Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization [Paperback]

Margaret Mead (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: 1961

Margaret Mead's psychological study of youth in a primitive society, is today recognized as a scientific classic. However, when first published, as Dr. Mead points out in her preface to this Morrow Quill edition, it was "the first piece of work by a serious professional anthropologist written for the educated layman in which all the paraphernalia of scholarship designed to convince one's professional colleagues and confuse the laity was deliberately laid aside."

Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Morrow Quill Paperbacks (1961)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0688309747
• ISBN-13: 978-0688309749
• ASIN: B000HESN4Y
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,692,354 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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179 of 206 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Mead's Samoa hoax has been exposed, February 3, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization (Hardcover)

In the unpaginated 'Preface [to the] 1973 Edition', Margaret Mead stresses that her description of Samoan moeurs should be read as applying to conditions at the time of her research. She finds it needful to 'shout' that advice because during her 1971 brief visit to Samoa, 'young critics even asked me when am I going to revise this book and look unbelieving and angry when I say that to revise it is impossible'.

This is a reference to an abrasive session with students who told her that her description of fa'aSamoa (Samoan custom) was false and insulting. They were miffed by her styling Samoans 'primitives' and her pronouncement that since anthropologists enjoy an 'immense superiority', they can 'master the fundamental structure' [of primitive society] . . . 'in a few months' (p. 8). In keeping with this arrogance, Samoans attending university were told by their instructors that their experience of fa'aSamoa was not valid evidence against Mead's scientific study. And, as we've just seen, Mead refused to revise her book even when she knew that it was mistaken in many particulars.

For Samoans this patronizing manner was the familiar voice of the papalagi (the colonial power). Mead's hosts on her field trip, aware that she enjoyed the protection of the Pacific Fleet admiral and boss of Western Samoa, went to great lengths to provide reliable information. When they learned of what they call her luma fai tele ('shameless defamaton'), they could not comprehend how she could have betrayed their hospitality. They were also aggrieved that she deceived them about her marital status. For she accepted the title taupou (ceremonial virgin) although as a married woman she was ineligible. Then she disgraced the title by carrying on with Aviata, a young man regarded as a rake.

While Samoans long knew the mendacity of this book, its correction in academic circles commenced only with the 1983 publication of Derek Freeman's Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth (Harvard University Press). That event shook anthropology to its boots. Such was Mead's prestige that the popular mind identified her with anthropology. If her credibility was seriously questioned in respect to the most widely believed anthropological study ever published, the credibility of the profession was at risk. That is why Freeman was attacked with great vehemence, even by those who agreed with his critique.

Freeman's book initiated a reappraisal of Coming of Age in Samoa. Martin Orans and Freeman have recently published studies of her Samoa investigations based on her field notes. They confirm that Mead's account of Samoan sexual moeurs is a travesty. But they go beyond that. Mead recorded the accounts given by her informants, but by ignoring key facts, twisting others, and inventing still others, she contrived to represent Samoa as a free love duck pond. She also misrepresented the research she carried out. She was funded to conduct a study of adolescent girls; and she states that she spent 'six months accumulating an intimate and detailed knowledge of all adolescent girls in the community'. Her field notes tell otherwise. She devoted her time to assembling ethnography; the funded study never got off the ground. She states that she conducted 'all' her interviews with these girls in the Samoan language ('I spoke their language and ate their food'). Orans found however that her information on adolescent girls came from 'English-speaking informants using English to communicate'. He notes that 'no conversations in Samoan are recorded in any of the field materials'. This is consistent with Freeman's finding that the study of adolescent girls was not conducted at all.

Mead built her picture of free love by tossing off unsupported one-liners. The 'inept lover is a laughing stock'. There are 'no neurotic pictures, no frigidity' in Samoa. Masturbation 'is a universal habit'. Homosexual activity is 'very prevalent' and is regarded as 'simply play'. '[Samoan] girls' minds were perplexed by no conflicts . . . [to have as] many lovers as possible and then to marry . . . these were uniform and satisfying ambitions'. The field materials do not show that Mead collected any evidence whatever about masturbation, homosexuality, or incidence of neuroticism and frigidity. She had but one informant about intimate sexual practices--an eighteen year old school teacher. In 1981 that person told Freeman that he had an affair with Margaret. Thus Samoa's alleged free love amounts to no more than a loose wife's gullibility to the pillow talk of her teenage lover. Such is the 'science' that made this book famous.

Research on Mead's field notes clarifies a feature of this book that has puzzled many readers. It is the drastic and repeated inconsistency between Mead's descriptions of Samoan vigilance of virginity and punishments of straying girls, and the attribution of a casual attitude toward sexuality. What we now can see is that Mead patched her free love pillow talk into descriptions given to her by her adult informants.

