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

by Margaret Mead

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.

Genres: Anthropology, Nonfiction, Psychology, Sociology, Science, History, Classics

223 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1928

About the author

Margaret Mead was an American cultural anthropologist who was frequently a featured writer and speaker in the mass media throughout the '60s and '70s as a popularizer of the insights of anthropology into modern American and western life but also a respected, if controversial, academic anthropologist.

Her reports as to the purportedly healthy attitude towards sex in South Pacific and Southeast Asian traditional cultures amply informed the '60s "sexual revolution" and it was only at the end of her life and career that her propositions were – albeit controversially – challenged by a maverick fellow anthropologist and literate members of societies she had long before studied and reported on. Mead was a champion of broadened sexual mores within a context of traditional western religious life.

Excerpted from Wikipedia.

Reviews

[Dave Schaafsma · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this in grad school when I was reading some post-colonial critiques of the cultural anthropology of most of the twentieth-century, almost all profoundly colonialist, misogynist, often racist. Mead was 23 at the time she went alone to live and study the development of sexuality in American Samoa as a way of reflecting on how sexual development might be different in different cultures. I don't recall much about it now but I have it here to page through as I read Euphoria, by by Lily King, an historical fiction based on the Mead-Bateson story:

While there, the married Margaret Mead began an affair with the much younger Gregory Bateson, leading to the end of her marriage. All this was going on as she was researching the sexual practices of girls and women in Samoa. Might her own new sexual relationship have affected her research into "native" sexuality? Nah. . . I'm sure she was completely objective. I'm kidding. Mead also had an affair with her teacher and mentor and anthropologist Ruth Benedict. So we might imagine Mead had a particualry open and liberal view of sexual practices in any culture, right? I'm not judging here at all. Just noting. But you can see why Lily King might have wanted to write a novel about Mead (though the ending of King's novel is not much like Mead's story.

I seem to recall that Mead in this iconic text that became internationally famous, more than most of her sexist/misogynist/colonialist (male) fellow anthropologists, was really trying to listen to and observe Samoan women and girls on their own terms as opposed to the cultural deficit approach (how primitive! how savage!) of the times.

[Erik Graff · Rating 4 out of 5]

During childhood summers spent at grandmother's cottage in SW Michigan there was little to do but go on walks with the dog, play solitaire, knit, assemble puzzles or read. I read a lot. Some of the books I obtained myself with money earned from doing chores. But even at a penny per cigarette butt collected from around the house, earning enough for a fifty cent paperback took a while, especially after the grounds had been scoured a couple of times. Consequently, I depended a lot on the books at the house or brought up by guests.

Coming of Age in Samoa had been in the living room bookshelf as long as I could remember. Initially, of course, is seemed too grown-up. However, as I grew older and explored more and more of the adult books in the resident collection, they became less intimidating. Indeed, a perusal of this particular title suggested a lot of material about girls and sex on some tropical island. The first two topics had been interesting me more and more over the last few years. The third, the tropical setting, was just iceing on the cake. I'd seen movies about tropical islands!

The book was not at all as sexy as I'd hoped, but it was informative. As obessively neurotic as I'd become about the subject, it was refreshing to read about a culture that seemed both relatively free of hang-ups and liberal as regards youthful erotic behavior. Alas! My culture wasn't like that, but it did serve a bit to liberate my imagination if not my behavior.

Years later, in seminary in New York, I became close friends with Mead's Episcopal confessor and actually crossed paths with the great woman herself on the Columbia University campus. She looked disconcertingly like my grandmother.

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm finally leaving New Guinea behind in an attempt to read about some other parts of Oceania before the end of the year. After reading Euphoria by Lily King, which is loosely based on Margaret Mead's earliest research, I wanted to go back and read some of her work from that time period. This book is her first, pre-dating the work she would do next in New Guinea.

I'm not sure what to think. There are claims now that she was lied to by the women and that many of the young girls made up stories of sexual activity, but that sounds like church-related coverup to me, not knowing anything about it. Even when she wrote this book, missionaries had taken root there, attempting to change the cultural practices governing various elements of everyday life. She even puts the girls living with the missionaries in a different category of girlhood because of the additional restrictions they had on their life. I wasn't there, it's hard to really know, but I do appreciate her early anthropological work with groups of women. Of course this was by necessity since it is difficult for a female scholar to enter into a traditional society's male groups, but since not many women worked as anthropologists back then, her research is bound to be different.

Between this book and Growing Up in New Guinea, it is clear that Mead is deeply interested in the nature vs. nurture debate. She spends considerable time pontificating on the education system of the United States vs. New Guinea (and here, Samoa) and tries to explain or suggest solutions for what she sees as problems and successes in both places. These were the least interesting parts of each of the books to me, because I just don't think it's as simple as she tries to make it. But this is very much a reflection of the time she did her research in the field of anthropology, in a world where very few cultural groups were isolated and untainted by the inevitable "other."

I did love the chapters on dance and personality, presenting a very unique perspective.

You know, I have a highschool classmate that married a Samoan, and I'm tempted to ask her if they have any opinions on this text!

[Sookie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Coming of age in Samoa is an important book for two reasons: a) In a world dominated by men, Margaret Mead was an anthropologist studying women and b) her study was primarily about women in Samoa - their life cycle, nurturing and impact of foreign culture i.e., missionaries on these women. The book make an interesting study of a culture that's tucked into a corner of the planet and not all that well known. Mead spent several years among Samoans and recounts her observations in this book.
Her original research has come to attention with newer anthropologist debunking many of her research and calling many of her observations as embellishment of facts. Even with all controversies that surrounds this book and Mead herself, it is commendable to note that Mead wrote this in the 20s and she was only twenty seven when she had this book published.
Mead's writing follows easy narrative technique as she explores different aspects of Samoan culture. Her observations aren't restricted to everyday administration or cultural history but she also documents how external factors have started to affect the younger generation. If not for anything, Mead deserves a salute for treating Samoan culture with respect and dignity.

[Kyle · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first time I encountered Margaret Mead was in a biography about Norbert Wiener. I was very impressed that Mead had written a well received book at the age of 27 in 1928 when at that time science was dominated by men. So, when I came across this book, Coming of Age in Samoa, sitting on the shelf in the local bookstore I decided to give it a go.

Coming of Age in Samoa details the lives of adolescent Samoan girls in the early 1920s. Mead spent time observing the girls and provides an interesting look at their lives from birth to old age. Though the descriptions of the Samoan culture circa 1920 is certainly fascinating, the portion of the book that really captured my interest was the last two chapters, where Mead asks the question, “What can we learn about our society from studying the lives of the Samoans”. Mead makes some insights that are just as relevant today as they were in 1928.

Mead set the stage for these latter two chapters in the beginning of the book when she asks the question, “Must adolescence always be a stormy time of rebellion and angst or is that a unique feature of Western culture?”. Throughout the rest of the book the answer become clear. Adolescent girls in Samoa do not have the same turmoil and strife that adolescent girls (and boys) in America have. Mead hypothesizes that this is due to a lack of choice in Samoan culture. In Samoa, everyone believes the same things and the opportunities that a teen girl has for the future are relatively few. In comparison, an American teen is beset with limitless opportunities, and unlimited choices, which her parents, friends, and society constantly pressure her to choose from.

