Margaret mead coming of age in samoa summary. Summary Of Margaret Mead's Coming Of Age In Samoa 2022-10-21
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Margaret Mead was an influential cultural anthropologist who is known for her work on the psychological and social development of individuals within the context of their culture. One of her most famous studies, "Coming of Age in Samoa," was published in 1928 and examined the process of growing up in the Polynesian culture of Samoa.
Mead's study was based on her fieldwork in Samoa, where she lived for several months and conducted extensive interviews with Samoan girls and young women. She found that the process of coming of age in Samoa was significantly different from that in Western cultures.
One key difference was the lack of emphasis on individualism in Samoan culture. Instead of striving for individual achievement, Samoans placed a strong emphasis on the well-being and harmony of the community. This was reflected in the fact that Samoan girls were not expected to conform to strict gender roles, and they were given more freedom and autonomy to explore their interests and passions.
Another notable aspect of Samoan culture was the lack of intense psychological and emotional turmoil during adolescence. In Western cultures, adolescence is often marked by intense emotional and psychological changes as individuals struggle to find their identity and place in the world. In contrast, Samoan adolescents experienced a relatively smooth transition into adulthood, with less emphasis on individual identity and more focus on fitting into and contributing to the community.
Mead's study had a significant impact on the field of anthropology and on the way that people in Western cultures thought about adolescence and coming of age. It challenged the idea that the psychological and social development of individuals is universal and showed that it is heavily influenced by cultural factors. Today, Mead's work continues to be studied and cited as an important contribution to the understanding of human development.
Summary Of Margaret Mead's Coming Of Age In Samoa
The girls' minds were perplexed by no conflicts, troubled by no philosophical queries, beset by no remote ambitions. Years later, in seminary in New York, I became close friends with Mead's Episcopal confessor and actually crossed paths with the great woman herself on the Columbia University campus. . Theoretical Considerations The most important issue or problem that arises in the theoretical part of combining both qualitative and quantitative methods is the definition of combined methods or mixed methods itself. The use of cross-cultural comparison to highlight issues within Western society was highly influential and contributed greatly to the heightened awareness of anthropology and ethnographic study in the United States. Their daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson, also became an anthropologist. For instance, she discovered that monogamy marriage to one person and jealousy were not valued or understood by the Samoans, and that divorce occurred simply by the husband or wife "going home.
The dance is what brought the surprisingly diverse "primitive" community together. Mead commented, somewhat satirically:. Thomas University in Fredericton not, I might add, before having to defend the academic merit of the courses before an all male Catholic University Senate who had some difficulty understanding why courses about social work with women were important at all. The first two topics had been interesting me more and more over the last few years. The forming of groups is an important part of Samoan life from early childhood when young children form groups for play and mischief.
Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation by Margaret Mead
Discussion: I found all the information from the tables to be really interesting. The family moved frequently during her youth. Mead also describes adolescence and the time before marriage as the high point of a Samoan girl's life: "But the seventeen year old girl does not wish to marry — not yet. This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. The data that Mead shares throughout the book is quantitative, painting a picture of everyday life for women in Samoa. Margaret Mead was an American cultural anthropologist who was frequently a featured writer and speaker in the mass media throughout the '60s and '70s as a popularizer of the insights of anthropology into modern American and western life but also a respected, if controversial, academic anthropologist. Mead describes how the extended family provides security and safety for Samoan children.
Mead states that it is the plethora of choices in people's values that causes neurosis in modern man that is largely absent in Samoan culture. Considering the utter lack of privacy for the women and the freedom of latitude that is given to them in matters of sexuality, it would make sense that anything done in private would be considered bad. Mead states that masturbation is nearly universal. Retrieved 4 August 2017. Firstly, the TSCD shifted the focus in anthropology from so-called primitive societies to western society. As obessively neurotic as I'd become about the subject, it was refreshing to read about a culture that seemed both relatively free of hang-ups and liberal as regards youthful erotic behavior.
An Analysis of Margaret Mead's "The Coming of Age in Samoa"
. She looked disconcertingly like my grandmother. If the relationship was to be clandestine, the soa would approach the girl during her daily activities and schedule the rendezvous. Her emphasis is on Samoan adolescent girls, but as elsewhere she needs to also describe Samoan social structures for the entire culture to give a complete picture. How the Mind Works. She was director of research in contemporary cultures at Columbia University from 1948 to 1950 and adjunct professor of anthropology there after 1954.
The Trashing of Margaret Mead: Anatomy of an anthropological controversy. Freeman claims Mead's letters to Boas reflect that she was influenced by studies of sexuality from :139 She sent her conclusions to Boas on March14 :142—143,146 and with "little left to do" :148 she cut short her trip. Mead's seminal work is used by many sociology classes including one I took during my undergraduate years to show that many of the cultural practices we might assume are universal among humankind in fact depend upon our social context. Instead, the TSCD was designed so multiple disciplines including psychologists and linguists could work together in investigating different cultures. Margaret Mead disseminated the incredible claim that Samoans have no passions — no anger between parents and children or between a cuckold and seducer, no revenge, no lasting love or bereavement,. Summary: In this second chapter, Margaret Mead describes with much detail a regular day at Samoa. Consequently, I depended a lot on the books at t During childhood summers spent at grandmother's cottage in SW Michigan there was little to do but go on walks with the dog, play solitaire, knit, assemble puzzles or read.
Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western ...
Those who approach Coming of Age as though it contains salacious passages that will make reading the rest of it worthwhile will be disappointed. The Culture Cult: Designer tribalism and other essays. Are Western adolescent problems due to civilization or is it inherent to adolescence? Retrieved 29 September 2014. Indeed, a perusal of this particular title suggested a lot of material about girls and sex on some tropical island. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom following her death in 1978.
Is adolescence a period of mental and emotional distress for the growing girl as inevitably as teething is a period of misery for the small baby? Luna had multiple lovers at the same time while Namu had a primary lover and had several boys on the side that were males that she would pass the time with when her primary lover was not available. She was then probably the most famous anthropologist in the world. In a class with the famous anthropologist Franz Boas, she learned of the importance of studying cultures that were rapidly disappearing around the world. The most disliked trait is being "stuck up". She concluded that this data demonstrated cultural determinism and that gender differences are determined by social factors. Coming of age in Samoa is an important book for two reasons: a In a world dominated by men, Margaret Mead was an anthropologist studying women and b her study was primarily about women in Samoa - their life cycle, nurturing and impact of foreign culture i.
At the time of her birth her father was a Professor of Finance at the Wharton School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania. In fact, one of the things Mead most admired about the culture - and the book gives every indication that she fell in love with it, as far as possible became part of it, far from the detached ethnographic observer - was that Samoans did not differentiate work and play and social life. It virtually launched the discipline of cultural anthropology, at least in the mind of the general public. A chief is someone who has above average abilities but not someone who is the best in anything he does. She found that mothers charged older sisters aged six through ten with the care of their younger siblings. Her keen observations contain many ideas that are still powerful today—that sexuality is culturally-shaped, that adolescence need not be stressful, and that the lives of adolescent girls are worthy of attention and respect.
Samoan culture is a laissez-faire culture devoid of any competition for women so they do not feel pressured to be or do anything. Mead admits she profiled a society in transition. Mead's Samoan name was also Makelita. From the smallest kids, to the elders of the villages, Mead captures their daily lives and customs, giving a general idea of how the life at a community like this one is. Mead published her findings in Coming of Age in Samoa 1923. The focus of this ethnography is to expose the average American to the lives of Samoans, specifically young Samoan females and compare them to their American counterparts.
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