This is a small book that is far from being a brilliant volume, but no matter which sentence you read, you can't help but be amazed by the language of Margaret Mead, a well-known contemporary female anthropologist. Overwhelmed by thoughts and even inner emotions.The differences, confrontations, and conflicts between the younger generation and the older generation in terms of behavior, life attitudes, and values ​​are called "generation gaps."In recent decades, discussions of the "generation gap" have consumed a great deal of ink and tongue among political scientists, sociologists, psychologists, and social scientists in general. In 1970, when the American youth movement in the 1960s, marked by the May Student Movement in 1968 and the "Woodstock Incident" in 1969, was just ebbing, Margaret Mead, a woman who was about to enter the age of The young old man wrote her final work in her later years.This booklet of less than 70,000 words is not only the most convincing interpretation of the generation gap so far, but also a magnificent youth manifesto in itself.

Margaret Mead was born in Philadelphia, USA in 1901 in a family of scholars of a generation.His father is a professor of economics, his mother is a Ph.D. in sociology, and a staunch feminist.This family, which had always been rich in "vivacious but worthless men" and "serious but impressive women", automatically endowed Mead with the aggressive spirit necessary to become a great man in the future. During Mead's childhood, the family's frequent relocations developed her ability to adapt quickly.From living in various communities with different political, racial, and religious backgrounds, the young Mead learned many things that ordinary children cannot learn.Before she became an adult, she learned weaving, music, sculpture, painting, and even carpentry, which most people regard as vulgar. When she graduated from Barnard College and got married at the age of 22, no one would have guessed that the exquisitely designed furniture in the room would be the work of a charming bride.

However, the greatest influence on Mead's life in this family is neither the quick, humorous but somewhat indifferent father, nor the smart, beautiful but overly rational mother. The real enlightenment teacher is her early teacher. Higher education maternal grandmother.This old lady who is proficient in educating people monopolizes all the early education of her granddaughter.Although she taught her granddaughter the skills of arithmetic when other girls of the same age were able to recite the multiplication table proficiently, she has always cultivated little's observation through stories, poems, games and even simple housework. ability.Let the 8-year-old Mead try to selectively record the language habits of his two younger sisters. This is probably the earliest special training given to the future anthropologist by his grandmother.

After graduating from high school, Meade first studied at De Pauw University in Indiana and then transferred to Barnard College in New York.There she earned a double degree in English and Philosophy. September 1923, with Luther Gris After a seminary graduate got married, he immediately transferred to Columbia University in New York to study for a master's degree in psychology.At that time, every field of social science was showing attractive lights of hope, so choosing psychology, which belongs to the humanities, gave this always independent girl her first taste of hesitation. 1924 was a turning point in her whole life.By chance, she had the honor to get acquainted with Franz Boas, a great master of modern anthropology, and his female assistant, Ruth Benedict.The profound knowledge and great strength of personality of Boas and Benedict gave Mead the courage and confidence to devote himself to anthropological research.She quickly completed her master's thesis in psychology, and like her senior sister Benedict, who was 14 years her senior, became one of Boas's underlings.

In the 1920s, no female footprint was left in anthropological field research.When Ruth Benedict went deep into the settlements of American Indians to study folklore and religion, Meade, in spite of Boas's advice, insisted on going to the Polynesian Islands in the South Pacific alone, and the research was even more barren. Puberty problems of wild and strange Samoans.During the nine months between 1925 and 1926, she experienced hardships unimaginable to women in civilized society.From learning the language and way of life of the Samoans, to resolutely getting rid of the indigenous suitors who noticed that "the white woman has a pair of beautiful and plump thighs", it shows the wisdom and courage of this 23-year-old woman.