Mead makes a great point at the end of Chapter 13: “In all of these comparisons between Samoan and American culture, many points are useful only in throwing a spotlight upon our own solutions, while in others it is possible to find suggestions for change. Whether or not we envy other peoples one of their solutions, our attitude towards our own solutions must be greatly broadened and deepened by a consideration of the way in which other peoples have met the same problems. Realizing that our own ways are not humanely inevitable nor God-ordained, but are the fruit of a long and turbulent history, we may well examine in turn all of our institution, thrown into strong relief against the history of other civilizations, and weighing them in the balance, be not afraid to find them wanting.”

This is a point I think is vital to how we live and raise our children. The struggles of our youth or our culture in general are due to the details of our culture, not fate or some inevitable part of the human process.

Mead’s words 80 years ago haunt me, because she saw the same problems we face today. “At the present time we live in a period of transition. We have many standards but we still believe that only one standard can be the right one. We present to our children the picture of a battle-field where each group is fully armored in the conviction of the righteousness of its cause. And each of these groups makes forays among the next generation. But it is unthinkable that a final recognition of the great number of ways in which man, during the course of history and at the present time, is solving the problems of life, should not bring with it in turn the downfall of our belief in a single standard."

Unfortunately, it is now eighty years since Mead has written those words and I believe that our society still is filled with these battles between camps of righteousness. Mead stated that:
The children must be taught how to think, not what to think.

And I don’t think we do that.

In Mead’s words, “Education, in the home even more than at school, instead of being a special pleading for on regime, a desperate attempt to form one particular habit of mind which will withstand all outside influences, must be a preparation for those very influences…And even more importantly, this child of the future must have an open mind. The home must cease to plead an ethical cause or a religious belief with smiles or frowns, caresses or threats. The children must be taught how to think, not what to think And because old errors die slowly, they must be taught tolerance, just as today they are taught intolerance. They must be taught that many ways are open to them, no one sanctioned above its alternative, and that upon them alone lies the burden of choice.”

I wish this was how our education system functioned. I long for the day when raising a child to be racist is viewed the same as physically abusing a child. I hope that I can raise my children to be tolerant and to not try and force my beliefs upon them.

Of course, the tricky part is finding where you draw the line. Obviously you need to instill in a child the idea of right and wrong. However, I would argue (and I believe Mead’s writing supports this) that right and wrong are very subjective things and culturally based. So how can I teach a child right and wrong without also inflicting upon them whatever “regime” (as Mead calls it) I subscribe to?

So the questions are:

1.)How can you teach a child to think and to keep an open mind while also teaching them the values that are near and dear to your heart?

2.)Should society as a whole get involved with how you teach your child these things? We as a society already step in where there is evidence of physical or sexual abuse. Should society step in for mental abuse as well? Should we consider it just as neglectful when Dad teaches Little Johnny to hate as when he beats Little Johnny?

[Гери · Rating 5 out of 5]

Страшно много се зарадвах, че тази книга се появи на българския пазар и много благодаря, че има достатъчно смели издатели, за да достигне и до нас. Когато правих проучване за самоанския си роман ми беше много трудно, защото фактите са Самоа са много малко, населението там се е стопило бързо, но техните наследници пазят огъня на своята кръв и ни напомнят за Самоа и за цялата полинезийска култура като цяло. Макар да има страшно малко книги по тази тематика.
http://tebeshirche.blogspot.bg/2017/0...

[Rick · Rating 1 out of 5]

[I have deleted my review because of repeated ad hominem attacks. I thought that readers might reasonably disagree - even strenuously - with the reviews of others but without attacking the reviewer. It had not occurred to me that anyone - anyone - would become so personally incensed by a review as to attack the reviewer, make false accusations against & insinuations of evil motives towards a reviewer.]

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

As as result of Derek Freeman's "debunking" of this book, this is a very complicated book to read. Freeman, who had sociobiological inclinations, was not seeking merely to debunk this book, but the agenda of cultural anthropology to treat human behavior as culturally determined. COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA is one of the key texts in making the claim of culture trumping biology.

What this means to anyone seeking to read this book or Freeman's critique is that both books should be treated as not really being about Samoa, but about the larger issue of the relative weight of culture and biology on human behavior.

As as far as I can ascertain from people I know who have done research in Samoa, the truth is FAR more complicated than what either Freeman or Mead suggest.

[Viktoria]

Мийд използва опростената система в Самоа, запазила традииците на родово-племенните общности, за да покаже на Америка (и не само), че преминаването през пубертета не е нужно да е съпътствано с проблеми, вземане на трудни решения и неврози.

"И понеже старите грешки умират трудно, те трябва да се учат на толерантност точно както днес са учени на нетолерантност. Трябва да се учат, че много пътища са отворени пред тях и всеки е еднакво позволен и че върху тях и само върху тях лежи тежестта на избора. Необременени с предразсъдъци, неизмъчвани от твърде раннно привикване към някой модел, те трябва да дойдат с ясно виждане до решенията, които са пред тях."

[Matthew · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mead's seminal work is used by many sociology classes (including one I took during my undergraduate years) to show that many of the cultural practices we might assume are universal among humankind in fact depend upon our social context. By showing that the natives of Samoa engaged in social and sexual practices we consider to be unusual or harmful, Mead sought to highlight the malleability of humankind, and the power that culture has in shaping us into who we ultimately become.

Unfortunately for Mead, and for the millions of people who read this book and take away that lesson, Mead's work utterly fails. Much of Mead's information about island life came from her interviews with young island girls, who later admitted that they told Mead outrageous lies about sexual exploits as part of a game. Later research confirmed that the Samoan natives did not lead lives so very different from other groups, and the sociologist's love of the 'Tabula Rasa' mind has slowly given ground to the scientific fact that human societies are largely preset due to the social forces in which our species evolved.

[Boyka · Rating 1 out of 5]

Rubbish! As a Samoan, no white person or non-Samoan will speak for my people. Her bs was written based on 2 girls accounts (I’ve only read a little bit of her book). In addition, she did not reside in Samoa long enough to collect enough data to support her bs. Firstly, science back in the age of colonialism was based on white supremacy/ imperialism and science was used to support and promulgate our inferiority, see social Darwinism etc. Secondly, accounts written by missionaries etc provide insight into Samoans and how we guarded of our oral history. These missionaries, some who’d been in Samoa for decades, established relationships with my people, unlike MM.

[Gerald Knight · Rating 5 out of 5]

Margaret Mead

Coming of Age in Samoa

Published in March 1928, Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa set off a wildfire in American sociological circles. It launched its author, then twenty-four, on her fifty-year career as a driven, celebrated communicator of anthropological principles. The book became a best seller, which was unusual for a formal scientific work on the lives of peoples in small communities on faraway South Pacific islands.

What propelled Mead’s publication to such popularity? Certainly not her writing style. At best, it’s quite descriptive, but it can be “thick,” especially when she drifts into the contemporary implications of her studies. There’s no doubt that she expertly chronicled the unique way of life of the Manu’a Islanders of American Samoa. She was good at describing simple observations of daily life, asking questions and writing everything down. Her notes show that 44 percent of the young women she studied had sexual relations within an average of two years of reaching puberty. I believe that this statistic, however humdrum it seems today, proved to be the catalyst that thrust her into the whirlwind of popular culture.

