Coming of Age in Samoa

Coming of Age in Samoa – Margaret Mead

Long hailed as one of the most prominent anthropological voices in recent history, Margaret Mead made her start by visiting Samoa for her first fieldwork study on the raising girls. Looking at how education and relationships influence the experience of adolescence, Mead studied when and how girls develop their “adult” knowledge and compared it to the conflict-filled and frustrating adolescent experience in the States. Mead discusses personal awareness, interpersonal relationships, sexual relationships, and how all these relationships and the education of girls is ultimately defined by the family. And as a good anthropologist, she neatly summarizes her results and compares them to US circumstances. She finds that Samoa presents a simpler lifestyle with no protections about what information is fit for young children to learn (concerning life, death, sex, birth, and so on), giving children broader knowledge from which to make choices, although their choices are limited because of the structure of the society. In contrast, children raised in the heterogeneous US culture of nuclear families tend to have strong emphasis on specific relationships, protected and guilty knowledge, and more difficulty in making choices because the choices are broader and more heavily weighted than choices in Samoa.

Take all of this with a grain of salt. Margaret Mead went to American Samoa in the 1920s when she was 23 years old, and this is the resulting work. I actually feel that my personal experience in Samoa relates fairly well with what Mead describes. From what I’ve seen, Samoans grow up in large, extended families that are constantly shifting depending on who has what responsibilities, who gets married, who is fighting, etc. Most everything seems to be based around the family structure. Funerals and births are more frequent, and although every single one is a fa’alavelave, it isn’t as big a deal in Samoa as it is in the States. It’s not protected information. Obviously the school system in Samoa has changed and become more formalized since writing this, and the church now has a much larger influence on Samoan life than it did at the time of writing this. I wasn’t entirely sure what the point of her book was – she says frequently that she is looking specifically at the education of girls and how it compares to that of the US, but she covers a lot of other topics as well. I was often confused by the people she talks about for specific examples. Instead of following two or three girls throughout the course of the book, she interviews several girls and draws on specific situations to illuminate her theories. But I suppose that’s how it’s supposed to be – it’s not a case study or a direct comparison; she is looking for a general analysis.

The other thing I ran into with this book was a lot of criticism. Every time I told someone I was reading Margaret Mead, I was always told I had to read Derick Freeman when I finished her. Apparently Derick Freeman came onto the anthropological scene later and showed how all of Margaret Mead’s research was wrong, specifically in Samoa. I’d love to read his book because I did find most of the material in Mead’s book relatable – I could see the origins of Samoan society today, at least from my palagi perspective it seems really similar. I could also detect a lot of her personal opinions in the material – an emphasis on sexual freedom, personal choice, looking forward to more tolerance instead of maintaining the status quo or moving backward. I’m really interested to see more research on Samoa and how his experience was supposedly more authentic. To sum it all up, I found this book incredibly interesting because it relates so well to my personal experience, but I’m not sure I would recommend it for general reading. The language is a bit dense at times, the examples are hard to keep up with, and it goes into a lot of details that probably don’t seem relevant to a Western experience. But if it counts for anything, I loved it.