Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation

Dedication

To the Girls of Tau

This Book Is Dedicated

’Ou te avatu

lenei tusitala

ia te ’outou

O Teinetiti ma le Aualuma

o Taū

Contents

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Words for a New Century by Mary Catherine Bateson

Introduction to the Perennial Classics Edition

Foreword by Franz Boas, 1928

Preface to the 1973 Edition

    I    Introduction

   II    A Day in Samoa

  III    The Education of the Samoan Child

  IV    The Samoan Household

    V    The Girl and Her Age Group

  VI    The Girl in the Community

  VII    Formal Sex Relations

VIII    The role of the Dance

  IX    The Attitude Towards Personality

    X    The Experience and Individuality of the Average Girl

  XI    The Girl in Conflict

  XII    Maturity and Old Age

XIII    Our Educational Problems in the Light of Samoan Contrasts

 XIV    Education for Choice

Appendix I: Notes to Chapters

Appendix II: Methodology of This Study

Appendix III: Samoan Civilisation as It Is Today

Appendix IV: The Mentally Defective and the Mentally Diseased

Appendix V: Materials upon Which the Analysis Is Based

a.  Sample Record Sheet

b.  Table I. Showing Menstrual History, Sex Experience and Residence in Pastor’s Household

c.  Table II. Family Structure, and Analysis of Table

d.  Intelligence Tests Used

e.  Check List Used in Investigation of Each Girl’s Experience

Index and Glossary

About the Author

Back Ad

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to the generosity of the Board of Fellowships in the Biological Sciences of the National Research Council whose award of a fellowship made this investigation possible. I have to thank my father for the gift of my travelling expenses to and from the Samoan Islands. To Prof. Franz Boas I owe the inspiration and the direction of my problem, the training which prepared me to undertake such an investigation, and the criticism of my results.

For a co-operation which greatly facilitated the progress of my work in the Pacific, I am indebted to Dr. Herbert E. Gregory, Director of the B. P. Bishop Museum and to Dr. E. C. S. Handy and Miss Stella Jones of the Bishop Museum.

To the endorsement of my work by Admiral Stitt and the kindness of Commander Owen Mink, U. S. N., I owe the co-operation of the medical authorities in Samoa, whose assistance greatly simplified and expedited my investigation. I have to thank Miss Ellen M. Hodgson, Chief Nurse, the staff nurses, the Samoan nurses, and particularly G. F. Pepe for my first contacts and my instruction in the Samoan language. To the hospitality, generosity, and sympathetic cooperation of Mr. Edward R. Holt, Chief Pharmacist Mate, and Mrs. Holt, I owe the four months’ residence in their home which furnished me with an absolutely essential neutral base from which I could study all the individuals in the village and yet remain aloof from native feuds and lines of demarcation.

The success of this investigation depended upon the co-operation and interest of several hundred Samoans. To mention each one individually would be impossible. I owe special thanks to County Chief Ufuti of Vaitogi and to all the members of his household and to the Talking Chief Lolo, who taught me the rudiments of the graceful pattern of social relations which is so characteristic of the Samoans. I must specially thank their excellencies, Tufele, Governor of Manu’a, and County Chiefs Tui Olesega, Misa, Sotoa, Asoao, and Leui, the Chiefs Pomele, Nua, Tialigo, Moa, Maualupe, Asi, and the Talking Chiefs Lapui and Muao; the Samoan pastors Solomona and Iakopo, the Samoan teachers, Sua, Napoleon, and Eti; Toaga, the wife of Sotoa, Fa’apua’a, the Taupo of Fitiuta, Fofoa, Laula, Leauala, and Felofiaina, and the chiefs and people of all the villages of Manu’a and their children. Their kindness, hospitality, and courtesy made my sojourn among them a happy one; their co-operation and interest made it possible for me to pursue my investigation with peace and profit. The fact that no real names are used in the course of the book is to shield the feelings of those who would not enjoy such publicity.