“Add more about what all this means to Americans”

When Mead took Coming of Age in Samoa to William Morrow, who would serve as her lifetime editor, he advised her to add “more about what all this means to Americans."1 This she did. Mary Pipher, an American psychologist and author, wrote, “Mead believed the problems for American teens were too many choices, too much pressure, and too little exposure to real-world phenomena, such as birth and death.”2 From her many exotic experiences, she had learned about the tremendous role played by the social environment in everyone’s life.

Coming of Age has been printed numerous times. The 1961 edition proved wildly popular during the sexual revolution of the 1960s — the era of Bob Dylan’s song “The Times They Are A-Changin.’” Pipher notes that Mead, often referred to as “the original flower child, was interested in peace, justice, sexual freedom, and adventure.…Her definition of an ideal culture was one that found a place for every human gift.”3 The academic world asked her to speak everywhere on these topics. Her book may have been the reason why young people during the San Francisco summer of ’67 grew their hair long, wore flowers and went barefoot to advertise their promiscuity.

Her focus was on young girls

In Samoa, Mead found a harmonious agrarian society with abundant access to marine resources and living a simple life based on a unique culture. Her purpose was to focus on young girls, subjects absent from earlier anthropological studies. She found that mothers charged older sisters aged six through ten with the care of their younger siblings. The older girls, who saddled the younger ones on their hips and carried them about the village, learned other simple skills like tidying the house and bringing water from the sea. They also learned to spread copra to dry and to roll pandanus leaves for plaiting, but “baby tending” was their primary chore. They had little opportunity to learn more interesting forms of work or play.

As soon as these girls were big enough to carry heavier loads, their mothers changed their responsibilities. Still younger sisters took over baby tending, releasing the now adolescent girls to other work. Along with dozens of other tasks, they would learn to weave baskets, pick taro leaves for cooking and dig tuberous taro roots in the swamps. During this stage of their lives, these girls became sexually active. To the monotony of their daily routines, they often added the excitement of nightly trysts among the coconut groves.

A young Samoan man needs a soa

A soa, or third-party friend of an interested young man, usually arranged these engagements. If the relationship was to be clandestine, the soa would approach the girl during her daily activities and schedule the rendezvous. Of course, this might take the efforts of more than one soa. The alternative was for the boy to formally “sit before the girl.” As the village would perceive such a step as tentative to marriage, he would have to overcome quite a bit of embarrassment. Together with his soa, the young man would show up at the girl’s home, usually before the evening meal. They would offer a gift, such as a basket of fish, or perhaps a chicken. If the parents accepted the gift, it was a good sign. It showed that the girl’s family was willing for him to express his intentions to her.

Such a “sitting” seldom came as a surprise. Usually, the soa would do his job and make some arrangements. Both families may already have been aware of a possible union. The matai, as headman of the household, would welcome the boy to the home. After the evening prayer, if all went well, he and the soa would stay for supper. Once the whole village knew the boy as her suitor, the girl might tease him with avoidance. When he came the next evening, she could have gone to another house, for example, and he would have to wait, wondering if she would arrive. Her point was to drag out his embarrassment and test his resolve: he had to endure her “love magic.” When such courtship ripened into an accepted proposal of marriage, custom would finally allow him to sleep in her house. Ceremonial marriage would occur once the boy’s family had collected enough food and property and the girl’s family had provided a suitable dowry of tapa (cloth made from the paper mulberry tree) and mats.

Each Samoan household had a matai

A headman presided over each household and exercised authority over every individual in the household, even his father and mother. A father could punish a young girl, but the matai held ultimate sway over this or any other family disagreement. The prestige of the household depended upon the rank or title (if any) of its matai. The high chief would grant a high-ranking matai a seat before a post at a meeting house of the fono, the assembly of headmen, and would give a matai of lesser rank a “between the posts” seat. This seat would still give a lesser-ranking matai the right to drink kava with his chief. There were also titles for lesser chiefs.

In each Samoan village, one or two high chiefs had the hereditary right to name one girl of their household as the village’s taupo, the ceremonial princess of the house. This taupo would inevitably marry into another village and would make the chief’s kava. She would wait upon and dance before his visitors and would represent her village at formal functions and while traveling. The wives of high chiefs had to treat their village taupo with courtesy and respect, and they would use separate nouns and verbs when speaking to her. They chaperoned their taupo constantly because the village expected her to remain a virgin.

Romantic love seemed absent from Samoan life

Marriage was a simple matter of gift exchange between the families. But because marriage brought a more robust set of chores, the average young woman would be in no hurry for that, often delaying it until her mid-twenties. Samoan society viewed marriage as a social and economic arrangement. Our western idea of romantic love, with its associated concept of fidelity, seemed absent from Samoan life as described by Mead. There was much less fuss over adultery than we find in our country today.

Mead’s personal life seemed to mirror the freedom from Christian mores that she found in Samoa. She had a brief relationship with linguist Edward Sapir before leaving for the island. Before her stay there, she was married to anthropologist Luther Cressman. Then she met Reo Fortune, a New Zealand–born anthropologist, aboard the ship on her return from Samoa and married him in 1928. He went with her to the New Guinea island of Manus, where she did her research for Growing Up in New Guinea.

Her third and final marriage was to the British anthropologist Gregory Bateson in 1936. Their daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson, also became an anthropologist. She wrote the introductory essay to the 2001 Perennial Classics Edition of her mother’s book Coming of Age in Samoa. Though Mead and Bateson were separated, she remained devoted to him throughout her life, despite her relationships with Ruth Benedict and another anthropologist, Rhonda Métraux, before her death in 1978.

Notes:
1. Mary Catherine Bateson, “Words for a New Century,” Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth, by Margaret Mead (New York: HarperCollins, 2001).
2, 3. Mary Pipher, introduction to the Perennial Classics Edition, Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth, by Margaret Mead (New York: HarperCollins, 2001).

[Joseph Pfeffer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Coming of Age in Samoa is arguably the most influential, not to say controversial, book of the twentieth century. It virtually launched the discipline of cultural anthropology, at least in the mind of the general public. In one bold stroke it established Margaret Mead, twenty-seven when it came out, as a major force in American intellectual circles, one who possessed an uncanny ability to deal with recondite academic topics in a way that connected immediately with the lay public.

Most important, it opened up a topic that is as fiercely debated today - perhaps even more - than when it came out during the heart of the Jazz Age or the era of the flapper. Mead found her perfect modern woman not in Scott and Zelda's New York or south of France, but in the most remote of all American territories, a place that seemed obscure even in the faraway isles of Oceania. The young women of the island of Tua, American Somoa, a place that when Mead visited had been little touched by western civilization, would right the wrongs of the mainland by proving, in Mead's hands, that adolescence could be a smooth passage between childhood and adulthood, lacking nearly all the Sturm und Drang of the American version, with little of the conflict, the guilt, the self-doubt, even the "philosophical queries" that beset young Americans and scarred them for life.

Those who approach Coming of Age as though it contains salacious passages that will make reading the rest of it worthwhile will be disappointed. Mead, in her twenties, wrote like a seasoned academic deeply thoughtful, widely experienced social commentator. Much of the book - at least two-thirds of it and especially the first half or more - reads like what it is: an ethnography of a people very different from the ones we are used to, from ourselves. Mead is stunningly detailed on Samoan (American Samoan, that is) social organization and child-rearing practices. Her basic point is that Samoan families are not stultifyingly "nuclear" in the sense that American families had become as early as the 1920's. A complex stew of parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, sometimes people not related by blood or marriage, inhabited Samoan households and gave children a rich variety of relationships from which to choose role models.

