Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity

I thought this was a great book to read about the fundamentals of how masculinity developed. It covers modern and prehistoric cultures, and greatly influenced my perspective of masculinity. I give it 5 stars due to its content, which overshadows a couple of objections:- I needed to keep a laptop nearby to lookup many esoteric words in the book.- I wish it went further into determining if masculinity exists due to the cultural environment, or vise versa: masculinity created the cultural environment to sustain it. It seems to be a chicken and egg problem.

For a while now, as a young man growing up, I pondered "what does it mean to be a man?". As far as I've read, this is a great book. It explains how cultures across the world who have never heard of one another have very similar rites of passages for young boys to be considered men.If you are a man who wants to understand how we as men naturally expect strength, bravery, and honor from one another, read this book.

I used this book for my Culture Anthropology report and this subject was certainly intense. I felt this book was very comprehensive and graphic in its discription of male cultural concepts.

This book explores the ways in which manhood is defined. It does so by investigating a series of fascinating case studies. To take but two of these, we see that the Truk of Micronesia have a pattern of adolescent drinking and brawling that can be seen as both a holdover of a more bellicose past and a stage through which to pass into marital and parental life; furthermore, we find that Tahitian manhood is subdued, probably reflecting the relative ease and cooperative nature of their subsistence basis (fishing and agriculture) as well as an absence of intergroup aggression. The ways by which males achieve status across cultural contexts vary with respect to the social and ecological conditions faced by a given society. Where warfare prevails, for example, a society's warriors earn high status, and are typically favored by women as mates. Common to many societies, men must "impregnate women, protect dependents from danger, and provision kith and kin (p. 223)." Such provocative conclusions, attention to ethnographic detail and clear writing make this a book difficult to put down. The main drawback rests with some of the interpretation of the cultural and universal patterns of manhood. The Freudian interpretations commonly make little sense and the group selection arguments need re-couching in terms of individual selection; otherwise, most interpretations seem sensible. Overall, this book does a great job of addressing manhood in the making.

got it, in good condition, better then i thought it was going to be.

The author went all out with the thesaurus on this one. Which made the book mudane. This was one of the few books. I threw away after reading due to some unexpected homosexual content. Moreover he also missed out on other ethnic cultures that I felt he should've included. I got nothing out of this book but disgust and frustration! So whomever might read this review, please don't waste your time on this one!

David D. GilmoreManhood in the Making:Cultural Concepts of Masculinity(New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1990) 258 pages Conventional manhood as found in several primitive tribes:warrior, food-gatherer, big-talker, etc.Each culture has definite ideas and means for creating 'masculinity'.If you would like to know about better books on 'masculinity',search the Internet for the following bibliography:"Best Books on Gender-Personality".James Leonard Park, creator of the Gender-Pattern Chart.

I found this hard to read at times due to the very intellectual wording. However, having powered through it all and learning a few new words, it was an excellent book.

Terminamos este libro, recomendado por Art of ManlinessEs un trabajo de erudición acerca de la masculinidad en todo el mundo, encontrando que la masculinidad no es un fenómeno determinado por la cultura o las normas sociales, sino algo compartido por todas las culturas en todo el mundo, presentes y pasadas.Es un libro académico, pero de fácil lectura. Aunque en las últimas páginas me aburrió un poco y me fui más rápido 😂Buen libro.

This famous book is a breakdown of what society perceives to be as 'man', unlike many, i viewed this book to help me expand my knowledge on this subject for media studies allowing me relate some of gilmore's theories to different media text's. In this respect then the book was helpful, but not all of it relevant, hence the rating it has received.

arrived on time and in good condition. would purchase again from seller. good for those interested in the major causes of the social problems of certain so-called ethnic groups and for those seriously interested in solving problems

Excellent book to learn how men live everywhere in the world. I learn a lot about my self by seeing other man from completely different background facing the same challenges. Very well written, but it's a sociology book. You buy this book to get informed not for fun. Perfect book for everyone who wants to learn about masculinity.