Cultural Anthroplogists

1.) Margaret Mead (1901-1978)

She was the best known woman in the United States as anthropologist in 20th century.
After completing her dissertation, she went to Ta’u in the Samoan Islands to study youth
primarily adolescent girl and published Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), a book based on them.
It theorizes that culture has a leading influence on psychosexual development. Mead continued
in Sex and Temperament (1935), describing the widely different temperaments exhibited by
men and women in different cultures. Mead proposes that social convention, not biology,
determines how people behave. Her works on Polynesian cultures brought her fame and being
the staple text for instruction in undergraduate anthropology.

A decade later, she led to another work, Male and Female (1949) which she analyzes
that motherhood serves to reinforce male and female roles in all societies, emphasizing the
wisdom and the possibility of resisting traditional thinking in gender stereotypes, especially how
society views women at that time.

She served as a curator at the Museum of Natural History from 1926 until her death and
a professor of anthropology in Columbia, became the chairperson of the Social Sciences division
of Fordham University, became the president of World Federation of Health (1956-57), the
American Anthropological Association (1960) and the American Association for the
Advancement of Science (1975). Later in her career, she concentrated on child rearing practices
and becomes the springboard of other researchers about learning theories, families, races and
gender identities.
2. Felipe Landa Jocano

Felipe Landa Jocano or F. Landa Jocano was known as an anthropologist who specialized
in cultural anthropology and Philippine folklore. Jocano made a huge leap in academe debunking
H. Otley Beyer’s Waves of Migration, introducing his own theory called Core Population Theory.
His major contribution in cultural anthropology and Philippine folklore was the documentation
of the epic poem “Hinilawod” of ancient Panay upon studying the kinship system and social
organization and ethnography of community life in western bisayan region.

He is also a pioneer in the use of Participant Observation as a research methodology

being the foremost anthropologist who had scholarly training. In result, numerous places in a
wide ranging aspects of Filipino lives had been methodized from folklore and pre-colonial up to
rural and urban way of life. His research highlighted the core Filipino value system, work values
of successful Filipinos and coping behavior of the urban community in slum.

Jocano was also an educator and became the Chairman of the UP Department of
Anthropology, director of Philippines Studies Program at UP Asian Center and the Dean of UP
Institute of Philippine Studies and the head of Asian Center Museum Laboratory.