The other radical feature of Samoan family life was age progression. People were classified entirely by age. Young pre-pubertal children took care of toddlers and already had assigned duties around the household. There were complex rules of association, with young boys and girls, brothers and sisters, strictly sex-segregated. Children were not classified by how smart they were or what they could do best, but on how old they were. When they got a little older, they ran in their villages in what Mead called gangs. When they reached puberty, however, they began to have a different set of responsibilities - always responsibilities, but never without a certain easy rhythm to life, time for fun and relaxation. In fact, one of the things Mead most admired about the culture - and the book gives every indication that she fell in love with it, as far as possible became part of it, far from the detached ethnographic observer - was that Samoans did not differentiate work and play and social life. It was all one, so that one never had to get off work with a sense of relief, then go out and get drunk or do whatever one did to blow of steam. This progression through life continued through to old age and death, which adults never hid from children. There was nothing about life - death, sex, disease, marital unhappiness - that was considered harmful to young people, so that as they grew older Samoans had an easy acceptance of whatever life sent their way, joyous or painful.

All this might not have been terribly controversial, though it was an original take on what Mead called primitive, what we now call indigenous, culture. Somewhere in the book's second half, however, she turns from anthropological observer to polemicist. Her compelling interest is the lives of girls from early teens to early twenties. She says that the average Samoan girl, as long as she is not burdened with being a Taupo or village princsse, who is weighted town with all sorts of responsibilities that basically destroy her adolescence, had a time of sexual awakening marked by carefree exploration, much as boys were long said to have in western culture. There is a kind of unspoken, unofficial, technically disapproved of but universally observed ritual of girls sneaking off from their families at night to join young men, sometimes boyfriends, sometimes casual one-night stands, in what Mead calls the palm leaves. A good deal of lovemaking goes on at night, and parents and other relatives, who are strict about many things, wink at it, expressing pro-forma disapproval but acting as though it's not happening. Mead thinks that this, along with diffused family relationships and the seamless continuity of work and play, render adolescence a smooth, easy transition that makes the rather stereotyped routines of adult life bearable, even enjoyable. In any case, she recommends that western culture adopt the same attitudes, obviating sexual guilt, imparting youngsters a smooth passage to conflict-free adulthood, and she spends many pages explaining how we might go about making this happen.

That at least is Coming of Age in Samoa on one level. But Margaret Mead was too close an observer and too honest a recorder to believe her own propaganda without hedging it so much it almost disappears. It turns out that what she calls simple, primitive Samoan life is as complex as any other, including our own, and there are so many negative factors that her "sexual utopia" almost disappears. This is especially true since she wrote an addendum to the book in 1973, responding to critics like Derek Freeman, that seemed to question many of her 1923 conclusions.

Though at bottom it didn't. She still extols Samoan life as a milieu where "adolescence represented no period of crisis or stress, but was instead an orderly developing of a set of slowly maturing interests and activities. The girls' minds were perplexed by no conflicts, troubled by no philosophical queries, beset by no remote ambitions. To live as a girl with many lovers as long as possible and then to marry in one's own village, near one's own relatives and to then have many children, those were uniform and satisfying ambitions." And there's a message for today's culture as well: "sex activity is never urged upon the young people, nor marriage forced upon them at a tender age." Each girl discovers sex at her own pace.

As Mead puts the girl's own mantra when someone tells her to grow up and be responsible, "I am young and like to dance." In the Samoa Mead studied, this has a literal meaning. Everyone danced, and no one criticized anyone else for dancing gracefully or clumsily. The dance is what brought the surprisingly diverse "primitive" community together.

Much of the more polemical parts of Coming of Age read as if they could have been written yesterday. In fact, they probably were. From the publisher's blurb, "Mead advances the theory that many so-called masculine and feminine characteristics are not based on fundamental sex differences, but reflect the cultural conditioning of different societies." These are the kinds of statements that makes conservative social commentators boil over with rage, and we have not moved a millimeter beyond them since Mead's opening shots. At the same time, by reading and carefully rereading Coming of Age in Samoa, we may get toward a more comprehensive vision of how we can help our young people, which is to say all of us, develop into mature, relatively untroubled adults.

Mead was the first to draw the lines of what would later be termed the culture wars about sex, gender, freedom vs. restraint, you name it. And she still contains the best paths toward answering these eternal, intractable issues. As we approach the centenary of the book that opened it all up, we can still return to it as containing at least the outlines of answers, of ways forward. No one has ever done it better.

[Carolynne · Rating 2 out of 5]

2/5 stars By the time I finished the Forward, Introduction, and Prologue, I was already tired of this book. So much of the introductory material seemed bigoted and ethnocentric that I was turned off.

Having heard of this book, and conclusions drawn from it, for most of my life, I was surprised and disappointed to learn that Mead spent only nine months doing her research before writing up this book. That seems a bit flimsy for an anthropologic study - Mead did not even see one complete cycle of the year.

[Sharon · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was inspired to read this book after reading Euphoria by Lily King, which was loosely based on the life of cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead. I also want to read Growing Up in New Guinea and Blackberry Winter by Mead which are memoirs of her early years. The best part of being retired is having more time to read and learn about interesting people and other cultures.

[Teuila · Rating 1 out of 5]

NOTE: ALL IN MY OPINION.

If I could give this book a 0 (zero) star review, I would. Not only is this book dated, but as a Samoan teenager, this book looks at all Samoans as if we are monkeys. Aside from that, Mead forced information out of my people and treated us unkindly. In the end, her information was false.

[Jessica Shannon · Rating 1 out of 5]

this book is terrible- anthropology is a horrible discipline to begin with and this is anthropology at its worst. I had to read it for a class called Youth Violence and Justice. the author just gives her opinions on people who she briefly met and then makes broad assumptions about entire cultures

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

I imagine what Knut Rockne was to American football (105W – 12L – 5T as coach), Margaret Mead was to the popular idea of anthropology. She may be the only anthropologist any American can name, if they can name one at all. This book, a great book by the way, started slowly for me; about two-thirds of the way through, I felt she hit stride, raising the lurking fundamental questions for the health of the childhood experience in more modern, Western societies. While she did not use the phrase ‘nuclear family,’ she directed much of her punch to the consequences for this relatively new phenomenon. My take is the open, self-governing Samoan society afforded opportunity for uninterrupted continuous development, most especially regarding sex and work, thereby significantly minimizing the psychological pitfalls associated with small, private family environments, which when accompanied with narrow value systems permit a childhood experience akin to prison. While the Samoans knew only one lifestyle, one possible social existence, Ms. Mead notes the potential benefit we offer in Western societies through an abundance of possible future life choices. She ends: “Samoa knows but one way of life and teaches it to her children. Will we, who have the knowledge of many ways, leave our children free to choose among them?”

Ms. Mead admits she profiled a society in transition. The first Western Europeans visited some 150 years prior to Ms. Mead’s study. She, therefore, cautions that her observations are not of a society that devised a perpetuating, optimal harmony, only to then be recorded for the world’s benefit. Rather, remarks for this time and place represent reflections of a unique, yet temporal, confluence of history. In other words, don’t hop on a plane to Samoa expecting to find this world, it no longer exists.

