaret Mead's Descriptive and Rhetorical Ethnography

Anthropologists and historians encounter similar problems of analysis when attempting to decipher situations of first contact between Europeans and Oceanians and the resulting long-term historical processes these contacts triggered. Considering intercultural contact situations in Oceania, I stress the need to integrate anthropology and history to analyze such situations effectively.     

Homeschooled and Self-Cultured: The Gendering of Margaret Fuller and Caroline Dall

This article examines the gendering of the human mind by nineteenth-century Unitarians and Transcendentalists or, more specifically, the employment of the doctrine of “self-culture” to encourage girls and young women to cultivate traits that would lead themselves and others to gender their intellect “masculine,” even while many proponents of self-culture maintained a traditional understanding of woman's role: as wife and mother and the keeper of house and home. Beholden to nineteenth-century categories of masculinity and femininity, many Unitarian and Transcendentalist men — and women — were ambivalent about the practical results of self-culture for women. How could the people who promoted self-culture and self-reliance as the primary religious duties of the spiritually engaged person show only lukewarm support and occasionally outright opposition for the women who followed such advice? To answer this question, this article examines the early lives and educational experiences of Margaret Fuller and Caroline Dall, in their own words and through primary and secondary sources that highlight self-culture as a source of both empowerment and enervation. In doing so it tracks how both the process and effects of cultivating the “masculine mind” shaped these women and their respective understandings of what it meant to be whole in their own bodies.