Dr. Debra Curtis is a cultural anthropologist who teaches at Salve Regina University, specializing in gender, sexuality, girls, globalization, and consumer culture. She was influenced by Margaret Mead, the first female anthropologist to study adolescent girls, and wrote her own book Pleasures and Perils studying young girls' coming of age practices and understanding of femininity on the island of Nevis, similar to Mead's work Coming of Age in Samoa. While some focus on nature influences, she is more interested in how culture shapes human behavior and biology. Mead opened up new subject areas in anthropology and influenced the field greatly, though some like Derek Freeman later criticized her Samoa research, a controversy Curtis feels stems
Dr. Debra Curtis is a cultural anthropologist who teaches at Salve Regina University, specializing in gender, sexuality, girls, globalization, and consumer culture. She was influenced by Margaret Mead, the first female anthropologist to study adolescent girls, and wrote her own book Pleasures and Perils studying young girls' coming of age practices and understanding of femininity on the island of Nevis, similar to Mead's work Coming of Age in Samoa. While some focus on nature influences, she is more interested in how culture shapes human behavior and biology. Mead opened up new subject areas in anthropology and influenced the field greatly, though some like Derek Freeman later criticized her Samoa research, a controversy Curtis feels stems
Dr. Debra Curtis is a cultural anthropologist who teaches at Salve Regina University, specializing in gender, sexuality, girls, globalization, and consumer culture. She was influenced by Margaret Mead, the first female anthropologist to study adolescent girls, and wrote her own book Pleasures and Perils studying young girls' coming of age practices and understanding of femininity on the island of Nevis, similar to Mead's work Coming of Age in Samoa. While some focus on nature influences, she is more interested in how culture shapes human behavior and biology. Mead opened up new subject areas in anthropology and influenced the field greatly, though some like Derek Freeman later criticized her Samoa research, a controversy Curtis feels stems
Dr. Debra Curtis is a cultural anthropologist who teaches at Salve Regina University, specializing in gender, sexuality, girls, globalization, and consumer culture. She was influenced by Margaret Mead, the first female anthropologist to study adolescent girls, and wrote her own book Pleasures and Perils studying young girls' coming of age practices and understanding of femininity on the island of Nevis, similar to Mead's work Coming of Age in Samoa. While some focus on nature influences, she is more interested in how culture shapes human behavior and biology. Mead opened up new subject areas in anthropology and influenced the field greatly, though some like Derek Freeman later criticized her Samoa research, a controversy Curtis feels stems
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Transcript of Telephone Interview with Dr.
Debra Curtis, Professor of
Anthropology at Salve Regina University What do you do in the field of anthropology? I am a cultural anthropologist and I teach at Salve Regina in Newport, Rhode Island. I have been a faculty member there since 1999. What is your specialty in the field of anthropology? I specialize in the subject of gender, sexuality, girls, globalization, and consumer culture. Has Margaret Mead contributed to your work in any way? Yes. Margaret was the first female anthropologist to work among adolescent girls and my first book is sort of like a Margaret Mead study one-hundred years later. Margaret wrote Coming of Age in Samoa in the 20s and she was looking at young girls and their coming of age practices and how they understood what it meant to be female in Samoa. I did a similar study, but it was explicitly about sexuality on a small island in the Caribbean called Nevis. My book is called Pleasures and Perils. As an anthropologist, what are your views on the nature vs. nurture debate? Well, I certainly understand that people are very interested in looking for biological determinacy for social behavior, or biological underpinning for social behavior, whether they are trying to identify genes or genetic markers, or if they are interested in brain studies. I am more interested in the malleability of human behavior and the ways in which human behavior is expressed very differently across cultures and throughout history. I am more interested in the ways in which culture shapes our behaviors, but more than that, I am interested in the ways culture shapes biology. How do you feel Margaret Mead has contributed to modern day anthropology? I wouldnt be sitting here if it werent for Margaret Mead. She impacted the way some anthropologists see themselves as professionals. She opened up subject matters that were disregarded by men such as the focus on children, child rearing, and womens issues. American anthropology would not be what it is today without Margarets influence. What are your thoughts regarding the controversy Margaret Mead received involving her research in Samoa? One of the things about anthropology thats different from other social sciences is that the anthropologist goes into the field and lives among a group of people for a long period of time. Most anthropologists today in 2016 understand that thats not an entirely objective process; its what we call a subjective process. In other words, there is always going to be an interaction
between the observer, Margaret, and that who is observed. For Derek to go to Samoa decades later and say Margarets findings were untrue, I mean, I think that if anyone went to Nevis, the small island in the Caribbean where I lived in 2003, if they went there now, they might find some of my findings objectionable. First of all, you have to examine what Dereks outlook was. Derek believed anthropology was an objective discipline, that the ethnographic, or final product, was a complete picture of the society. Most anthropologists dont see the world like that. We understand that what we write is highly subjective and that it was based on our being there and what we observed. I dont give too much thought to this argument. He had a different intellectual agenda and most anthropologists dont take his comments seriously, at least the ones that I know.