Since this book was written some 90 years ago, I wonder whether things have just gotten worse for our lot in the West. Sure we have medical advances to point at and uninterrupted electricity, with all that comes with it, and cars and planes and homes and second homes, yet what of our mental health; the who we are and where we are going seems to get ever murkier with time, or maybe it’s just that I watch and read too much of the news. Despite the broad and growing menu of available, though most arbitrary, synthetic and deceptively impermanent, trajectories afforded our youth, most proffered through the lens of an ethnocentric morality, I feel, as have so many respected writers of both fiction and nonfiction before me, that we in the West may actually be the victims of our mythical successes; perhaps the multitude of choices more readily allows for the recognition of the illusionary nature of our journeys; while for most no further questioning begs; some find this mirage to be, well, politely put, downright unsatisfactory, if not ultimately insulting.

[Marilù · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Si può pensare che, data la nostra civiltà così ricca di scelte, sarebbe forse bene ridurre (...) la forte influenza che i genitori esercitano sulla vita dei figli ed eliminare così uno dei più potenti fattori accidentali nelle scelte di ogni vita individuale."

Negli anni '20 Margaret Mead, a soli ventitré anni, scrisse uno dei libri più importanti dell'antropologia culturale, se non il più interessante al pubblico.
Nelle isole Samoa Margaret poté osservare per dimostrare che no, il "disagio adolescenziale" non è affatto biologico, bensì una forma di conseguenza culturale.
L'ultima parte del libro è una vera illuminazione: la civiltà americana occidentale, più complessa ed eterogenea di quella degli indigeni delle Samoa, offre troppe scelte, costrizioni e contraddizioni ai giovani. Concetti e dinamiche come sesso, vita e morte - che in Samoa sono vissuti serenamente anche dai bambini! - da "noi" sono tabù, e ciò genera una qualche forma di devianza, o comunque una mal digestione dei concetti stessi, con tutto ciò che ne consegue per la vita del giovane.

"Noi che conosciamo molti modi di vivere, perché non dovremmo permettere ai nostri bambini di scegliere liberamente?"

Margaret Mead fu sicuramente una madre eccezionale, poiché sostenitrice del fatto che ai pargoli si dovesse insegnare a pensare, non cosa pensare. E fra i concetti di questa semplice frase v'è una differenza abissale.

Una stella in meno solo perché in questa edizione (l'unica in Italia) le virgole sono spesso messe a caso, peccato.

[Brandon Fryman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead was first published in 1928 in which she paints Samoan child rearing practices as compelling as she could. The focus of this ethnography is to expose the average American to the lives of Samoans, specifically young Samoan females and compare them to their American counterparts.
The two main questions Mead (1928) stipulates are 1) “re the disturbances which vex our adolescents due to the nature of adolescents itself or to the civilization” and 2) “[u:] nder different conditions does adolescence present a different picture?” Mead states that she studied fifty “girls” in three villages on the island of Tua, in Samoa (Mead 1928: 6).
The book is made up of fourteen chapters. Each chapter progresses from general to the individualistic parts of everyday life. The introduction discusses what Mead intends to do and statistical information. Then she moves into a general overview of Samoan life, presenting daily activities and the differences between the sexes. Next Mead starts to show how children are socialized and how important “ranks” are in everyday life. In chapter four, these “ranks” play a prominent role and are thoroughly contrasted between villages, within villages, and within the home.
From chapter five to chapter twelve, Mead takes various aspects in women’s lives, such as her age group, community life, sexual relations, dance, personality, experiences and individuality, conflicts and old age and delves into each subject. She introduces individuals and shows how the average female acts compared to a few marginal individuals that do not follow the ideal.
In the last two chapters, Mead compares and contrasts growing up in both America and Samoa. She interjects psycho-social differences within both societies. In these last two chapters, Mead tries to unpack her question “what is in Samoa that is not in America that has Samoan women “good” tempered (Mead 1928:109)?” I feel this is where Mead starts her analysis and defends her findings.
Mead spent nine months in the field (Mead 1928: 6) trying best to “minimize the differences” between her and her subjects by learning the local language, eating their food, playing games, and “sitting” like a women. She states that she took extensive notes, which you get a glimpse of in the appendixes. In the appendixes Mead describes the individuals in greater character, maps out the villages, family life, Christian living, her background in developmental psychology, her field methods and how she came up with her analysis.
The data that Mead shares throughout the book is quantitative, painting a picture of everyday life for women in Samoa. She does however give examples of deviant behavior and introduces these individuals in a somewhat qualitative way. I only say somewhat because we get a sentence or two about eight different individuals.
Mead states (1928) that this work is “the first piece of work by a serious professional anthropologist written for the educated layman in which all the paraphernalia of scholarship designed to convince one’s professional colleagues and confuse the laity was deliberately laid aside.” I felt there were some things missing that I needed in this study such as the physical description of the islands, an estimate of the population, the age and sex distribution, and Mead’s personal academic background – was she qualified in the area of psycho-social development?
If you wanted a more academic feel to the book, then you would have to read the appendices. She wrote in an etic point of view and turned to an emic point of view when she presented information about deviant behavior. Once in awhile she would introduce native words to describe Samoan ranks; since Americans do not have these types of family/village ranks, this was apropos for this study.
Mead’s conclusion simply put is that young Samoan women have less psychological problems because of their upbringing. Samoans are brought up with life, death and sex as a natural daily occurrence so when they experience these phenomenon’s in life, they are not as affected with psychological problems growing up. Children’s education in Samoa is self regulated and not forced upon them by teachers, parents and society (Mead 1928: 129).
One thing that really stood out to me is how Mead used the word “primitive” to describe Samoans (Mead 1928: 109). I argue against this neocolonial thought that many early anthropologist hold. How “primitive” is a society in which all individuals have a place to live, enough food to eat, and no wars?
Overall, this book would be a fascinating read for someone who wanted to learn about Samoan history; how Christianity affects life in Samoa; how has child rearing practices changed since this ethnography was conducted; how early ethnographies were conducted; how to write an ethnography not full of jargon; and how to collect, store, and analyze data.

[Francie Kaye · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa, beyond its controversy (Mead/Freeman), was pivotal to the methodology and framework established as “ethnography” in Anthropology. Though Anthropology threads on both the natural and social sciences, Mead’s focus was more transcendental in terms of the established social norms and status quo. With this, I am suggesting that without Mead’s inference and addition to Boas’s cultural determinism, Anthropology would not have been humanized the same way it had been following the book’s popularity upon its publication. Margaret Mead’s ethnography, either through her fieldwork and testimonials from her 9-month fieldwork in Samoa, was (I found to be) unbiased and nonracist, unlike what others have claimed. There have been disclaimers upon every preface published that the focus of the ethnography was more inclined on the feminine and adolescent girls in Samoa. Though anthropologists detach themselves in the field, focusing on a particular topic is inevitable and cannot be thoroughly extinguished.

