Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation

by Margaret Mead

Overview

Rarely do science and literature come together in the same book.  When they do — as in Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, for example — they become classics, quoted and studied by scholars and the general public alike.

Margaret Mead accomplished this remarkable feat not once but several times, beginning with Coming of Age in Samoa.   It details her historic journey to American Samoa, taken where she was just twenty-three, where she did her first fieldwork.  Here, for the first time, she presented to the public the idea that the individual experience of developmental stages could be shaped by cultural demands and expectations.  Adolescence, she wrote, might be more or less stormy, and sexual development more or less problematic in different cultures.  The "civilized" world, she taught us had much to learn from the "primitive."  Now this groundbreaking, beautifully written work as been reissued for the centennial of her birth, featuring introductions by Mary Pipher and by Mead's daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781774645901
Publisher:	Rare Treasure Editions
Publication date:	01/23/2024
Sold by:	De Marque
Format:	eBook
File size:	237 KB

About the Author

Margaret Mead (1901-1978) began her remarkable career when she visited Samoa at the age of twenty-three, which led to her first book, Coming of Age in Samoa. She went on to become one of the most influential women of our time, publishing some forty works and serving as Curator of Ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History as well as president of major scientific associations. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom following her death in 1978.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

Introduction

During the last hundred years parents and teachers have ceased to take childhood and adolescence for granted. They have attempted to fit education to the needs of the child, rather than to press the child into an inflexible educational mould. To this new task they have been spurred by two forces, the growth of the science of psychology, and the difficulties and maladjustments of youth. Psychology suggested that much might be gained by a knowledge of the way in which children developed, of the stages through which they passed, of what the adult world might reasonably expect of the baby of two months or the child of two years. And the fulminations of the pulpit, the loudly voiced laments of the conservative social philosopher, the records of juvenile courts and social agencies all suggested that something must be done with the period which science had named adolescence. The spectacle of a younger generation diverging ever more widely from the standards and ideals of the past, cut adrift without the anchorage of respected home standards or group religious values, terrified the cautious reactionary, tempted the radical propagandist to missionary crusades which might be urged upon the teacher. The theorist continued to observe the behaviour of American adolescents and each year lent new justification to his hypothesis, as the difficulties of youth were illustrated and documented in the records of schools and juvenile courts.

But meanwhile another way of studying human development had been gaining ground, the approach of the anthropologist, the student of man in all of his most diverse social settings. Theanthropologist, as he pondered his growing body of material upon the customs of primitive people, grew to realise the tremendous rôle played in an individual's life by the social environment in which each is born and reared. One by one, aspects of behaviour which we had been accustomed to consider invariable complements of our humanity were found to be merely a result of civilisation, present in the inhabitants of one country, absent in another country, and this without a change of race. He learned that neither race nor common humanity can be held responsible for many of the forms which even such basic human emotions as love and fear and anger take under different social conditions.

So the anthropologist, arguing from his observations of the behaviour of adult human beings in other civilisations, reaches many of the same conclusions which the behaviourist reaches in his work upon human babies who have as yet no civilisation to shape their malleable humanity.

With such an attitude towards human nature the anthropologist listened to the current comment upon adolescence. He heard attitudes which seemed to him dependent upon social environment--such as rebellion against authority, philosophical perplexities, the flowering of idealism, conflict and struggle--ascribed to a period of physical development. And on the basis of his knowledge of the determinism of culture, of the plasticity of human beings, he doubted. Were these difficulties due to being adolescent or to being adolescent in America?

For the biologist who doubts an old hypothesis or wishes to test out a new one, there is the biological laboratory. There, under conditions over which he can exercise the most rigid control, he can vary the light, the air, the food, which his plants or his animals receive, from the moment of birth throughout their lifetime. Keeping all the conditions but one constant, he can make accurate measurement of the effect of the one. This is the ideal method of science, the method of the controlled experiment, through which all hypotheses may be submitted to a strict objective test.

Even the student of infant psychology can only partially reproduce these ideal laboratory conditions. He cannot control the pre-natal environment of the child whom he will later subject to objective measurement. He can, however, control the early environment of the child, the first few days of its existence, and decide what sounds and sights and smells and tastes are to which might be urged upon the teacher. The theorist continued to observe the behaviour of American adolescents and each year lent new justification to his hypothesis, as the difficulties of youth were illustrated and documented in the records of schools and juvenile courts.

But meanwhile another way of studying human development had been gaining ground, the approach of the anthropologist, the student of man in all of his most diverse social settings. The anthropologist, as he pondered his growing body of material upon the customs of primitive people, grew to realise the tremendous rôle played in an individual's life by the social environment in which each is born and reared. One by one, aspects of behaviour which we had been accustomed to consider invariable complements of our humanity were found to be merely a result of civilisation, present in the inhabitants of one country, absent in another country, and this without a change of race. He learned that neither race nor common humanity can be held responsible for many of the forms which even such basic human emotions as love and fear and anger take under different social conditions.

So the anthropologist, arguing from his observations of the behaviour of adult human beings in other civilisations, reaches many of the same conclusions which the behaviourist reaches in his work upon human babies who have as yet no civilisation to shape their malleable humanity.

With such an attitude towards human nature the anthropologist listened to the current comment upon adolescence. He heard attitudes which seemed to him dependent upon social environment--such as rebellion against authority, philosophical perplexities, the flowering of idealism, conflict and struggle--ascribed to a period of physical development. And on the basis of his knowledge of the determinism of culture, of the plasticity of human beings, he doubted. Were these difficulties due to being adolescent or to being adolescent in America?

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgements	ix
	Words for a New Century	xi
	Introduction to the Perennial Classics Edition	xv
	Foreword	xxi
	Preface to the 1973 Edition	xxiii
I	Introduction	3
II	A Day in Samoa	12
III	The Education of the Samoan Child	16
IV	The Samoan Household	29
V	The Girl and Her Age Group	42
VI	The Girl in the Community	52
VII	Formal Sex Relations	61
VIII	The Role of the Dance	77
IX	The Attitude Towards Personality	86
X	The Experience and Individuality of the Average Girl	92
XI	The Girl in Conflict	110
XII	Maturity and Old Age	128
XIII	Our Educational Problems in the Light of Samoan Contrasts	135
XIV	Education for Choice	161
Appendix I	Notes to Chapters	171
Appendix II	Methodology of This Study	179
Appendix III	Samoan Civilisation as It Is To-day	185
Appendix IV	The Mentally Defective and the Mentally Diseased	195
Appendix V	Materials upon Which the Analysis Is Based	199
a.	Sample Record Sheet	201
b.	Table I. Showing Menstrual History, Sex Experience and Residence in Pastor's Household	202
c.	Table II. Family Structure, and Analysis of Table	203
d.	Intelligence Tests Used	206
e.	Check List Used in Investigation of Each Girl's Experience	208
	Index and Glossary	211

Editorial Reviews

Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) launched Mead's career as an anthropologist, which was reaffirmed with the 1930 publication of New Guinea. In both volumes she theorizes that culture is a leading influence on psychosexual development. She also surmises that the so-called civilized world could learn a lot from so-called primitives. Essential volumes for academics. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

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