Most involve some sort of corporal punishment, such as hitting with hands, palm fronds, or shells. She describes the various methods of disciplining children. After birth, however, Mead describes how children are mostly ignored, for girl children sometimes explicitly ritually ignored, after birth up to puberty. She then describes child education, starting with the birth of children, which is celebrated with a lengthy ritual feast. Mead begins with the description of a typical idyllic day in Samoa. Mead studied daily living, education, social structures and dynamics, rituals, etiquette, etc. She found a village of 600 people on the island of Ta'ū, in which, over a period of between six and nine months, she got to know, lived with, observed, and interviewed (having learnt some Samoan) 68 young women between the ages of 9 and 20. To answer this question, she conducted her study among a small group of Samoans. "I have tried to answer the question which sent me to Samoa: Are the disturbances which vex our adolescents due to the nature of adolescence itself or to the civilization? Under different conditions does adolescence present a different picture?" Mead described the goal of her research as follows: Once she has an understanding of Samoan culture she will delve into the specifics of how adolescent education and socialization are carried out in Samoan culture and contrast it with Western culture. However, in doing so she introduces new complexity in that she must first understand and communicate to her readers the nature of South Sea culture itself rather than delve directly into issues of adolescence as she could in a more familiar culture. Rather than select a culture that is fairly well understood such as Europe or America, she chooses South Sea island people because their culture is radically different from Western culture and likely to yield more useful data as a result. For this reason her methodology is one of studying societies in their natural environment. She contrasts the methodology of the anthropologist with other scientific studies of behavior and the obvious reasons that controlled experiments are so much more difficult for anthropology than other sciences. She discusses various limitations in each approach and then introduces the new field of anthropology as a promising alternative science based on analyzing social structures and dynamics. Mead introduces the book with a general discussion of the problems facing adolescents in modern society and the various approaches to understanding these problems: religion, philosophy, educational theory, and psychology. Margaret Mead (ca 1930 to 1950, age 30s or 40s) It is instructive to know that standards differ in the most unexpected ways." "Courtesy, modesty, good manners, conformity to definite ethical standards are universal, but what constitutes courtesy, modesty, good manners, and definite ethical standards is not universal. In the foreword to Coming of Age in Samoa, Mead's advisor, Franz Boas, writes: Samoans themselves tend to be critical of what Mead wrote of their culture, especially her claim that adolescent promiscuity was socially acceptable in Samoa in the 1920s. Mead's field work for "Coming of Age" was also scrutinized, and major discrepancies were found between her published statements and her field data. However, several members of the anthropology community have rejected Freeman's criticism, accusing him of cherry picking his data, and misrepresenting both Mead's research and the interviews that he conducted. In the 1980s, Derek Freeman contested many of Mead's claims, and argued that she was hoaxed into counterfactually believing that Samoan culture had more relaxed sexual norms than Western culture. It is a key text in the nature versus nurture debate, as well as in discussions on issues relating to family, adolescence, gender, social norms, and attitudes. The book has sparked years of ongoing and intense debate and controversy on questions pertaining to society, culture, and science. Since its first publication, Coming of Age in Samoa was the most widely read book in the field of anthropology until Napoleon Chagnon's Yanomamö: The Fierce People overtook it. The book details the sexual life of teenagers in Samoan society in the early 20th century, and theorizes that culture has a leading influence on psychosexual development.įirst published in 1928, the book launched Mead as a pioneering researcher and as the most famous anthropologist in the world. Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation is a 1928 book by American anthropologist Margaret Mead based upon her research and study of youth – primarily adolescent girls – on the island of Taʻū in the Samoan Islands.
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