Neither girls' clothes nor girlish attitudes felt "right" to me. I was athletic, hated dating boys, and resented pretending I was less of everything than they were. I was a scholarly minded half-Jew from New York (where I had spent my childhood) and a red diaper baby. Her voice had reached into my teenage hell, to whisper my comforting first mantra, "Everything is relative everything is relative," meaning: There are other worlds, possibilities than suburban California in the 1950s. Before 1961, when I read Coming of Age in an Introduction to Anthropology course at the University of Michigan, Mead had already done a great deal to popularize the concept of cultural relativity. Reading Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa was my introduction, not only to the concept of culture, but to the critique of culture - ours. *Reprinted with the permission of Duke University Press.
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