More so, Mead even introduced us to a different conception of Female Sexuality. It deconstructs the social and rigid norms of attached concepts towards women, such as sexual activity, virginity, and marriage. As Mead indicated in the distinction of having a distinct and casually open attitude, Samoans were calm and open about the sexual freedom a girl has. Sex is not taboo. According to Mead, homosexual sex was casually accepted and seen as a kind of play.' [S]ex is a natural, pleasurable thing; the freedom with which it may be indulged in is limited by just one consideration, social status.' Of course, this does not discredit certain practices that limit the woman in the Samoan community. However, at the same time, there exists this rush of vitality given to the Samoan woman. It might have been due to the author's focus throughout the ethnography. However, the Samoan woman is rarely subjugated under the roles of men. Though individuality is not emphasized in their attitudes to personalities, the woman's liberation that is based on a single structure of a community feels direct and unrestrained. It might also be because of their musu (a certain attitude named after someone’s unwillingness). In Chapter 9, it was quoted that "No prominence is given to the subtler facts of intelligence and temperament. Preference between the sexes is given not to the arrogant, the flippant, the courageous, but to the quiet, the demure boy or girl 'who speaks softly and treads lightly'". 


Mead then goes on to compare the Samoans in US Contemporary culture at her time. Though the book claims to be a psychological study on a primitive society, I would say that the book was purely an ethnographic account with a focus. Though it may be less academic as Freeman and the others have critiqued it to be, its raw forms of field notes and methodology should be respected as a raw account of everyday life in the fieldwork. I must also credit Mead for her feminist lens when conservatism was still rapid in terms of sexuality and even expressing sexual freedom as correlated in what she has shown in her findings. An anthropologist in the field is exposed to many vulnerabilities and different adjustments. Any discredit to the bias and notions as suggested in writing would be acceptable, but to dismiss the process and hold that the anthropologist would fabricate such minute details would be a disrespect to the ethics of the anthropologist. If I were to spend nine months of my life in Samoa, I certainly would not have fabricated and skewed my data to lie about it. I think that the book held the spirit of ethnography in terms of its ethics. Any comments and controversy regarding its theories and themes on account of Mead’s are expected. The Freeman/Mead controversy today holds as much importance to the continuous focus of anthropology.

Ethnography (as Mead has helped popularize) in its raw form, will always just account and provide data. It will always be (and should be) a raw and unbiased telling of everyday happenings. Should the anthropologist suggest and make inquiries, it would be detailed as a manner of comparison and not that concoction of cultures. It will always be open to the suggestions and debates of psychology and philosophy and the likes. Nevertheless, the methodology and the process of the anthropologist to detach oneself from rigid social norms once in the field, the ability to interpret and reflect from such accounts, form bonds and immerse within cultures, is precisely the very essence of anthropology. This is what makes fieldwork somewhat impenetrable.

[Bob · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have a Signet paperback copy, probably from the 1960s, with this cover and a 1950s new introduction by Mead herself to the 1928 original.

Since Mead's death, a New Zealand anthropologist has made something of a cottage industry of debunking her specific conclusions about attitudes towards sex of adolescent girls in Samoa in the 1920s, but it seems to me the historical significance of the book must lie elsewhere.

I don't know much myself but I'd guess the story-telling style of her approach with all the boring tables, numbers and glossaries tucked away in the appendices might have been something of an innovation. Her statements at the outset about how much easier it is to study "primitive" cultures through a sort of laboratory control group lens might no longer be considered self-evident.

Since the recent controversy, such as it is, and the furor at the time of publication was all about sex, it is notable that after having started with the premise that we are seeing a society untouched by the West, it is gradually revealed that an (admittedly rather easy-going) version of Protestantism had already been the islands' official religion for 100 years, and that those whose ambitions reached beyond village life were able to go serve at the U.S. Naval base.

Heisenberg's "uncertainty principle" had just been articulated around the time of this book and had likely not seen its more metaphorical use spread into the social sciences.

[Steve Van Slyke · Rating 2 out of 5]

Just prior to taking off for Tahiti to help a friend sail his boat from there to Apia, Samoa, I bought this book hoping to learn more about Samoan culture.

Even though it was written a long time ago it could still have been interesting, and parts of it were. But for me it was slow-going and ultimately I gave up about half way through.

Samoan culture today is far from what it was back then, and judging by some of the other reviews here, what Mead was told and reported about the culture back then may not have been accurate. So if you are headed for Samoa and wanting to learn more about the islands and their people, I would look elsewhere.

[Chris Bull · Rating 2 out of 5]

Only 32 reviews in Amazon

I have lived on small islands in the Pacific for over 25 years and much of what Mead says still to some extent rings true 90 years later. Moving from household to household is still a thing; night crawling is a right of passage; there are big chiefs and small chiefs.I must confess that my undergrad was in anthropology, but I had avoided reading Mead.
What irks me is the style she has written in. Perhaps this was ok in 1928, but the run on sentences and loose definition of a paragraph ruined the book for me. I seem to have spent too much time analyzing her writing.
Odd that there are only 32 reviews in Amazon at this time. .

[Linda Robinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

While interesting from a sociological standpoint, I enjoyed "Letters from the Field" more, and reading the second book improved my experience with "Coming of Age in Samoa," as the personal account of Mead's studies put all in a clearer perspective. It was a good experiment to read this book and then read "The Savage Mind" by Claude Levi-Strauss right away.

[Roberto Yoed · Rating 1 out of 5]

Idealistic, contradictory and, with all due respect, useless.

[Madeline Augusta Turner]

here I go w the grad school reading…

[Patrick · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think this is a good book but depressing book on raising children in a heterogeneous culture for someone who wants to raise their children in a traditionalist mindset because she states it is nearly impossible to raise a child to hold values that are dear to you because of competing values inherent in a heterogeneous culture. She does this via contrasting our culture with that of a Samoan traditionalist culture. Her point on women's sexual choice is largely irrelevant in today's culture. I give this book 2.5 stars.

Mead anthropology teaches us the importance of choice in upbringing of people. She sought to show alternatives to the American way of life and to show that culture does not always need to be fixed that it can change by conscious choice. The ideal culture sexual decision should be made by intentional choice not from some external force like pop culture dictating it. Her definition for an ideal culture was where every individual expresses his/her full potential. She states that sexuality is culturally shaped. She used her ethnographic study to answer the question how does culture shape individuals and what is the role of biology in human behavior? She believed in teaching children on how not what to think. When she wrote this book, the thoughts of the time was that culture did not shape the way we turn out so she did introduce the notion of nurture vs nature debate. The reason she chose the Samoan culture to study is due to its simplicity in comparison to Western culture so to show differing attitudes that are culturally determined. Are Western adolescent problems due to civilization or is it inherent to adolescence?

In Samoa, birth order is more important than the age of the person to keep the hierarchy of the village in place. The adults have a laissez-faire attitude toward their kids and discipline is enforced by an older sibling only. The whole system is kept in place by constant birthing in which the older sibling will always have a younger one to be responsible over (this can lead to trouble if the personality of the elder is not conducive to being conscientious. This system probably works in a village where people know each other but not in modern day metropolis. Temper tantrums will usually get children out of whatever they do not want to do b/c older children just want to shut them up. Usually, it is the little girls that are charged with rearing babies while little boys are allowed to play outside with the older boys. The boys learn the importance of team work early on, the girls once they achieve puberty are weaned off child rearing and allowed to do the work of older women so in away they never have to care for children ever again. The chief domestic chore the girl is in charge of is weaving. The boys are socialized by their peers into a strong band of brothers that does work and is both schooled in cooperation and competition by the other males. But even though, the boy must excel in something, he cannot be a genius in his craft to earn him the scorn of his elders so he has to have the social skill to know if he is pissing a person off by his precocious skill. The competitive nature of rearing a boy toward greater social status means he has to thread the line between childhood fun and prestige that comes from having adult responsibility for when he becomes a chief he no longer is allowed to associate with childhood friends. A chief is someone who has above average abilities but not someone who is the best in anything he does. What a woman loses in prestige, she gains in freedom.

