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

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.

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.

I was the Medical Director of American Samoa a few years after Mead's six

month in Ta'u, a village in the Manu'a group and spent over two years there. On my trips to Manu'a I found and talked to Chief Tufele and those Mead worked with. With two years study of Hawaiian I was able to converse with them quite easily. Mead studied Samoan for only six weeks in Pago Pago.

There are many errors and self-projections in the work of a 23-year old girl fresh out of college on her first field trip, but not enough to incur

Freeman's wrath. About half of his criticisms are not true.