Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead  

    Summary of Coming of Age in Samoa

•             Coming of Age in Samoa was published in 1928.  Mead's mentor Boas suspected that "much of what we ascribe to human nature is no more than a reaction to the restraints put upon us by our civilization" (Boas 1928).  To test this hypothesis, Mead was sent to Samoa to find out whether the "emotional stress and turmoil" of American adolescence was biologically inherent or culturally determined.  She studied 25 young women in three villages in Samoa and found that for them adolescence was neither stressful nor constrained.  She concluded that "the adolescence is not necessarily a time of stress and strain, but that cultural conditions make it so" (1928: 234).  She explained the stress-free character of adolescence in Samoa with differing cultural and social arrangements of the Samoans, in particular a "general casualness" and "lack of deep feeling" that was their attitudes towards life.  She especially pointed out that Samoan adolescent women enjoyed a casual sexual code, limited only for the daughters and wives of chiefs.  Although missionaries were not supporters of such code, their protests were unimportant (1928: 202).  The Samoan church also did not press youth too hard for participation that would curb their sexual freedom.  Sexual jealousy was absent and rape was foreign to their thought.  Mead pointed out that the less buffled choices of creeds and careers made them less stressful.  Also, the child-rearing practices and attitudes toward sex accounted for the difference between American and Samoan adolescence.  Especially, Samoan numerous adult caretakers released children from close attachments to their own parents, and knowledge of sexuality, birth, and death that Samoan adolescents acquired helped them gain mentally health.  With the analysis of the differences, Mead called for a change in American child education.

    Mead's Fieldwork in Samoa

•             Mead has extensive correspondence with the National Research Council and Bishop Museum before she sets out to Samoa.  Six weeks before she sails for Samoa, Mead accepts Dr. Gregory's offer of an associateship in ethnology and agrees to write an ethnology of Samoa for publication as a monograph of the Bishop Museum, without consulting Boas or the National Research Council.  Freeman argues in his book that Mead's involvement with the Bishop Museum has fateful consequences for her later investigation under Boas' investigation and for the National Research Council.  As Freeman argues, Mead brings with her both the position of Boas and the Bishop Museum.  As he states, Handy of the Bishop Museum gives her a preconception that adolescent promiscuity is a pervasive cultural pattern in Polynesian islands.  Freeman argues that in Mead's two separate research projects of investigation of adolescent girls and ethnology, the ethnological research is the one that she is fascinated with.  In her twenty-one weeks' research in Manu'a, as Freeman shows, one-third is given to the ethnological research which she agrees to work for publication by the Bishop Museum.  With little time left, out of uncertainty, Mead begins questioning the two informants about the sexual behaviors of adolescents to discover a cultural pattern.  As Freeman contends, her time-consuming involvement in doing ethnology for the Bishop Museum to ensure her professional future creates a severe crisis for her official research on adolescent behavior and forces her to turn to Fa'apua'a and Fofoa to solve the problem Boas requires her to investigate.  As a result, Mead's plan to collect a wide range of information on thirty girls is abandoned and information on only 25 girls is provided instead.  Her work, according to Freeman, is informed principally by the two "beguiling preconceptions" of Boas and Handy, Edward Craighill.

   Writing and Publication of Coming of Age in Samoa

•             Getting back from New York, Mead wrote six chapters of her report to the National Research Council, entitled "The Adolescent Girl in Samoa."  It was 56,000 words long and was written in ten weeks while she was performing her curatorial duties.  On April 24, 1927, Mead mailed the top copy of her report to the chairman of the Board of National Research Fellowships, and told the board that in consultation with Dr. Boas, she organized the manuscript in a form "sufficiently untechnical to appeal to a commercial publisher" (Freeman 1998:178).  Because the title The Adolescent Girl in Samoa is too clumsy for commercial publication, she used "Coming of Age in Samoa" instead with the approval of Boas.  Mead received the approval by the board on May 10 and the typescript was sent to Harper and Brothers for publishing.

•             After being rejected by this publishing house, Mead could not find any publisher until the starter of a new publishing house in New York City, William Morrow, arranged to meet her and asked her to write more about what her work means to Americans.  On January, 1928, Mead sent to Morrow an abstract of a final discussion that she would incorporate into her book.  Within a fortnight after he accepted her proposal, she sent two new concluding chapters to Morrow.  Afterwards, she sent a new introduction to Morrow to tie it up with the new conclusion and informed him that Boas had approved all of the new materials she had added to the text of Coming of Age in Samoa.  On March, 1928, Mead sent to Morrow a sketch "A Day in Samoa" to include in the text.  It had been originally written as the opening section of the discussion in "Social Organization of Manu'a."  This "enchanting vignette" (ibid.: 184) was very much liked by Morrow and added to her report to become the second chapter of Coming of Age in Samoa.  With the manuscript complete and the publication scheduled for fall of 1928, Mead asked Boas for a foreword.  As Freeman states, the standing of Coming of Age in Samoa within anthropology depends on what Boas has to say about it.  Boas expressed his total satisfaction of this work.  One of the copies was sent to Malinowski and received favorable response.  Morrow assured Mead that he would make sure this book "would have a real show with the general public" (ibid.: 186).  In the first edition, on the cover, there was an "alluring light of a just-risen full moon, a bare-breasted Samoan girl, inflamed with passion, leading her half-naked lover to what Mead, in her fanciful text, called a tryst beneath the palm trees" (ibid.: 186).   With the success of this book throughout the world, Mead received a National Achievement Award from a committee of which Eleanor Roosevelt was a member, and in 1940, she was awarded her doctorate.