Girls are obeyed by their rank in age rather in their marital status. Children have a range of places to choose from to stay with relatives if they do not approve of their household so this enforces checks and balances on the discipline in the household. They have strict enforcement of incest sibling taboo. It is interesting that people are not allowed to state why they have come until the end of the visit when it is okay to ask what they want.

Young children are grouped into age grouping and look in askance on children of a different group even though they maybe related. While girls home life was all work, hanging out with their outside gang was filled with play time. Teenage girls friendship is centered around their lovers friends while women become friends women who are in similar spots as they are. Boys social friendship are stronger than girl which includes a soa, which is a wingman for picking up girls. Because the economy needs male cooperation, male friendships tend to be long-lived while female friendships that are not based on family are dictated by women's husbands friendship. The teenager women's group does no work except play hostess to visiting delegation from other villages. The women completely depend on their men for their status. The village princess is also its chief hostess when visitors visit. Since women are not involved in public life, they do not care for it much. While the laws of the land are more lenient for women than for men especially in cases of marriage fidelity, there is a strict division of labor between the sexes.

Young girls see young boys as the enemy. Frequently, the young youths loose their virginity to older people of the opposite sex. Besides marriage, pre-marital sex and adultery are condoned as appropriate sexual expressions. In pre-marital courtship, a wingman or wingwoman is necessary to seal the deal. The most violent adolescent fights is if the soa steals the affection of the beloved or if friend of the beloved cockblocks the guy. In the strictly clandestine affair, the soa is the one who gets in touch with the girl and usually short in duration and both boy and girls may carry several at once.

There is an interesting case for rapists who rape b/c the girl are coquettish or they are impatient with the courting process so they rape. Once a rapist is branded no one wants to go near him and the household in which the rape occurs considers it great sport to chase after the rapists. In marriage proposal, the boy needs to bring her something substantial to talk to her. Once the marriage is accepted by the family then the boy is invited to stay over the family's home and sex can occur that way.

The only girl who is required to keep her virginity until marriage is the princess of the village. In marriage, the bridegrooms talking chief take "tokens of her virginity" and if she proves to be not a virgin, the women in her family beat her up. Although the concept of celibacy is foreign to the Samoan, virgins are definitely more prized than a regular girl.

The princess has to be a virgin b/c the whole village reputation is dependent on that fact but the princess does not get to choose her husband only the talking chiefs have the ability to choose the princess' husband. The princess can get out of an arranged marriage by eloping with her beloved. Adultery is common and accepted part of Samoan life since marriage is only a social and economic arrangement adultery is not unheard of though divorce can occur as a result of it which means living in a woman's home.

In dancing, the princess dances the formal dance while the talking chief or his wife provides the role of jester. Dance is encouraged to be individualized so dancers have superiority and inferiority complex. In dancing, the children are the center of attention and it is highly individualized. It can be compared to present day dancing in dance clubs. Shyness disappear in dancing. The only time youths are ridiculed is if they cannot dance or if the male is awkward in sexual relations.

The person who does something that is no accepted norm is branded a weirdo or "musu" and left at that without any curiosity to the motivation why the person does what he does. People do not have private property nor private acts. As if to compensate for the whole life is public knowledge, Samoan's hold their thoughts and feelings to themselves. The Samaon focused on negative personality traits to differentiate b/w people such as ugliness or viciousness while personality is devoid in Samoan. The Samoan prefer a personality of temperance and disdain excesses be it bad or good. The most disliked trait is being "stuck up". Temperament and intelligence are not recognized but rather actions present a fuller picture of a person rather than empathizing what the person is going through.

I think it is interesting how the birth, death, and sexual activities of a person is open knowledge to children due to the lack of privacy in such cramped spaces but public physical affection is discouraged. Mead states that masturbation is nearly universal. Like in all cultures, salacious behavior is more readily a male phenomenon. While voyeurs are discouraged, sex with fellow peers present were accepted as the norm.

Just like in the US, a person's peers have a bigger influence on how a person turns out than ones home life. Despite the shifting households, Mead states that the household with a stronger nuclear family had better well-adjusted children b/c they had definitive well-defined roles to which they were expected to play and thus had a personality.

On average, a girl losses her virginity roughly by the same time as American girl roughly by the age of 15 to an older man who knows what he is doing. Girls homosexual experience are considered a natural part of growing up and a gateway towards heterosexual relationships. In general all homosexual relationships are regarded as stepping stones to heterosexual relationships but even in Samoa there are true gays who hang out with women more than men. The burden of advancing in his amorous target is on the man. Amatory lore is done by men who pass it down from older males to younger males and then to women. A man who cannot please his woman is looked upon and ridiculed. Men analytically study the technics of sex in detail while women are just aware of what is suppose to take place. They treat sex as an art so there are no neuroticism in Samoa.

Because women were considered economic assets, they were generally allowed to do anything they wanted sexually in their own time. Luna had multiple lovers at the same time while Namu had a primary lover and had several boys on the side that were males that she would pass the time with when her primary lover was not available. Although there are cases of abortion, it is exceedingly rare as illegitimate children are welcomed in society. People talk of romantic fidelity in terms of days or weeks @ most but there are cases of intense jealousy for a lover which means despite the promiscuous environment, romantic love was alive and well. Mead states, "the girls' minds were perplexed by no conflicts, troubled by no philosophical queries, beset by no remote ambitions. To live as a girl with many lovers as long as possible and then to marry in one's own village, near one's own relatives and to have many children, these were uniform and satisfying ambitions."

The law of probability states that there are women who will be individualistic in their preference for another culture while others will act out b/c of bad parenting.

The girls have few attachments so they also lack few jealousies. Lita and Sona had ambition and channeled their ambition into education at the missionary school. While the majority of the Samoan girls chose the status quo, the choice of going to school opened up a contrariness way of looking at the world that some girls chose.

While a few girls choose another lifestyle of whites, other girls are true delinquents in their culture such as the strong-willed Lola with strong passions that was mad about her life and having to share it with people around her combined with the fact that she had no strong role model made her an outcast. Her younger sister Siva is following in Lola's outcast ways though may turn out ok due to her comedic ways. Mala was an orphan became a kleptomaniac. She played and preferred boys to girls probably a dyke. While Sala just is interested in sex and nothing else, so she is projected to be good first time sexual companion but horrible wife because she cannot learn household duties.

B/c sex experience is freely taken by both genders, they differentiate based on whether the woman is developed or developing not on marital status like the west. Around age 23 after the woman is done with sexual experimentation society expects her to settle down so for the most part she complies. Do none of the women get pregnant with pre-marital sex? Whereas a move makes little difference to the women b/c they do not form community bonds, it proves profound for a male whose community bonds are stronger than that of a woman. But unfaithfulness to a wife is less tolerated in a woman's home turf than it is if he stayed at his own home. The sexes even when married are segregated in their labor except when performing their marital duties. For women, once they are married nothing important happens to them; thus the desire to prolong singlehood as long as possible. While women's life ends when she gets married, a man's increases in status due to heavy competition that they have to succeed.

