"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." Continuities in Cultural Evolution is evidence of this devotion. It began as the Terry Lectures, given at Yale in 1957 and was not published until 1964, after extensive reworking.

The time she spent on revision is evidence of the importance Mead attached to the subject: the need to develop a truly evolutionary vision of human culture and society."--BOOK JACKET.