How is that anthropologists for so long were taken in by Mead's yellow anthropology? One part of the answer is that many weren't taken in. The controversy brought to light numerous statements to this effect. Thus Weston LaBarre wrote: "When I was a graduate student in anthropology at Yale in the late '30's, Mead's Sex and Temperament came out. Puzzled that even a big island like New Guinea should have had three tribes waiting to be discovered to prove her point about the non-biological nature of gender, I went to Edward Sapir with my puzzlement. He said laconically, 'She's a pathological liar'. I was startled as much by what he said, as by the fact that an eminent anthropologist and chairman of a department should say this to a mere graduate student. But over the years, I have come to believe that this is literally the case." The next round in the evaluation of Mead's anthropology, we may hope, will collect and critically assess this largely unpublished expert opinion.

Hiram Caton, Editor, The Samoa Reader: Anthropologists Take Stock. University Press of America, 1990.

29 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Some clarification, January 6, 2005

By 

Sandwhich - See all my reviews

This review is from: Coming of Age in Samoa (Paperback)

A few reviewers have referenced the Mead / Freeman controversy. I'd like to explain this controversy and provide some historical context for readers unfamiliar with the book.

Coming of Age in Samoa is Margaret Mead's first publication. It launched a career that made Mead one of the most famous anthropologists in American history. I find this book interesting in two ways: historically and stylistically.

Coming of Age in Samoa is historically interesting in that it represents one culmination of the conflict between cultural and biological anthropology. Mead was a student of anthropologist Franz Boas, a famous advocate of "nurture" over "nature." Mead borrowed and expanded Boas' ideas, and many cultural anthropologists still cite her work as evidence that a person's cultural upbringing--not his genetic makeup--accounts for most of his personal development.

Anthropologists that valued "nature" over "nurture" did not dig. Mead's claims were big, bold, and well-received.

But Boas' opponents (or his opponents' students and their students' students) were able to breath easy once Derek Freeman, an Australian anthropologist, published a book refuting Mead's findings. Freeman accused Mead of conducting sloppy fieldwork, approaching her subject with predetermined conclusions, and refusing to correct her work after its publication. In response, Mead supporters accused Freeman of attacking Mead personally rather than professionally. While they disagreed about the quality of Freeman's own fieldwork, these critics all thought that he could have written his critique with more tact and civility.

Coming of Age in Samoa is stylistically interesting in that it targets a general audience. Some sections seem to come from a travelogue, others from a novella. Very little sounds like the anthropological writing of Boas or other American anthropologists that preceded Mead. Mead's writing has been called unscientific, revolutionary, appropriate, novelistic, and refreshing. Because of its accessibility, it has introduced several generations of undergraduates to anthropology.

With that clarification, I'd like to offer my opinion of how Coming of Age reads in 2005.

While the book is historically and stylistically relevant, I don't find Mead's prose that exciting. For an introduction to the field, I'd start somewhere else entirely--maybe Malinowski's Argonauts of the Western Pacific, which offers a thorough representation of a culture and an ethnographer's experience with that culture. Mead's book offers clear answers to clear questions, but I don't understand why new students should seek clarity. Something like Malinowski's diary--the strange and honest account of a witness--is more valuable. Mead's book flows, but plenty of books flow. I'd start with vague and rich anthropological writing, the sort that emerges from years research among radically different people. Even if it is a little more difficult, that sort of writing will introduce you to some really meaty and unfamiliar concerns.

50 of 68 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Gilligan's Island on Friday night., September 26, 2002

By 

David Marshall - See all my reviews

This review is from: Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation (Perennial Classics) (Paperback)

Coming of Age in Samoa is a pleasantly-written South Sea fantasy, heavy with the author's social agenda upon it. If you buy the agenda, apparently you can hardly help like the book. (See reviews below.) Even if I bought the agenda (and it is hard for me to look at American society and say the sexuality Mead encouraged has made people entirely free of guilt or conflict), I would still choke on her dishonesty. But as they say in the anthro business, different strokes for different folks.

Some of the defenses of this book below are hilarious. "Sure, it's largely untrue. But it reads well!" (And here I thought it was supposed to be science.) "It stimulated my thinking about culture! Mead really did interview thirty live Samoans! (In some language or other.) "Besides, what scholarship from that era would not sound like fiction today?" (Uh, honest scholarship? Do you want a book list?)

The interesting thing about this book, to me, is the way it illustrates human self-deception, in particular the hubris of those who claim to speak for "Science." Being interested in such curiosities, for me personally the book was worth buying. Mead's sexual fantasies are not the only instance in the 20th Century in which anthropologists sought to throw out "religious dogma" in favor of "scientific" new theories of their own cultivation. As pleasant as an idyllic trip to the islands may be, those for whom such theories hold charm should remember that honest scholarship and imagination are two different things, that vacations in Fantasy Island usually cost something, and that the one who takes the vacation is not always the person who pays the bill.