In 1928, Mead's first masterpiece "The Coming of Puberty in the Samoans" was published. The subtitle of the book was "A Psychological Study of the Youth of Primitive Humans for Western Civilization".In this work, she tries to explain "how the rich and colorful cultural environment in which human beings (savage and uneducated primitive humans) live shape personality." (Mead "From the South Sea", 1939 edition, p. 7) In short, she tried to find out the cultural factors that determine personality. Before Mead, American psychologist Stanley Hall took the lead in proposing the famous "adolescence crisis" theory in 1904 in a two-volume book based on his research on youth in Western society.From the perspective of the reenactment theory that "ontogeny summarizes phylogeny", Hall believes that adolescence symbolizes a turbulent transitional stage of human beings.The emergence of adolescence is a kind of "new birth", which means a sudden change and crisis in the personal psychological state.Following Hall's line of thought, Spranger called adolescence "the second birth," and Hollingworth vividly described it as "psychological weaning." Theories all repeat the same theme: that genetically determined physiological factors cause people's psychological responses.Thus, the characteristics of puberty are biologically universal.

If the nine-month life in Samoa made Mead somewhat intimidated, then now she has enough courage to challenge the previous theory.While she doesn't deny that biological factors play a role in puberty, she points out that cultural factors play a more important role in development.For example, those Samoan girls in hula skirts don't have a period of tension, struggle, and fault during adolescence. "In Samoa, adolescent girls do differ from their prepubescent sisters in that certain changes that occur in the older sister do not appear in the younger sister. But otherwise Other than that, there were no other differences between those who were in puberty and those who reached puberty two years later or two years earlier." (Mead's "The Coming of Puberty in Samoans", 1961 edition, p. 196) Samoans have only one simple way of life, so they will not be troubled by future choices; They will have painful questions about life; even sexually they have greater freedom, so they will also not have the turmoil and pressure that ordinary young people in civilized societies have.When they were children, they were encouraged to engage in many "sex" games. When they reached adolescence, they lost the enthusiasm and novelty of civilized people in love with the opposite sex.

The trip to Samoa was a milestone in Mead's entire life.Since then, from Polynesia in the east to New Guinea in the west, the different primitive cultures in the Pacific region have affected her love for the next 50 years.In her early career, her 1929 study of three primitive tribes of New Guinea, and her book Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Tribes (1935) based on it, are recognized as the origin of human Another serious challenge posed by scientists to social psychology. Anthropologists' attention to the relationship between culture and personality development is attributed to Freud's "Totem and Taboo" published in 1913.If it is said that Malinowski, the master of functionalism, began to study the sexual behavior of the aborigines on the Trobriand Islands in 1914, just to provide a detailed explanation for Freud's pansexual theory, then Mead However, the research is precisely marked by the negation of Freud's theory.

In Freud's theory, men are the innate behavior patterns of human beings, while women are just castrated men.The different psychological development processes of men and women depend on the different physiological anatomy of men and women.Therefore, the different personality characteristics of men and women in a civilized society are also biologically universal. When Freud's theory became famous in Europe and America, Margaret Mead was the first to attack in 1935.Mead established a strong The fact that so-called male and female characteristics do not depend on biological sexual differences, on the contrary, it is a reflection of the cultural conditions of a particular society". ("Sex and Temperament of Three Primitive Tribes", 1960 edition, 5 pages)

Whether it was the study of puberty in Samoans or the exploration of the relationship between sex and temperament in three primitive tribes in New Guinea, Mead's early research had only one purpose, that is, to reveal the decisive role of culture in shaping personality and behavior patterns.Mead's research is nothing less than a bold impact on the young social psychology whose birth marks are the two works of the same name by Mai Dugu and Ross.Before that, social psychology was all about "a psychology of Westerners in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries." (Murphy's "Introduction to the History of Modern Psychology", p. 615) In the face of this theory, Mead fully confirmed the decisive role of cultural diversity in shaping personality and psychology, thus showing that the previous social psychology had a great influence on human beings. The descriptions and explanations of behavioral scale do not have an absolutely universal meaning.Just as psychologists in McDork's time forced social psychology to make concessions to biology, Mead began to force social psychology to make concessions to anthropology.Mead's presence is not hard to sense, given the fact that later in the century psychologists carefully attached the qualifying phrase "in our culture" to every reference to human behavior.