 Mead and Boas

•             Mead is different from Boas in writing styles and strategies, namely, Boas has the text-driven style and Mead has the psychological style.  However, they are both cultural relativists and they both advocate using anthropology to address and solve social problems.  For Boas, cultural relativism is to attack racism, and for Mead, it is to fight against universalist psychologizing.  When Boas collects texts to "reconstruct the histories of cultures that have left no written records,"  Mead is an extremely meticulous collector of data in Samoa and her everyday activities in her fieldwork.  She has left tons of invaluable materials for a record of cultural change and for later anthropologists' reference in their fieldwork.  Freeman, in his second book of a historical analysis of her fieldwork and writing, is enabled to use her diary to construct her day-to-day activities during her stay in Samoa and follow the course of her fieldwork in great detail.

•             Boas is a public intellectual and Mead is a popular anthropologist.  When Boas quit his position at the museum and devoted to the university department and graduate training, Mead returned to the museum and refused to contained by the structures of academic calendar and the obligations of university professors.

Ethnography of Coming of Age in Samoa

•             Mead is popularizing anthropology for practical use in this ethnography of Samoa.  This particular aspect is different from other ethnographies such as Nuer, Ndembu and Argonauts.  In the introduction of Coming of Age in Samoa, Mead presents the psychologists' and other biological theorists' explanation of the plight of adolescence in American society.  She points out that these explanations have highly influenced American education policy.  However, she goes on to contend that, in comparison to these findings, anthropology is the only subject that can enable us to investigate other societies and find out the real roots of this agitation and disturbance of adolescence in American society.  In her work, Mead uses the subject of anthropology to solve this social problems and change American child education, marriage problem and child-rearing in the revelation of behavior patterns in other societies.  She is very critical of American society and points out that "a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own."  She claims that only by doing anthropology in this way can anthropologists really write for "the whole world" instead of for a small group of elite academic people and better serve people and improve their lives.  This is how she thinks of anthropology and how she does her field research.  This particularly popularizing anthropology for the practical use is absent from other ethnographies we have read this semester.

•             The cover of Coming of Age in Samoa is different from Nuer and Argonauts for the specific audience it is designed for and the nature of the book for publication.  For Nuer and Argonauts, the photos and visual materials are used for the academic audiences.  For Coming of Age in Samoa, however, because it was first published as a commercial book for public consumption, especially for the middle-class American social groups,  to attract readers, the publisher appropriated the scene of Mead's portrayal of adolescents' free sex in the book and dramatized it in the cover.  This departs from other purely academic ethnographies we have read this semester.

•             In the final conclusion of Coming of Age in Samoa, when comparing child education in America and Samoa, Mead generalizes American "middle-class" pattern of child socialization as the "American" pattern and neglects the configurations of class, ethnicity, age, profession, etc.  This kind of generalization has resonance with other ethnographies we read for this semester.  To give an example, in Bath's work of political organization among Swat Pathans, Barth generalizes the complementarity of political leaders such as chiefs and Saints without deconstructing the category of chiefs and Saints with recourse to differences such as age and social background.  This kind of generalization, I think, is necessary for theorists to work out a theoretical model that permeates the minor differences and exceptions.

•             In Coming of Age in Samoa, Mead points out that political organization neither interests nor influences the young girls, therefore she feels safe to disregard it in her account.  This aspect is very different from the emphasis on the political leadership and organization in other ethnographies such as Nuer, Swat Pathans, and Ndembu.  Freeman later on points out that it is because Mead is forbidden the access into the fono, Samoan political organization and denied the participation of political affairs for the limitation of her gender.  In later work on Samoa by other researchers such as Duranti's From Grammar to Politics, political hierarchy in Samoa has been greatly stressed as an important characteristics of Samoan society.  In her work Coming of Age in Samoa, Mead does touch upon the age hierarchy and rank hierarchy in the fono, such as strict use of terms of address and members' required behaviors as indicator of their higher status,  but she does not give it too much weight in the ethnography, nor does she mention the aspect of history, economy, ecological environment or religion in Samoa.  Instead, she focuses on the analysis of the Samoan household, education of child, average girls' experiences, sex relation, role of dance, and their attitudes towards personality.  This focus of gender and child socialization is distinctive due to her purpose of research.

•             In Coming of Age in Samoa, Mead portrays the flexible age groups.  Children can be members across groups due to the blood ties cutting across the neighborhood alignments.  This mutable group pattern can be compared with that in Nuer and other ethnographies.  In Nuer, each tribe as a political segment is stratified according to age independently of other tribes and socially differentiated according to sex.  This age-set system is an exemplification of the segmentary principle of the Nuer social structure.  E-P points out that the relations between groups in the Nuer social structure have a high degree of consistency and constancy.  However, the social sphere of persons is limited by the extension of their political groups.

