Coming of Age in Samoa

Citation

Mead, M. (1928). Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation. William Morrow & Company. Free edition (Project Gutenberg): https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/74750

Chapter Summary

The book has fourteen chapters with a foreword by Franz Boas, followed by five appendices and a glossary of Samoan terms. The first half describes Samoan life from a village morning to the household, the age groups and the community; the middle chapters turn to sex, dance and personality; the last chapters compare Samoa with the United States.

Foreword by Franz Boas

Boas explains why a study of one individual's experience inside a culture matters: systematic descriptions of customs show how people are supposed to behave but little of how they think and feel. He presents the study as a test of the long-held suspicion among anthropologists that much of what is ascribed to human nature is a reaction to the restraints of civilisation.

Chapter 1: Introduction

Mead begins with the American concern about youth and the psychologists, such as Stanley Hall, who treated adolescence as a period of unavoidable conflict. She asks whether the disturbances come from adolescence itself or from civilisation. Since controlled experiments are impossible, she argues, the only method is to study a different society, and she chose Samoa and the adolescent girl. The chapter says she spent nine months in the Manu'a islands and lived with the girls of three villages on the island of Taū.

Chapter 2: A Day in Samoa

A descriptive chapter that follows a village from dawn through the work of the day, giving the setting (houses, fishing, plantations, relatives asking favours, news of a death) that the later chapters presuppose.

Chapter 3: The Education of the Samoan Child

The chapter follows a child from a birth that carries little ceremony for most babies, through nursing and a simple early upbringing, to the tasks that fill childhood. Small girls spend most of their time minding younger children, and are moved on to fishing, plantation work and weaving only when they are strong enough; the chapter contrasts this with the boy's path toward a possible chief's title. Relative age rather than actual age governs who may command whom.

Chapter 4: The Samoan Household

Describes the household headed by a matai (title-holder), usually of thirty to forty in a village, which includes many relatives beyond the parents and children. Authority is organised by age rather than by closeness of kinship, and a girl at adolescence stands in the middle, with as many people obeying her as she owes obedience to.

Chapter 5: The Girl and Her Age Group

Children begin to form same-sex neighbourhood groups at about seven, hostile to the opposite sex and to groups of other villages. The chapter shows how these gangs shape children's early social lives and then dissolve before adolescence.

Chapter 6: The Girl in the Community

The community ignores children until about fifteen or sixteen, when boys and girls enter organisations that echo the village political structure: the Aumaga (young men), the Aualuma (girls and wives of untitled men) and the matai council, the Fono. The chapter explains how little the community demands of young girls.

Chapter 7: Formal Sex Relations

Traces the girl's attitude to boys from childhood avoidance and the brother-sister taboo through the recognised forms of relationship between unmarried people: the clandestine meeting under the palm trees, elopement, and formal courtship, in which a boy uses a go-between. It also covers the attitude to virginity, the ceremonial marriage of high-ranking girls, the forms of sex relation outside the recognised patterns, and the community's treatment of adultery and divorce.

Chapter 8: The Rôle of the Dance

Treats dancing as the one activity in which almost all ages and both sexes take part, and uses it to analyse education: there are virtuosos but no formal teachers, and children learn at small informal dance parties.

Chapter 9: The Attitude Towards Personality

Argues that the ease of changing residence keeps the Samoans from pressing personality differences, and that the word musu (unwillingness) covers a range of attitudes, producing an incuriosity about motives.

Chapter 10: The Experience and Individuality of the Average Girl

Draws on the girls aged ten to twenty in the three villages to answer "What is coming of age like in Samoa?" It lists what the younger girls know and do not know, and follows the group through puberty.

Chapter 11: The Girl in Conflict

Reserved for the few girls whose temperament or conduct deviated from the norm. The chapter argues that diffuse affection, diffuse authority and the ease of moving between households make serious conflict rare, and examines the exceptions.

Chapter 12: Maturity and Old Age

Completes the life cycle with the unmarried woman of twenty-two or twenty-three, marriage and residence, the narrow sphere of a married woman's life, and old age.

