Coming of Age in Samoa

Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) aims to show that everything around us, every part of our culture is actually a social construction, although the term “social construction” was used probably about 40 years after she published her work. (see Berger and Luckmann). Mead attempts to find the underlying reasons for the difference between modern (Indo-European and American) experiences of puberty and that of Samoan puberty. In her experience makes the two experiences very different is the way two cultures are socialization; if we speak of Mead’s terms, the way the children are educated. Through the socialization period, young people learn to feel pain, feel ashamed, fall in love, feel devoted, etc. The norms and values of the society are shaped and carried through generations, and they finally make up the very distinct reality of a very distinct culture.

IMHO the most important contribution of the book to the field is probably the way it shows that Anthropology is not only a study of distant cultures, but it also helps us learn about our own culture. This work is the first attempt to analyze Western world by implementing fieldwork in a primitive culture.

At the time of the publishing of Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), a large portion of the academic world had recently rediscovered the works of Gregor Mendel and built upon it a pseudoscientific doctrine of genetic determinism. This meme gave root to the social darwinism and eugenics movements. Conversely, there were the cultural determinists who believed human behavior was almost entirely a result of culture or environment. Seeing as human behavior is distinct from animal behavior, the cultural determinists, or "nurturists" took the argument that selective breeding is a dangerous proposition when dealing with humans.

Mead brought about the downfall of the eugenics movement with a book containing lines such as "at last there is only the mellow thunder of the reef and the whisper of lovers," as well as "It is not pleasant to realize that we have developed a form of family organization (meaning the nuclear family) which often cripples the emotional life, and warps and confuses the growth of many individuals' power to consciously live their own lives." Mead found a "negative instance" in which the turmoil of adolescence, believed to be a natural force in human development, was an unknown.

Throughout the book Meade boldly contrasted American and Samoan life, arguing that the open, permissive Samoan attitudes about adolescent sex provided a smooth transition between childhood and adulthood. Conversely, of American life she wrote, “when there is added to the pitfalls of experiment the suspicion that the experiment is wrong, and the need for secrecy, lying and fear, the strain is so great that frequent downfall is inevitable.”