•             Mead does not deal with the social change in her ethnography, which is different from Turner.  In Schism and Continuity in an African Society, Turner uses one village as his unit of diachronic study, rather than to illustrate the synchronic analysis by examples taken at random for a number of villages.  Some criticism of Mead revolves around the issue of social change of Samoa that she fails to convey in her ethnography.

•             Mead fits the girls and boys in the social structure and neglects the particularity within this social structure.  In the chapter of Formal Sex Relations, she mentions that some old men could choose the "unwilling daughter of ambitious and selfish parents" (95).  Mead also mentions Samoan wives have to obey and observe their husbands' orders.  However, she does not give an account of how these girls and women resist or manipulate the social structure for their personal gains and to what extent they are successful, except only briefly in the book she touches upon how the girls use chicken's blood for their own blood of broken hymen to disguise the fact that they are not virgins.  Her paradigm of human behaviors are resulted from their cultural environment does not leave agency for individuals.  This is different from other ethnographic work that stresses individual agency in an overarching structure.  In Turner's work Schism and Continuity in an African Society, he deals with the vitality of general forms in Particulars.  The very uniqueness of the events he lays out in the book is used to illuminate the structural regularities that interpenetrates them, in ways that the redressive custom absorbs particularities of behavior and reestablish the primacy of regulative custom.  Mead's ethnography is different from Turner's paradigm of intertwining universality and particularity, though she does give examples of deviant adolescents in her ethnography.  Gluckman, from the perspective of individualism, points out the importance of considering how people themselves construct their contexts of action and have a role to play in the making of their sociopolitical and cultural realities.  Barth, in his work of political system in Swat Pathans, also stresses individual's choices in the formation of hierarchical groups of leaders that is constantly performed and contested and personal gains.

•             Mead has different strategies in writing a compelling ethnography from other ethnographies.  She casts a puzzle in the introduction and leads the readers through the whole book to find a solution to this puzzle in the conclusion.  This is very effective in terms of providing the readers with a guideline and framework to go through the book to the final persuasive conclusion so that they can connect the conclusion with the introduction and previous chapters.  This strategy is different from the dazzling traveling scenes that Malinowski uses in his ethnography Argonauts to draw readers in.

Mead's Other Work

•             Coming of Age in Samoa sets a theoretical base for Mead.  In her later work, she gives special notice to biological factors, continues to create tens of thousands of fieldnotes and archives for other researchers' use in the future, and persists her principle of applying anthropology to the use of the populace for the benefit of the world.       After Coming of Age in Samoa, Mead studied child education in Manus and watched how their socialization led them the form pressed upon by the culture.  She represented her study in Growing up New Guinea with meticulous records and fieldnotes.  Similar to Coming of Age in Samoa, this is also a study of the elastic and malleable human nature.  Along the same theoretical line, Sex and Temperament in three primitive societies portrays how behaviors of sexes are conditioned by the cultural environment that they are born in.  In Male and Female, Mead deals with both cultural variability in sex roles and primarily biological sex differences.  She gives particular notice to biological factors in addition to cultural assumptions in this work.  In her work in Bali, she photographed thousands of films and delineated how the culture influences personality of child through mothers' child-rearing.  When the war broke out, Mead used anthropological study to assist the war  in her book American Troops and British Community.  Later, complementary to the absence of social change in Coming of Age in Samoa, Mead studied the cultural and social change of Manus after the second World War.  She investigated how the old and young generation viewed the change and expected the future.  Through Mead's life time, in all of her work, she used anthropology skills to discuss questions people concern about and help build a more beautiful world.

Book Review

•             Ruth Benedict’s book review:        "The concrete evidence of this excellent ethnological picture of an alien culture is more convincing than any a priori argument as to the plasticity of that which we have been accustomed to theorize about as human nature."

        "It is another example of the truth that our problems spring not from the facts, but from the
         social setting in which the facts are grouped."

•             Bertrand Russell and Havelock Ellis liked her findings on sex, marriage and child rearing and cited them often.  As they contend, "Dr. Mead presents her material with great insight, throwing into relief not only the essential factors in Samoan, but in modern American, civilization."

•             Jane Howard 1984   "[her] book's spectacular success made Mead's name an immediate and enduring metaphor for steamy things that happened in torrid, languid jungles, and gave her a reputation that she built on to, steadily, in the 50 more years of her life" (433).

•             Manhattan Psychologist Otto Klineberg, "She had a very definite influence in shaping public opinion, similar to that of Dr. Spock. Mead and Spock reduced the emphasis on the biological side of childhood and adolescence and changed the pattern of child rearing."

•             New York Book Review (Nov. 4, 1928):  "As Miss Mead’s careful scientific work deserves the most earnest tribute, so her method of    presenting its results calls for the highest praise. Her book, broad in its canvas and keen in its detail, is sympathetic throughout, warmly human yet never sentimental, frank with the clean, clear frankness of the scientist, unbiased in its judgment, richly readable in its style. It is a remarkable contribution to our knowledge of humanity"

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