For criticism and assistance in the preparation of this manuscript I am indebted to Dr. R. F. Benedict, Dr. L. S. Cressman, Miss M. E. Eichelberger, and Mrs. M. L. Loeb.

M. M.

The American Museum of Natural History,

New York

March 1928

Words for a New Century

by Mary Catherine Bateson

When my mother, Margaret Mead, was ready to seek a publisher for her first book, Coming of Age in Samoa, she found her way to William Morrow, the head of a new publishing company, and he gave her a key suggestion for the rest of her career, that she add more about what all this means to Americans. This set a course she followed throughout her life, establishing not only the appeal of anthropology as a depiction of the exotic but as a source of self-knowledge for Western civilization. The last chapter of Coming of Age laid out a theme for the years ahead: Education for Choice.

Even before World War II, still using the terminology of her time that now seems so outmoded and speaking of primitives or even of savages, she believed that Americans should learn not only about the peoples of the Pacific, but from them. And after almost every field trip she went back to William Morrow, now HarperCollins, where many of her books have remained in print ever since, offering new meanings to new generations of Americans. A century after her birth, they are offered once again, now for a new millennium, and today they still have much to offer on how individuals mature in their social settings and how human communities can adapt to change.

Several of Mead’s field trips focused on childhood. Writers have been telling parents how to raise their children for centuries; however, the systematic observation of child development was then just beginning, and she was among the first to study it cross-culturally. She was one of those feminists who have combined an assertion of the need to make women full and equal participants in society with a continuing fascination with children and a concern for meeting their needs. A culture that repudiated children could not be a good culture, she believed. [Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years, New York: William Morrow and Company, 1972, p. 206.]

After studying adolescents in Samoa, she studied earlier childhood in Manus (Growing Up in New Guinea) and the care of infants and toddlers in Bali; everywhere she went, she included women and children, who had been largely invisible to earlier researchers. Her work continues to affect the way parents, teachers, and policy makers look at children. I, for one, am grateful that what she learned from the sophisticated and sensitive patterns of childcare she observed in other cultures resonated in my own childhood. Similarly, I have been liberated by the way her interest in women as mothers expanded into her work on gender (Sex and Temperament and Male and Female).

In addition to this growing understanding of the choices in gender roles and childrearing, the other theme that emerged from her fieldwork was change. The first postwar account of fieldwork that she brought to her longtime publisher described her 1953 return to the Manus people of New Guinea, New Lives for Old. This was not a book about how traditional cultures are eroded and damaged by change but about the possibility of a society choosing change and giving a direction to their own futures. Mead is sometimes labeled a cultural determinist (so obsessed are we with reducing every thinker to a single label). The term does reflect her belief that the differences in expected behavior and character between societies (for instance, between the Samoans and the Manus) are largely learned in childhood, shaped by cultural patterns passed on through the generations that channel the biological potentials of every child, rather than by genetics. Because culture is a human artifact that can be reshaped, rather than an inborn destiny, she was not a simple determinist, and her convictions about social policy always included a faith in the human capacity to learn. After the 1950s, Mead wrote constantly about change, how it occurs, and how human communities can maintain the necessary threads of connection across the generations and still make choices. In that sense, hers was an anthropology of human freedom.

Eventually, Mead wrote for Morrow the story of her own earlier years, Blackberry Winter, out of the conviction that her upbringing by highly progressive and intellectual parents had made her ahead of her time, so that looking at her experience would serve those born generations later. She never wrote in full of her later years, but she did publish a series of letters, written to friends, family, and colleagues over the course of fifty years of fieldwork, that bring the encounter with unfamiliar cultures closer to our own musings. Although Letters from the Field, was published elsewhere, by Harper & Row, corporate metamorphoses have for once been serendipitous and made it possible to include Letters from the Field in this HarperCollins series, where it belongs. Mead often wrote for other publishers, but this particular set of books was linked by that early desire to spell out what her personal and professional experience could and should mean to Americans. That desire led her to write for Redbook and to appear repeatedly on television, speaking optimistically and urgently about our ability to make the right choices. Unlike many intellectuals, she was convinced of the intelligence of general readers, just as she was convinced of the essential goodness of democratic institutions. Addressing the public with respect and affection, she became a household name.

