University of Minnesota n her autobiography, Blackberry Winter, Margaret Mead (1972) recalled th goal of her well-known project in Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935/1963). She wrote there that she had wanted to show" the dif ferent ways in which cultures patterned the expected behavior of males and f males"(1972: 102). A few pages later, however, she admitted that" the subject on which...[she] had particularly wanted to work" had been rather more defi nite (1972: 205). She was not then just interested in assessing the contribution of culture to defining gender stereotypes, as temperaments are now known, but she really wanted to encounter and study a culture in which the emotions or dinarily associated with men and women contrasted with one another as well as with those in the West.

Sex and Temperament has been read and reread countless times since it wa published in 1935. It has been viewed as a theoretical relic, a passing moment in the history of the American culture concept. Indeed, the imprint of Benedict configurationalism is strong. This was the ideal that culture as a whole might be conceived as personality writ large, personalities to which actors also might find themselves in more or less conformity. The coherence and integration of cultur was seen in terms of prototypical psychological patterns that were acquired o