a society or culture in which people typically learn from those younger than themselves. Because of the extremely rapid rate of social and technological change in the modern world, it has been proposed that contemporary Western society may be moving toward a prefigurative culture in which the young possess a keener intuition of the present than do their elders. Compare cofigurative culture; postfigurative culture. [coined by U.S. anthropologist Margaret Mead (1901–1978)]