Margaret Mead’s work has gone through many editions, and the details of her observations and interpretations have been repeatedly critiqued and amended, as all pioneering scientific work must be. In spite of occasional opportunistic attacks, her colleagues continue to value her visionary and groundbreaking work. But in preparing this series, we felt it was important to seek introductions outside of ethnography that would focus on the themes of the books as seen from the point of view of Americans today who are concerned about how we educate our children, how we provide for the full participation of all members of society, and how we plan for the future. Times change, but comparison is always illuminating and always suggests the possibility of choice. Teenage girls in Samoa in the 1920s provided an illuminating comparison with American teenagers of that era, who were still living in the shadow of the Victorian age, and they provide an equally illuminating comparison with girls today, who are under early pressure from demands on their sexuality and their gender. Preteen boys in Manus allow us to examine alternative emphases on physical skills and on imagination in childhood—and do so across fifty years of debate about how to offer our children both. Gender roles that were being challenged when Mead was growing up reverted during the postwar resurgence of domesticity and have once again opened up—but the most important fact to remember about gender is that it is culturally constructed and that human beings can play with the biology of sex in many different ways. So we read these books with their echoes not only of distant climes but also of different moments in American history, in order to learn from the many ways of being human how to make better choices for the future.

Introduction to the Perennial Classics Edition

Coming of Age in Samoa is a small book written over seventy years ago by a twenty-four-year-old woman about teenage girls in a distant place. It has stayed with us, profoundly informing many of the great debates of our century and inspiring much controversy and discussion. My mother was a girl on a ranch in Colorado when Coming of Age in Samoa was published. She read it in college in the 1930s. I read it in college in the 1960s. Now, with this new edition, my daughter may read it and maybe even my granddaughter.

I’m deeply honored to review this book. Like Mead, I have always been interested in how culture affects mental health. I too have loved to study at the intersection of psychology and anthropology, an area once called Culture and Personality. Like Mead, I have believed that good cultures make better people, and I have felt that it is our responsibility and joy to work for positive cultural change. In my speeches, I have often quoted Mead’s beautiful line, Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world.

And, of course, I share her interest in teenage girls. In Coming of Age in Samoa, Mead identified some of the pressures American girls faced in the 1920s. With Reviving Ophelia, I did very much the same thing in the 1990s. Mead criticized the pressures women faced early in the century to be virginal until marriage. She felt that in Samoa young women were free to choose their partners and experiment with their sexuality according to their own wishes. Ironically, at the end of the century, I criticized the pressures young women felt to constantly define themselves as sexual. Regardless of what American girls wanted or needed, by the time they were in high school, they were pushed to be sexually active. Mead and I believed the same thing, that in an ideal culture sexual decisions should be the result of intentional choices.

Mead’s book, with its vivid descriptions of life on a South Sea island and its critique of America’s culture for teens, was an immediate bestseller. Afterwards, Mead was never out of the public eye. Franklin Delano Roosevelt once said of his crusading wife, Lord, please make Eleanor tired. The same remark could have been made about Mead, who once told a staff member, I’m exhausted—find me a lecture to deliver. Mead wrote thirty books, over one thousand articles for popular and professional journals, and was Curator of Ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History. At some point, she earned the nickname grandmother to the world.

With her practical shoes and walking stick, Mead seems to have spoken everywhere. I travel and do a great deal of speaking, and if I mention Margaret Mead, which I often do, I’m told, I heard her speak. She came to our town. However, in spite of her popular appeal and cultural significance, in fact most likely because of it, she remained an adjunct professor at Columbia University, where she taught almost until her death.