Also, women are discouraged from doing things alone as solitary enterprise is considered bad b/c only things that are done in secret are bad. Considering the utter lack of privacy for the women and the freedom of latitude that is given to them in matters of sexuality, it would make sense that anything done in private would be considered bad.
While the men get their power from their titles, women usually rule by the force of their personality and the psychology of human nature.

Samoan culture is a laissez-faire culture devoid of any competition for women so they do not feel pressured to be or do anything. In the end, the lack of pressure makes them complacent so though they do not have any pressure to grow, they are static. Samoan's rewards the lesson of not caring and punishes people who are too ambitious. It rewards people who took defeat lightly and turned to some other goal with a smile. They have a race to mediocrity culture b/c children have no expectations besides growing up like their ancestors where men are jostling towards ever increasing social status while women have no expectations besides following in their elders foot steps. But on the plus side, there are generally no overwrought jealousies in adolescence since individual goals are lacking.

Mead states the amount of choice that Americans have in raising their children leads to angst in children over which path to state whereas in Samoa and other traditional cultures one standardized way of raising their children allows for children to follow the prescribed path that works for most children though not all. Mead says the reason why Samoan adolescents are so well adjusted is b/c teenagers are allowed to experiment. She advocates the need for choice in sexual experimentation to alleviate conflict but ironically decries all choice that are competing in our culture b/c it confuses our children by competing values. Mead states that it is the plethora of choices in people's values that causes neurosis in modern man that is largely absent in Samoan culture.

Mead states that the because of the amorphous quantity of authority figures in the life of a children, the child is secure that their multiple older people she can trust for her general welfare while the birth order does not effect the roles which the child operates in b/c there are always people who are older and younger than the child. Because the child learns only the opposite sex is a lover regardless of personality and one can only be friends with relatives of the same sex, casual hook ups and marriage of convenience and divorce are readily made without strong emotional attachment. While Samoan children see people as a whole devoid of any personality so they do not form any emotional attachment and can have casual sex with whomever they find attractive. American children see distinct personalities so they learn distinguish who they like the best. So American children get to experience romantic love but girls can experience also no love and marital dysfunction due to unmet expectations.

In Samoa, the culture not the individualize parents raise their children. They have little emotional attachment because they live in large heterogeneous households, the segregation of sexes before adolescence enforced by the incest taboo, and the regimentation of friendship along relationship lines. Mead also finds the lack of children's knowledge of the basics of sex ed, birthing process, and death appalling. She thinks the nuclear family should be loser so neurosis does not develop in the family members to be like someone. Mead wants US citizens to be trained like doctors in that we are not shocked by life's major events from a baby's birth, to sexualize behaviors, to death because on any given day we are consulted on all 3 things. She is correct in thinking exposure to only one or 2 births, sex experience, and death gives the three life events a huge unsightly emotional importance in our lives.

Meads perfect childhood experience is a homogeneous society, with sex choice so one can divorce the good feelings that the sex act produces with being in love with the 1st person one sleeps with b/c the inexperienced women equate sex with love. That is, they don't confuse lust with love. She would like us to be more open about our sexual practice incorporating oral sex, doggystyle, and women on top as normal in our repertoire.

Mead further states that while our children are divorced from seeing the use of what they are studying, Samoan children have on the job training what needs to be done so feel like they are an integral part of the community. Their life are much more unified with work and play mixing side by side with each other. They also have a lot of leeway on when to settle down so it takes away the "benchmark" age on when to do anything such as marriage by the age of 30 does not occur thus decreasing neurosis.

In conclusion, Mead stresses the negativity of choice in adolescent life inherent in American culture with its multi-cultural leanings. She blames America's heterogeneous culture for lacking to provide a common standard to raise our children in for the unnecessary angst in raising children. Because the outside world's culture is so at odds with tradition, the parents only choice is to take away the child's economic power to buy what they want. So her perfect culture is a traditional culture where there is some sort of common standard. She cites the old strictures in female sexuality, contraception, and marriage in limiting female relationship choice thus giving women more headache is largely settled in today's society.

She blames the American dream of endless working opportunities with the reality of only a fix set working opportunities with the stresses in American teenagers life. She also blames the fact that children are allowed to seek opportunities not available to their parents for the stress they feel. She blames the American dream as unrealistic in giving what seems like a choice to the choiceless.

In heterogeneous society where competing values bombards our children, she states the only way to make sure that our children come out good is not to entrench ourselves in traditional thinking but rather equip our children with the tools necessary in how to think not what to think. They must be taught tolerance and unpredjudicial thinking, the responsibility of their choices lies with them alone. So, basically, she states that conservatives who want to raise their children a traditional way are out of luck b/c a society built on tolerance will have competing values and will have competing claims on their children.

[Czarny Pies · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this short eloquent book published in 1928, Margaret Mead' argues that the rules governing sexual relations and the roles of women in society are dictated neither by nature nor by God but by culture. It was the right message for the flapper age when the women's movement which having recently obtained the vote was campaigning for laws to make divorce easier.
Mead's thesis, which I do not subscribe to, was that casual sex both before and after marriage was simply a source of pleasure. Pre-marital and extra-marital relations cause problems only when society imposes sanctions against them.
Mead like most anthropologists believes in Rousseau's noble savage. Members of primitive societies are healthier psychologically. They are less likely to hate or be jealous. They live with fewer rules.
Like Rousseau, Mead also acknowledges that the state of their historical-social evolution is largely responsible for this innocence and simplicity. It is perfectly obvious to a boy in a Neolithic society that he must help his father hunt for their dinner. Similarly the little girl understands why she must help her mother tend the vegetable garden. A boy or girl in our modern society who is expected to study calculus or take piano lessons does not inevitably see a legitimate reason for doing so. The complexity and seeming irrationality of rules in our contemporary world gives our young people neuroses.
Mead's prescription is for society to impose a minimum of rules for its members and not to make children feel guilty when they rebel against them.

However reasonable may be her conclusions, Mead has had a large number of critics. They point out the period of her Samoan field work was a mere nine months. Some have suggested that she overstated her fluency in the Samoan language and thus misunderstood things that were said to her by her subjects. Others have stated that Mead relied heavily on comments made to her in English by missionaries. Yet others have implied that she arrived in Samoa with her major conclusions already formulated. However, while some of these criticisms may be true to a greater or lesser extent, it is equally possible that Mead's research methodology was as rigorous as she claimed and that her judgement was perfectly unbiased. None of this matters. They key thing is that Mead's message was the one that everyone wanted to hear at the time and still do.
I am giving this book four stars in acknowledgement of the importance that it has had for almost a century in a debated that is still far from over.

[Its_me_its_P · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not only is this so called 'study' racist but as it later turned out all the Samoans this woman harassed turned out to be flat out lying to this woman. And you know what? Thank God for that she deserved none of their time. The story however does go that the Samoans did have a good laugh at her expense so thank God for that.
For the longest time this was considered not just the premiere "academic" writing on Samoa and Samoans but was the only western accepted writing on Samoa ignoring all the writings we had already done on own peoples. Also we are an oratory culture.
Perfect example of racism in academia even the title has 'primitive' in it.

Fuck this.