The bumpy life led to Meade's three marriages.But her last union with anthropologist Gregory Bateson gave her an angelic daughter, Catherine. More than 30 years later, when she wrote her autobiography entitled "Blackberry Winter", she still wrote affectionately: "Cathy's parenting is not only an adventure in my passion, but also the crystallization of my female wisdom". After the 1940s, Mead's field of vision shifted from primitive culture to contemporary society.As an anthropologist, her excellence lies in that although she can tell the rare and wild anecdotes of primitive culture in vivid, clear, and humorous language, she never intentionally Emphasize this exoticism.Instead, she always focuses on contemporary society and the future development of human beings.From the alliance of the Allied Powers in World War II, the morale increase and decline during the war, to the social changes after the World War, family disintegration, racial conflicts and student movements, sexual liberation and generation gap issues, all aroused her great interest.She applied the anthropological knowledge gained from her early fieldwork to illuminate various issues of contemporary society, in Men and Women: A Study of Gender Roles in a Changing World (1949), The Ancient Rebirth: 1928-1956 The Cultural Change of the Nian Manu" (1956), "The Continuity of Cultural Evolution" (1964), "Race Talk" (this is her conversation with the black writer James Baldwin on racial issues), all of which she wrote The late famous masterpiece.And her last book, written before she set out to write her autobiography Blackberry Winter, is the better of her many later books. The subtitle of the booklet, "A Study of the Generation Gap," unambiguously identifies the topics discussed in this pamphlet.However, for this question that everyone can make a few comments, or make a generous statement, or argue against it with reason, Mead took a unique approach, starting from the investigation of the entire human cultural history, and put forward the various modern and contemporary issues in today's world. The contradictions and conflicts between generations (that is, the "generation gap") can neither be attributed to differences in society and politics, nor to differences in biology, but are primarily due to differences in cultural transmission.If the book "Continuity of Cultural Evolution" written by her 15 years ago mainly emphasized the "continuity" in cultural evolution, then, as the younger sister of the book, Mead first emphasized prehistoric culture , the fundamental difference between the culture of the historical period and the contemporary culture after the Second World War, which emphasizes the discontinuity in the evolution of culture.Starting from the way of cultural transmission, Mead divided the entire human culture into three basic types: prefigurative culture, cofigurative culture and postfigurative culture. "Pre-figurative culture means that the younger generation mainly learns from the elders; co-figurative culture means that the learning of both the younger generation and the elders occurs among peers; and the post-figurative culture means that the elders learn from the younger generation in turn."These three cultural models are the theoretical cornerstones for Mead to create his generation gap thought. The prefigurative culture, the so-called "old age culture", was the basic feature of primitive society thousands of years ago, and in fact it is also the basic feature of all traditional societies.The production tools in the primitive society were very simple, and the labor was mainly carried out by manpower. Coupled with the dangerous natural environment, people lacked the necessary material means for production and social change, so the development of the whole society was very slow.People have never expected, and it is impossible to imagine that their lives can be different from those of their parents and grandparents. In their eyes, the meaning of life is fixed, and the past of their predecessors is their future. Everything they experienced after their childhood drifted away will also be everything they will experience when they become adults." Proceeding from here, Mead explained the basic characteristics of prefigurative culture, that is, although slight changes of one kind or another may occur, people's life path cannot be changed.The transmission of this immutable culture depends on the succession of generations related to biology.In ancient prehistoric times, people’s lifespan was very short (the average lifespan of the ancient Romans was only 27 years ago more than 2,000 years ago). At that time, people of the generation of great-grandparents were very rare, in fact, people of the generation of grandparents were also very rare. Not often.However, since little has changed through the ages, this very small number of elders have the deepest understanding of the culture in which they live, and their experience is a culture in itself.Therefore, they are recognized as role models for the whole society, and of course for the younger generation.Therefore, although the three generations of grandparents and grandchildren living at the same time constitute the basis of prefigurative culture, the oldest ancestors are the most respected, and the recognized way of life is reflected in their voices, smiles and gestures.In this process of cultural transfer characterized by metaphor, what the older generation transfers to the younger generation is not only the basic survival skills, but also their understanding of life, the accepted way of life, and the simple concept of right and wrong.In order to maintain the continuation of the entire culture, each generation of elders regards it as their most sacred duty to pass on their lives to the next generation intact.In this way, the entire socialization of the younger generation is carried out under the strict control of the older generation, and they completely follow the life path of the elders. Of course, they can only be the continuation of the elders in body and spirit, and they can only rely on them. The living land and the offspring of tradition". In such a culture, respect for the elderly has naturally become one of the most basic virtues.Linked with this, it constitutes two basic conditions for the preservation of prefigurative culture: lack of doubt and lack of self-awareness.Three generations of grandparents and grandchildren have taken the culture in which they live for granted.Children grow up to accept without question what their parents and grandparents took for granted.