As a student of cultural anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley, I read Mead. Everyone in college read Mead in the 1960s. Her writing and teaching fueled an explosion of interest in anthropology. Her idealism and interest in social action appealed to our revolutionary sensibilities. Her fascination with the meaning of change had great relevance in the era of Bob Dylan’s song The Times They Are A-Changin’.

Mead was the original flower child, interested in peace, justice, sexual freedom, and adventure. She worked tirelessly for social change herself and taught everywhere that we could and should build better cultures that produced happier, less aggressive, and more emotionally sturdy people. Her definition of an ideal culture was one that found a place for every human gift. No better definition of an ideal culture has ever been formulated.

When I first read Coming of Age in Samoa, I was struck by Mead’s attention to the lives of girls and women and by her interest in the daily routines of families. She was curious about girls’ talk and games, and she was interested in how they felt about their lives. At that time, I was certainly no feminist. I had never really thought about women’s issues. But as I read her book, dedicated to the girls of Taū, I found myself delighted and proud that someone believed girls were interesting and important.

From my reading of Coming of Age in Samoa, I acquired several ideas that I still find powerful today—that gender differences are not set in stone, that sexuality is culturally shaped, that adolescence need not be stressful, and that the lives of adolescent girls are worthy of attention and respect. Re-reading this book in 2000, three-quarters of a century after Mead wrote it and thirty-five years after I first read it, the things that come across the strongest are the keenness of Mead’s observational powers, the depth of her respect for the islanders, and her zest for her work. And, of course, still I’m impressed by her attention to girls.

Mead was proud of not being a dry and timid academic. In her 1961 preface she writes, I can emphasize that this was the first piece of anthropological fieldwork that was written without the paraphernalia of scholarship designed to mystify the lay reader and confound one’s colleagues. She wrote for ordinary readers, for whom she might be useful, and she expressed herself simply and dramatically in non-academic language. In fact, the reader whom Mead imagined as she wrote was her grandmother, an intelligent schoolteacher. She tried to make her writing helpful to her.

Mead relished strong opinions. About the Samoans, she was neither condescending nor ethnocentric. A photo of her holding hands with a woman friend in Samoa, barefoot, her hair frizzy, and her face open and happy, shows how warmly she felt towards her subjects.

Mead’s Samoan research drew upon several disciplines. She had some background in psychology and paid attention to family dynamies. Biology, as evidenced by appearance, innate intelligence, and temperament, played an important role in her conceptualization of development. But Mead also argued for the fluidity of human development. Culture played an enormous role in the lives of Samoan girls, and Mead was most interested in what she called the interplay between endowment and cultural style.

Coming of Age in Samoa influenced the nature vs. nurture debate that raged at the beginning of the century and still rages today. It has many current forms, such as the recent debates over gender and the role of biology in mental health. Right now, biological determinists are strong and growing stronger. But the tide may turn yet again. If Mead were alive, she would love to be in the thick of the current debates. She had a rich and sophisticated view of the multiple factors that shaped human beings, and we social activists could use her intelligent, compassionate arguments today.

Mead’s viewpoint in Coming of Age in Samoa on the destructive effects of isolation and intensity in nuclear families influenced our first generation of family therapists. Early advocates of sexual freedom, such as Havelock Ellis and Bertrand Russell, loved this book. And of course, Mead’s ideas about sexual experimentation were wildly popular during the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Her ideas about adolescence have permeated our culture. Thousands of books and articles have been written praising and attacking this book. Mead has been the darling and the curse of feminists, the flag bearer for proponents of social engineering, and a strong advocate for indigenous peoples, even though these same peoples have sometimes been quite critical of her work.

Why read Mead today? The Samoa that Mead wrote about no longer exists. Even Mead, the expert on social change, couldn’t predict the rapidity with which worlds would disappear in our last century. But Mead didn’t go to Samoa just to study Samoans. Rather she wanted to understand the whole human race. She used her work in Samoa to examine big questions: How does culture shape individuals? What is the role of biology in human behavior? There are no more interesting questions.

