Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation (Perennial Classics)

Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation (Perennial Classics)

By: Margaret Mead  

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Average Customer Rating: 2.5 out of 5

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.

Publisher: Harper Perennial Modern Classics

Release Date: 2001-02-20

Customer Review: 1 out of 5
Proven Hoax - Poorly researched book, which is completely wrong on the facts of Samoan adolescent behavior, as subsequent scholars have discovered. Mead had an agenda and goes to Samoa to prove it. Some people just can't accept the truth!

Customer Review: 1 out of 5
The subversion of science by politics - Unfortunately this book is one more example of how a politicized anthropology systematically obstructs the advancement of science. Mead, a convicted feminist, did a highly selective fieldwork and put together a politically motivated monograph which seems at odds with the findings of most other scholars. As a result of this, and the many controversies that it has spawned, we nowdays have a very muddled picture of Samoan culture. And this despite the fact that it has been repeadedly studied.

This book also shows another inherent flaw in anthropology. Writing fanciful diaries (which is what many anthropological monographs are) is not science. It is urgent that anthropologist go beyond this bad habit of theirs and start using more rigorous scientific methods. Otherwise there will soon be no scientific credibility left in anthropology. Its methodological and epistemological foundations are deeply flawed. Finally, anthropologists should not forgett that the Sokal Hoax was actually a challange against anthropology, the "big brother" of cultural studies.

The vicious circle of sloppiness and politization in which anthropology has been caught in has lead to the bizarre effect that nowdays we have to turn to subsidiary sources (e.g. travelers, traders and missionaries) for much of our knowledge about aboriginal societies. They seem more reliable. And this sorrowful trend had its inglorious beginning with the studies of Margaret Mead.

The only thing more pityful than this failure is the fact that Margaret Mead was a very intelligent person and a brilliant writer. She should never have let political passion taint her work.

Customer Review: 2 out of 5
Slow - This book would have been much more understandavle and readable if the author had followed one or two girls through the cycle of growing up. It seems to be random information that does not come together very well to reveal the true culture.

Customer Review: 4 out of 5
Came really quickly - I ordered from Bellweather.

I had an issue/question and through Amazon, messaged bellweather, who replied within a day. the package also go to see within the time they said it would. good service!

Customer Review: 1 out of 5
Someone in Samoa before Mead - Much of the debate about the accuracy of Mead's characterizations of Samoans suffers from two difficulties.

1. Criticism of her work by Samoans themselves is attacked with, "well they would say that," the assumption being that Mead is honest and they are not, or that Mead understood their society better after a few months of living there than do those who've lived there all their lives. Snobbery, yes. But almost every profession suffers from a 'we versus the masses' snobbery, including anthropology. Those would be Mead's defenders.

2. Criticism by other anthropologists who have spent time in Samoa and differ with Mead is attacked with the claim that Samoan culture may have changed since Mead's visit, perhaps under the influence of Christian missionaries. Again, Samoans who can remember those pre-missionary times are branded liars.

In one sense, this isn't that bad a call. If virtually all Samoans are liars today, then why should anyone believe what Mead claims they told her? Bragging about sexual conquests is at least as common as covering them up. And keep in mind that Mead is just one person, and one with a less than sterling reputation for integrity. Believing Samoans over just her isn't that hard to justify.

But moving beyond that, what's obviously needed in this dispute is someone from the outside (negating #1), who visited Samoa before Mead did (negating #2). It would also help if such a person were scientifically trained and in a position to know about the intimate details of their lives.

Such a person actually exists, or to be more accurately, did exist in the late 1980s, when I was teaching a computer class at the Bremerton Naval Shipyards across Puget Sound from Seattle. For lunch, I dropped into the officers club and began to talk with an elderly couple at the next table. Finding out that I was a writer, the man asked if I knew how he could publish something he felt might be important.

He was a retired US Navy doctor and had been stationed in Samoa before Mead arrived there. He'd spent quite a bit of time providing medical care for the Samoan people and his memories were clear. He offered precisely the independent check on Mead's accuracy that's needed. What did he claim? Mead, he said, was wrong, and her description of Samoan sexual behavior was inaccurate.

I encouraged him to find someone willing to publish his experiences in Samoa, but it's one of regrets of my life that I didn't get his name and address and try to help get published. It would be a major contribution to a debate that now seems to be fated to go on without end.

****

I might add that you can find a similar deceptions in our own society. Almost a century ago, Margaret Sanger, founder of today's Planned Parenthood, was claiming that America "repressed" sexual knowledge, particularly by keeping it from women. That's rather bizarre, since at that time the nation was still heavily agricultural, and you can hardly keep a knowledge of sex from anyone who's grown up around a barnyard.

But because we're a literate society, publishing books on almost every topic, we don't have to depend on anthropologists visiting us from outside and reporting on what they think they saw. It's possible to find books that offer a snapshot of what a culture believed at a certain time. And in this case, there's more than ample evidence that Sanger was lying. I have a copy of a book (published in Ohio) called Eugenics or The Laws of Sex Life and Heredity by a Professor T. W. Shannon. It professes on the cover to be "profusely illustrated," and was published in 1917, the very year Sanger began her career as a birth controller. It even includes a commendation from a Mrs. Mary E. Teats of the Women's Christian Temperance Union.

In short, if the topic is sex, read with a healthy dose of skepticism. That's particularly true of Mead and Sanger.

--Michael W. Perry, The Pivot of Civilization in Historical Perspective: The Birth Control Classic

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