A New Control of Destiny
玛格丽特·米德 \/ Margaret Mead
Children used to play a game of pointing at someone suddenly, saying: “What are you?” Some people answered by saying: “I am a human being,” or by nationality, or by religion. When this question was put to me by a new generation of children, I answered: “An anthropologist.” Anthropology is the study of whole ways of life, to which one must be completely committed, all the time. So that when I speak of what I believe, as a person, I cannot separate this from what I believe as an anthropologist.
I believe that to understand human beings it is necessary to think of them as part of the whole living world. Our essential humanity depends not only on the complex biological structure which has been developed through the ages from very simple beginnings, but also upon the great social inventions which have been made by human beings, perpetuated by human beings, and in turn give human beings their stature as builders, thinkers, statesmen, artists, seers and prophets. I believe that each of these great inventions—language, the family, the use of tools, government, science, art and philosophy—has the quality of so combining the potentialities of every human temperament, that each can be learned and perpetuated by any group of human beings, regardless of race, and regardless of the type of civilization within which their progenitors lived, so that a newborn infant from the most primitive tribe in New Guinea is as intrinsically capable of graduation from Harvard, writing a sonnet or inventing a new form of radar as an infant born on Beacon Hill. But I believe also that once a child has been reared in New Guinea or Boston or Leningrad, he embodies the culture within which he is reared, and differs from those who are reared elsewhere, so deeply, that only by understanding these differences can we reach an awareness which will give us a new control over our human destiny.
I believe that human nature is