Nature vs. Nurture: Sex and Temperament

How essential are the characteristics of men and women? How do culture and environment shape the roles that they assume and the ways they relate to each other? Given that we live in a society, how can we even start to answer these questions?

This discussion starts with Margaret Mead's seminal work, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies. This work follows three cultures living in close proximity in Papua New Guinea, the cultural evolution of which nevertheless followed three very different paths. A brief overview of this work can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Mead#Sex_and_Temperament

Importantly, Mead's anthropological field work took place over a number of years among people largely untouched by industrialization, Christianization, and other substantial contact with the Western world. Societies like these give us a relatively unspoiled look at the human condition for the majority of our history, in contrast to the usual approaches we are left with when studying matters of nature vs. nurture. See: Are your findings 'WEIRD'?)