Of her life's work, cultural anthropologist, museum curator and feminist scholar Margaret Mead once said, "I have spent most of my life studying the lives of other peoples — faraway peoples — so that Americans might better understand themselves." Mead's professor and mentor Franz Boas is credited with the concept of cultural relativism in American anthropology, but it was Mead who truly eradicated the concept of the "savage" through her extensive fieldwork in the Pacific.

Of her life's work, cultural anthropologist, museum curator and feminist scholar Margaret Mead once said, "I have spent most of my life studying the lives of other peoples — faraway peoples — so that Americans might better understand themselves." Mead's professor and mentor Franz Boas is credited with the concept of cultural relativism in American anthropology, but it was Mead who truly eradicated the concept of the "savage" through her extensive fieldwork in the Pacific.