Chapter 13: Our Educational Problems in the Light of Samoan Contrasts

The central argument. Mead concludes that Samoan adolescence differs from childhood only in bodily changes, so storm and stress must come from the social environment, and she compares the two societies point by point: a casual society where no one "plays for high stakes", the diffusion of affection in a large household, the open acceptance of sex, birth and death, the absence of a sharp division between work and play, and little pressure to make important choices.

Chapter 14: Education for Choice

Turns from the Samoan picture to the American. Conflicting standards and the belief that each person must choose are, she argues, the main sources of adolescent difficulty in the United States, and she asks what education can do when the cultural conditions cannot easily be changed.

Appendices

The appendices contain notes to the chapters, a methodology chapter, a description of Samoan civilisation in the late 1920s, a note on the mentally defective and mentally diseased, and the materials on which the analysis is based (record sheet, tables on the sixty-eight girls, tests and check list), followed by a glossary.

Key Concepts

Chapters 1 and 13–14: The argument

• Adolescence and civilisation: the question of whether adolescent turmoil belongs to the stage of life or to the surrounding culture.
• The natural experiment: the argument that the same physical development in two different societies allows a comparison of cultural effects.
• Diffusion of affection and authority: the book's explanation of calm adolescence, with many adults sharing care and many places to go.
• Choice and conflicting standards: the book's explanation of American difficulty.

Chapters 2–12: Samoan life

• The matai and the household: the title-holder who heads an economic and residential unit.
• The age group, the Aumaga and the Aualuma: the groupings of children, young men, and girls and wives.
• Relative age and rank: age and title, not individual temperament, set the pattern of obedience.
• Musu: the word that covers unwillingness and shapes how personality is handled.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• A clear question and design. The introduction states the problem, why a controlled experiment is impossible, and why Samoa was chosen, and the last chapters return to it.
• Ethnography of children and girls. Most chapters follow the life of Samoan children and young women, a subject the introduction says was far less studied than boys' lives, and the appendices give the methodology and the records for the sixty-eight girls.
• Writing for general readers. The chapters are narrative, often built around named individuals, and a glossary explains the Samoan terms.

Limitations

• A small, local sample presented as a general case. The methodology appendix states that the group numbered sixty-eight girls in three villages, that quantitative statements are "practically valueless", and that the cases illuminate rather than prove a thesis; the introduction speaks of fifty girls and of nine months in Samoa, whereas the methodology appendix gives sixty-eight girls and six months.
• Generalising from an "uncomplex" culture. The conclusion that adolescence is not inevitably difficult rests on one society whose contrast with America is stressed in the final chapters; the book's own characterisation of Samoa as a casual place where nobody plays for high stakes is the main part of the explanation.
• Later criticism. Derek Freeman challenged Mead's findings in the 1980s, and the critique is not in this 1928 text. Readers should consult it alongside the book.

Where It Fits in the Course

Among the introductory anthropology books on this list, this is the primary source in the group. Cultural Anthropology: A Toolkit for a Global Age and Small Places, Large Issues are modern introductory textbooks that present concepts and methods with examples from many regions; either can be read first to supply the vocabulary this book uses without explanation. History and Theory in Anthropology places Mead and her teacher Boas within the development of anthropological theory, and Europe and the People without History is a historical anthropology that rejects the picture of separate, timeless societies on which a village study like this one relies; it makes a useful counterpoint.

How to Use This Book

The book is accessible to first-year students and needs no technical background. Read the foreword and Chapter 1 for the question, then Chapters 2–6 for the setting, and Chapters 13–14 for the argument; Chapters 7–12 give the detail on which the argument rests and are worth reading with the methodology appendix open. A useful exercise is to list the features that Chapter 13 says explain calm adolescence and then ask what evidence in Chapters 2–12 supports each. Pair the book with a modern textbook, and with Freeman's later critique, to see how ethnographic claims are tested.

Edition and Sources

This guide covers the first edition of 1928 (William Morrow & Company, with the foreword by Franz Boas), read in the free Project Gutenberg text (eBook #74750). The foreword, the acknowledgments and table of contents, the introduction, the chapter openings and the argumentative chapters 13 and 14 were read, together with the methodology and materials appendices; chapters 7–12 were read in part.