- This way of cultural transmission fundamentally excludes the possibility of change, and of course the possibility of the younger generation rebelling against the life of the older generation, and the possibility of generation gaps. "In the valley of ignorance, the ancient things are always respected. Whoever denies the wisdom of the ancestors will be neglected by the honest and gentlemen" (Van Loon, page 2). The co-figurative culture is fundamentally a transitional culture, which started when the pre-figurative culture collapsed.Mead cites many historical reasons for the collapse of prefigurative culture and the birth of cofigurative culture, such as the failure of war, the immigration movement, and the development of science.All these causes have in common the fact that the disruption of the previous culture deprives the younger generation of ready-made models of behaviour.Since the predecessors can no longer provide them with a brand-new life mode that meets the requirements of the times, they can only create it based on their own personal experience, and they can only use their companions who have taken the lead in the new environment as a model for them to follow, which produces cultural transmission. parallel metaphor. In the process of formation of co-figurative culture, the initial intergenerational conflict was brewed.For the younger generation, in the new environment, what they experience is not exactly the same, or even completely different from their parents, grandparents and other elders: while for the older generation, the way they raise their offspring has changed. Unable to adapt to the growth needs of children in the new world.Using the situation in immigrant families, Mead fully confirms the inevitability of the contradictions and conflicts between the two generations representing the new and old ways of life because the older generation can no longer continue to guide the youth forward.If parents in immigrant families want their children to adapt to the culture of the host country as soon as possible, the most basic way is to accept education in the host country.Because children can quickly master the language of the host country, they can often in turn introduce the local culture to their parents, forcing parents to accept their children's interpretation of what is standard behavior.But, unlike younger generations who accept new behaviors, older generations must first face the loss of previous behaviors.This loss is painful because it means the denial of a previous life, in short, of oneself.This makes the older generation have to have conflicts with the younger generation. Through the description of prefigurative culture and cofigurative culture, Mead grandly turned to the analysis of postfigurative culture.Postfigurative culture is the most important component for Mead to create his generation gap thought, so it is also the most important chapter of the whole book. Postfigurative culture, also known as "youth culture", is a process of cultural transmission opposite to prefigurative culture, that is, the process in which the younger generation transmits knowledge and culture to their living predecessors.If we say that in the prefigurative culture (that is, the traditional society), the objects of socialization are the underage individuals in the society, then, to borrow the terminology of sociology, the postfigurative culture is an out-and-out "reverse socialization". ". "In this culture, it is the younger generations who represent the future, not their parents and grandparents." Mead's postfigurative cultural theory is completely based on the rapid social changes since World War II.If the world has indeed entered a new era after World War II (the so-called "information age" or "nuclear age"), then Mead is one of the few geniuses who first realized that the new era has arrived. In 1945, when "Always Ready", a pamphlet about American character written to mobilize American citizens to join the anti-fascist war, came out, news came that the United States had dropped atomic bombs on Factory Island and Nagasaki. She tore up the manuscript in anger: "Every sentence is outdated, and modern warfare has brought us into a new historical era." Making such a conclusion at the time fully reflected her foresight. After the Second World War, the vigorous development of the technological revolution brought great changes to the whole society.Electronic technology with computer as the core, biotechnology, optical communication technology based on laser and optical fiber, marine engineering, space development, and the utilization of new materials and new energy all make the relationship between people and the relationship between people and nature Relationships have changed dramatically and irreversibly over the decades.The future is no longer a simple continuation of today, but the fruit of today's development. In the face of this new historical era, the experience of the elders inevitably loses the value of legend.Human beings have left the world as they know it behind and began to live in a completely strange new era.This situation