Margaret Mead - O fémur curado

Anos atrás, uma estudante perguntou à antropóloga Margaret Mead o que ela considerava ser o primeiro sinal de civilização numa cultura. O aluno esperava que Mead falasse sobre anzóis, potes de barro ou pedras de amolar.

Mas não. Mead disse que o primeiro sinal de civilização numa cultura antiga foi um fémur que foi quebrado e depois curado. Mead explicou que no reino animal, se você quebrar a perna, você morre. Você não pode fugir do perigo, ir ao rio para beber ou caçar para comer. Você é carne para feras rondantes. Nenhum animal sobrevive a uma perna quebrada por tempo suficiente para que o osso cicatrize.

Um fémur partido que cicatrizou é evidência de que alguém reservou um tempo para ficar com aquele que caiu, tratou o ferimento, carregou a pessoa para um local seguro e cuidou dela durante a recuperação. Ajudar alguém em dificuldades é onde a civilização começa, disse Mead."

Damos o nosso melhor quando servimos aos outros. Seja civilizado.

Fonte: Forbes

How Margaret Mead's research into utopias helped usher in the psychedelic era

Pioneering anthropologist Margaret Mead came of age in a time of enormous change and uncertainty. In the aftermath of World War I, as technologies like the radio and automobile began to take hold, Mead and her husband Gregory Bateson began to formulate a vision for utopia that relied upon plant-based psychedelics.
"They saw science as something which was responsible for some of the bad things in the world," historian Benjamin Breen says, "but also [as] something which could be a tool for fixing the world or healing a sick society."
Breen is an associate professor of history at the University of California Santa Cruz. He says Mead's research began as an effort to understand the science of expanded consciousness and hypnosis. Her specific interest in psychedelics took hold in 1930 when, while doing fieldwork on the Omaha Reservation in Nebraska, she noticed that people of the reservation were using peyote.
"Rather than seeing peyote use among the Omaha as something which predates the modern era and goes back to this ancient tradition, she came to see it as something which was modern," Breen says. "And it allowed people — and not just the Omaha — but potentially people in the rest of the world, to cope with the rapid technological changes they were going through."

During World War II, Mead and Bateson worked on a team that sought to use hypnosis and mind altering drugs in the fight against fascism. Later experiments went even further afield, with an effort to use LSD to teach dolphins how to talk.
In his new book, Tripping on Utopia, Breen writes about Mead and Bateson's early scientific research into psychedelic substances — and how their research led to secret CIA experiments using psychedelics for interrogation.
Fonte: NRP
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Margaret Mead interview on Cultural Anthropology (1959)

Em definições, dá para traduzir automaticamente para Português.