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Selection from Coming of Age in Samoa 1928 MARGARET MEAD Selection from Coming of Age in Samoa . 1928 The most obvious function performed by social scientists in modern America has been a cognitive one: the advancement of knowledge about society. Another, more subtle func- tion has been a moral one: the articulation and criticism of standards for conduct. The role of the public moralist had long been performedby the clergy and by men and women of letters, but in the twentieth century this role increasingly came to be filled by psy- chologists, anthropologists, sociologists, and other practitioners of social science. The anthropologist Margaret Mead (1901-78) was perhaps the most influential single example of "the social scientist as public moralist." Mead wrote thirty-four books on a multitude of topics, many of which were only remotely anthropological. Shewas a formidable pres- ence in American intellectual life for half a century, beginning with her Coming of Age in Samoa(1928), from which the selection that follows is taken. Mead's study of adolescent girls in Samoawas offered frankly as a means of fostering a critical perspective on the growing-up experiencesof young people in Mead's own society. In our excerpt she sums up the lessonsshe wishes readersto derive from her study. Mead was an inveterate enemy of American middle-classprovincialism and invited her readers to develop a diverse cul- ture in which individuals could choose between a great variety of ways of life. Although she expressedmuch sympathy for the homogeneous,easygoing culture she attributed to the people of Samoa,she defended the heterogeneous,complex culture of modern Amer- ica and sought to foster the knowledge and attitudes that would better equip Americans to take advantageof their opportunities. A readable,popular biography is Jane Howard, Margar~t M~ad: A Lif~ (New York, 1984). The quality of Mead's fieldwork as an anthro- pologist has been a matter of dispute, especially in recent years. For a brief, judicious commentary on this controversy see the remarks of JamesClifford in the Times Literary Supplement,May 13, 1983, 475-76. See also Roy Rappaport, "Desecrating the Holy Woman: Derek Freeman'sAttack on Margaret Mead," American Scholar, Summer 1986, 313-47. For an analysis of the cultural-critical role played by Mead, Ruth Benedict, and other anthropologistsof the school of Franz Boas,see Richard Handler, "Boasian Anthro- pology and the Critique of American Culture," American Quart~rly 42 (1990), 252-73. On Boasand the larger Boasiantradition, see GeorgeW. Stocking,Jr., Th~ Shapingof Am~r- ican Anthropology(New York, 1974), esp. 1-20. 206 Margaret Mead 2°7 For many chapters we have followed the lives of Samoan girls, watched them change from babies to baby tenders, learn to make the oven and weave fine mats, forsake the life of the gang to become more active members of the household, defer marriage through as many years of casual love-making as possible, finally marry and settle down to rearing children who will repeat the same cycle. As far as our material per- mitted, an experiment has been conducted to discover what the process of develop- ment was like in a society very different from our own. Because the length of human life and the complexity of our society did not permit us to make our experiment here, to choose a group of baby girls and bring them to maturity under conditions created for the experiment, it was necessary to go instead to another country where history had set the stage for us. There we found girl children passing through the same process of physical development through which our girls go, cutting their first teeth and losing them, cutting their second teeth, growing tall and ungainly, reaching pubeny with their first menstruation, gradually reaching physical maturity, and becoming ready to produce the next generation. It was possible to say: Here are the proper conditions for an experiment; the developing girl is a constant factor in America and in Samoa; the civilisation of America and the civilisation of Samoa are different. In the course of development, the process of growth by which the girl baby becomes a grown woman, are the sudden and conspicuous bodily changes which take place at pubeny accom- panied by a development which is spasmodic, emotionally charged, and accompanied by an awakened religious sense, a flowering of idealism, a great desire for assertion of self against authority-or not? Is adolescence a period of mental and emotional dis- tress for the growing girl as inevitably as teething is a period of misery for the small baby? Can we think of adolescence as a time in the life history of every girl child which carries with it symptoms of conflict and stress as surely as it implies a change in the girl's body? Following the Samoan girls through every aspect of their lives we have tried to answer this question, and we found throughout that we had to answer it in the nega- tive. The adolescent girl in Samoa differed from her sister who had not reached puberty in one chief respect, that in the older girl certain bodily changes were present which were absent in the younger girl. There were no other great differences to set off the group passing through adolescence from the group which would become adoles- cent in two years or the group which had become adolescent two years before. And if one girl past puberty is undersized while her cousin is tall and able to do heavier work, there ~ill be a difference between them, due to their different physical endowment, which will be far greater than that which is due to puberty. The tall, husky girl will be isolated from her companions, forced to do longer, more adult tasks, rendered shy by a change of clothing, while her cousin, slower to attain her growth, will still be treated as a child and will have to solve only the slighrly fewer problems of childhood The precedent of educators here who recommend special tactics in the treatment of adolescent girls translated into Samoan terms would read: Tall girls are different from short girls of the same age, we must adopt a different method of edu- cating them, But when we have answered the question we set out to answer we have not fin- ished with the problem A further question presents itself. 1f it is proved that adoles- Margaret \1.: '"1'".1'~ .,(Age in Samila (Nt"" York \1orro'" 1955). 195-20(, 214-15- 244-48 ~ht I \)28 '91 ~1"rg"rc! \Iead Rernntt'd b~' pt'rmissl()nill \\".lItam Morro", &: C., ~()~IAL PROGRESS ~ND THE POWER OF INTELLECT cence is not necessarilya specially difficult period in a girl's life-and proved it is if we can find any society in .which that is so-then what accounts for the presenceof storm and stress in American adolescents?First, we may say quite simply, that there must be something in the two civilisations to account for the difference. If the same process takes a different form in two different environments, we cannot make any explanationsin terms of the process,for that is the same in both cases.But the social environment is very different and it is to it that we must look for an explanation. What is there in Samoawhich is absentin America, what is there in America which is absent in Samoa,which will account for this difference? Such a question has enormous implications and any attempt to answer it will be subject to many possibilities of error. But if we narrow our question to the way in which aspects of Samoan life which irremediably affect the life of the adolescent girl differ from the forces which influence our growing girls, it is possible to try to answer it. The background of these differences is a broad one, with two important compo- nents; one is due to characteristics which are Samoan, the other to characteristics which are primitive. The Samoanbackground which makes growing up so easy, so simple a matter, is the general casualnessof the whole society. For Samoais a place where no one plays for very high stakes,no one pays very heavy prices, no one suffers for his convictions or fights to the death for special ends. Disagreementsbetween parent and child are settled by the child's moving across the street, between a man and his village by the man's removal to the next village, between a husband and his wife's seducerby a few fine mats. Neither poverty nor great disastersthreaten the people to make them hold their lives dearly and tremble for continued existence. No implacable gods, swift to anger and strong to punish, disturb the even tenor of their days. Wars and cannibalism are long since passedaway and now the greatest cause for tears, short of death itself, is a journey of a relative to another island. No one is hurried along in life or punished harshly for slownessof development. Instead the gifted, the precocious,are held back, until the slowest among them have caught the pace. And in personal relations, caring is as slight. Love and hate, jealousy and revenge, sorrow and bereavement, are all matters of weeks. From the first months of its life, when the child is handed carelessly from one woman's hands to another's, the lesson is learned of not caring for one per- son greatly, not setting high hopes on anyone relationship. And just as we may feel that the Occident penalisesthose unfortunates who are born into Western civilisation with a taste for meditation and a complete distaste for activity, so we may say that Samqa is kind to those who have learned the lesson of not caring, and hard upon those few individuals who have fai.ledto learn it.
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