is somewhat similar to the experience of those immigrants who pioneered the New World.The difference is that if the pioneers of the New World experienced migration in space, then the generation that grew up before World War II experienced migration in time.If it is said that the immigrants who opened up new continents accounted for only a very small part of the world's total population, then it is a whole generation that has undergone temporal migration due to the great changes of the times today.In view of this, Mead wrote repeatedly in the novel: "Everyone born and raised before World War II is an immigrant in time, just as their ancestors were immigrants in space." A similar experience determines that in the contemporary world, the elders "like the pioneers who opened up the new world) lack all the knowledge necessary to cope with the new living environment."In fact, since the contemporary world is much more different from the pre-World War II world than America was from Europe at the time, the challenges of a new life faced by the elders were greater than those faced by the pioneers of the New World much. However, the challenges of this new life have inspired unprecedented vitality in the younger generation.If it is said that "in the past there were some elders who knew more than young people by virtue of their accumulated experience in a specific cultural system. But this is no longer the case today".Throughout the ages, no generation has been able to experience all kinds of changes like today's younger generation, and no generation has been able to "understand, experience and absorb such rapid social changes taking place before their eyes" like them. "It took Newton a lifetime to invent the laws of physics, and today's college students can learn them in a week." (Fei Xiaotong's "America and Americans", p. 85) 40 years ago, the young Fei Xiaotong read Mead's "American The grand theory issued by "Human Character" (that is, "Always Ready") is a very appropriate footnote here. In the face of the drastic changes in the development of the times, the contradiction between the old generation's fear of abandoning the old and the new generation's fear of losing the new inevitably leads to the confrontation and conflict between the two generations.And because the leap across the ages does not occur in some areas like the immigration movement, an important feature of the current intergenerational conflict is that it is transboundary and global.The reason why Mead painstakingly emphasizes this point has only one purpose, that is, to show that the intergenerational conflicts in contemporary society are completely different from the partial intergenerational conflicts that have just emerged in co-figurative culture.It is based on this that Mead dared to declare to the entire 20th century: "The characteristics of the modern world are to accept the conflict between generations, to accept that due to continuous technologicalization, the life experience of each generation will be different from that of the previous generation. different beliefs". If Mead gave a convincing explanation of the inevitability of the generation gap in the world, then she also gave a more profound answer to how to solve the opposition and conflict between the two generations.In the past, people tended to attribute the cause of the generation gap only to the "rebellion" of the younger generation, but Meade further attributed this rebellion to the old generation's backwardness in the new era.In the past, although some people also emphasized that there should be communication between the two generations, they often regarded the establishment of such communication as a means of restoring the education of the older generation to the new generation; but Mead affirmed: "The real communication should be a kind of dialogue. "It is worth noting that although the two parties involved in the dialogue are equal, their meanings for the future are completely different.The unique way of cultural transmission in the contemporary world (i.e. postfigurative way) determines that in this dialogue, it is the older generation who should humbly accept the lesson.This experience may be painful, but it is an unavoidable reality.If you don't want to fall behind the times, you can only try to learn from young people, because today they represent the future. "Only through the direct participation of the younger generation, using their vast and novel knowledge, can we build a future full of life." This is Mead's pertinent answer to solving the problem of generation gap. The publication of the book is destined to bring fierce opposition and criticism to Mead while winning great praise for her.However, after all, Meade is a pioneer of our era. She can assess the situation, clearly recognize the historical role of the younger generation in the new era, and enthusiastically sing for the younger generation. the future. In 1978, Margaret Mead revisited To See a Sudden Death.Mourners paid tribute with flowers and her autobiography, "Blackberry Winter."In the hearts of those who respect and understand her, her life is like a blackberry in winter, the more icy and snowy it is, the more fruitful it will be. In our society today, there is inevitably the problem of "generation gap". The purpose of translating this book is to provide a reference for researching and solving this problem.However, we should realize that there are obvious differences between the social and cultural background of the issues discussed by the author in the book and our reality today.Therefore, we should rationally and critically absorb and discard the theories expounded in the book with a scientific attitude. There must be some inadequacies in the translation of this book, and readers are welcome to enlighten me. translator September 1986 at Nankai University