Coming of Age in Samoa
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation (1928) is a book by American anthropologist Margaret Mead based upon her research and study of youth – primarily adolescent girls – on the island of Taʻū in the Samoan Islands. The book details the sexual life of teenagers in Samoan society in the early 20th century, and theorizes that culture has a leading influence on psychosexual development.
First published in 1928, the book launched Mead as a pioneering researcher and as the most famous anthropologist in the world. Since its first publication, Coming of Age in Samoa was the most widely read book in the field of anthropology until Napoleon Chagnon's Yanomamö: The Fierce People overtook it. The book has sparked years of ongoing and intense debate and controversy on questions pertaining to society, culture, and science. It is a key text in the nature versus nurture debate, as well as in discussions on issues relating to family, adolescence, gender, social norms, and attitudes.
In the 1980s, Derek Freeman contested many of Mead's claims, and argued that she was hoaxed into counterfactually believing that Samoan culture had more relaxed sexual norms than Western culture. However, several members of the anthropology community have rejected Freeman's criticism, accusing him of cherry picking his data, and misrepresenting both Mead's research and the interviews that he conducted. Mead's field work for "Coming of Age" was also scrutinized, and major discrepancies were found between her published statements and her field data. Samoans themselves tend to be critical of what Mead wrote of their culture, especially her claim that adolescent promiscuity was socially acceptable in Samoa in the 1920s.
