During this stage of their lives, these girls became sexually active. Along with dozens of other tasks, they would learn to weave baskets, pick taro leaves for cooking and dig tuberous taro roots in the swamps. Still younger sisters took over baby tending, releasing the now adolescent girls to other work.
They had little opportunity to learn more interesting forms of work or play.Īs soon as these girls were big enough to carry heavier loads, their mothers changed their responsibilities. They also learned to spread copra to dry and to roll pandanus leaves for plaiting, but “baby tending” was their primary chore. The older girls, who saddled the younger ones on their hips and carried them about the village, learned other simple skills like tidying the house and bringing water from the sea. She found that mothers charged older sisters aged six through ten with the care of their younger siblings. Her purpose was to focus on young girls, subjects absent from earlier anthropological studies.
In Samoa, Mead found a harmonious agrarian society with abundant access to marine resources and living a simple life based on a unique culture. Her book may have been the reason why young people during the San Francisco summer of ’67 grew their hair long, wore flowers and went barefoot to advertise their promiscuity. The 1961 edition proved wildly popular during the sexual revolution of the 1960s - the era of Bob Dylan’s song “The Times They Are A-Changin.’” Pipher notes that Mead, often referred to as “the original flower child, was interested in peace, justice, sexual freedom, and adventure.…Her definition of an ideal culture was one that found a place for every human gift.” 3 The academic world asked her to speak everywhere on these topics. Mary Pipher, an American psychologist and author, wrote, “Mead believed the problems for American teens were too many choices, too much pressure, and too little exposure to real-world phenomena, such as birth and death.” 2 From her many exotic experiences, she had learned about the tremendous role played by the social environment in everyone’s life.Ĭoming of Age has been printed numerous times. When Mead took Coming of Age in Samoa to William Morrow, who would serve as her lifetime editor, he advised her to add “more about what all this means to Americans.” 1 This she did. “Add more about what this means to Americans” I believe that this statistic, however humdrum it seems today, proved to be the catalyst that thrust her into the whirlwind of popular culture. Her notes show that 44 percent of the young women she studied had sexual relations within an average of two years of reaching puberty. She was good at describing simple observations of daily life, asking questions and writing everything down. There’s no doubt that she expertly chronicled the unique way of life of the Manu’a Islanders of American Samoa. At best, it’s quite descriptive, but it can be “thick,” especially when she drifts into the contemporary implications of her studies. What propelled Mead’s publication to such popularity? Certainly not her writing style. The book became a best seller, which was unusual for a formal scientific work on the lives of peoples in small communities on faraway South Pacific islands. It launched its author, then twenty-four, on her fifty-year career as a driven, celebrated communicator of anthropological principles. d) her Samoan research showed that biological changes accompanying adolescence are experienced by youth in every culture.Published in March 1928, Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa set off a wildfire in American sociological circles. c) the stress and anxiety of American adolescence were not experienced by Samoan youth, who grew up in a different cultural environment. b) the stress and anxiety of American adolescence were felt equally as strongly among Samoan youth. Margaret Mead's book Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) provided an example of cultural determinism in that a) cultural behaviors and biological changes of Samoan and American youth developed at the same ages. d) human biological processes, such as puberty, are the same all over the world. c) learned cultural roles are randomly assigned, and are not dependent on cultural differences. b) learned cultural roles are more important than biology in most types of behavior. Her fieldwork provided evidence that a) biological instincts dictate the way that people behave.
Margaret Mead's book, Coming of Age in Samoa (1925), was an important contribution to the nature-nurture debate, arguing that teenagers experience less stress in Samoa than in the United States.
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