In an era of specialization, Mead was a synthesizer, a connector of dots. She was bold, open-hearted, and timely. She wanted her writing to change the world. Her ideas have a relevance and resonance with issues of today. Her analysis of the problems of teens is curiously modern. At root, 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. She believed in teaching children how to think, not what to think, and in the importance of intentionality in decision making. Her conclusions, that adolescence need not be a time of stress and strain and that growing up could be freer and easier than we make it in America, are still being discussed in the beginning of a new century.

Sophisticated scientists with the benefit of decades of hindsight may pick at Mead’s work. She was, after all, a steamboat anthropologist who sailed to Samoa when President Harding was in office. But the questions she examined and inspired others to examine are the best questions we have. Her vision of a good society with tolerance, justice, joy, individual freedom, and communal pleasure beams out to us as the best vision we have. Her belief that we could change human nature, while hard for us to sustain after our troubled twentieth century, is still what motivates many of us to do good work.

In significance, Coming of Age in Samoa is right up there with the paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe, the political activism of Eleanor Roosevelt, the poetry of Mary Oliver, the Vietnam War memorial by Maya Ying Lin, and The Diary of Anne Frank. This small book written about teenage girls captured a moment in a particular place and time and became one of our most important cultural products. America in the twentieth century couldn’t have had a better grandmother.

—Mary Pipher, Ph.D.

Foreword by Franz Boas, 1928

Modern descriptions of primitive people give us a picture of their culture classified according to the varied aspects of human life. We learn about inventions, household economy, family and political organisation, and religious beliefs and practices. Through a comparative study of these data and through information that tells us of their growth and development, we endeavour to reconstruct, as well as may be, the history of each particular culture. Some anthropologists even hope that the comparative study will reveal some tendencies of development that recur so often that significant generalisations regarding the processes of cultural growth will be discovered.

To the lay reader these studies are interesting on account of the strangeness of the scene, the peculiar attitudes characteristic of foreign cultures that set off in strong light our own achievements and behaviour.

However, a systematic description of human activities gives us very little insight into the mental attitudes of the individual. His thoughts and actions appear merely as expressions of rigidly defined cultural forms. We learn little about his rational thinking, about his friendships and conflicts with his fellowmen. The personal side of the life of the individual is almost eliminated in the systematic presentation of the cultural life of the people. The picture is standardised, like a collection of laws that tell us how we should behave, and not how we behave; like rules set down defining the style of art, but not the way in which the artist elaborates his ideas of beauty; like a list of inventions, and not the way in which the individual overcomes technical difficulties that present themselves.

And yet the way in which the personality reacts to culture is a matter that should concern us deeply and that makes the studies of foreign cultures a fruitful and useful field of research. We are accustomed to consider all those actions that are part and parcel of our own culture, standards which we follow automatically, as common to all mankind. They are deeply ingrained in our behaviour. We are moulded in their forms so that we cannot think but that they must be valid everywhere.

Courtesy, modesty, good manners, conformity to definite ethical standards are universal, but what constitutes courtesy, modesty, good manners, and ethical standards is not universal. It is instructive to know that standards differ in the most unexpected ways. It is still more important to know how the individual reacts to these standards.

In our own civilisation the individual is beset with difficulties which we are likely to ascribe to fundamental human traits. When we speak about the difficulties of childhood and of adolescence, we are thinking of them as unavoidable periods of adjustment through which every one has to pass. The whole psycho-analytic approach is largely based on this supposition.

The anthropologist doubts the correctness of these views, but up to this time hardly any one has taken the pains to identify himself sufficiently with a primitive population to obtain an insight into these problems. We feel, therefore, grateful to Miss Mead for having undertaken to identify herself so completely with Samoan youth that she gives us a lucid and clear picture of the joys and difficulties encountered by the young individual in a culture so entirely different from our own. The results of her painstaking investigation confirm the suspicion long held by anthropologists, that much of what we ascribe to human nature is no more than a reaction to the restraints put upon us by our civilisation.

Preface to the 1973 Edition

This book is a record of my first field trip,