Samoa: The Adolescent Girl
In
1925, Margaret Mead journeyed to the South Pacific territory of
American Samoa. She sought to discover whether adolescence was
a universally traumatic and stressful time due to biological factors
or whether the experience of adolescence depended on one's cultural
upbringing. After spending about nine months observing and interviewing
Samoans, as well as administering psychological tests, Mead concluded
that adolescence was not a stressful time for girls in Samoa because
Samoan cultural patterns were very different from those in the
United States. Her findings were published in Coming of Age
in Samoa (1928), a vivid, descriptive account of Samoan adolescent
life that became tremendously popular. It was published in more
than a dozen editions in a variety of languages and made Mead
famous. One of the reasons for the popularity of the book was
that Mead had revised the introduction and conclusion of her original
manuscript, adding two chapters that dealt directly with the implications
of her findings for child rearing in the United States.
Though it was a popular success
and has been used in numerous undergraduate anthropology classes,
Coming of Age in Samoa has received varying degrees of
criticism over the years. Some of her results have been called
into question by other anthropologists, and she has been criticized
for romanticizing Samoan life and downplaying evidence contrary
to her main argument. In addition, some Samoans have found her
depiction of Samoan adolescent sexuality offensive.
In addition to her popular volume
on Samoan adolescence, Mead wrote a more technical account of
Samoan culture entitled The Social Organization of Manu'a
(1930).
Final Instructions and Admonition
Shortly before Mead departed for Samoa, Franz Boas wrote
her a letter with final instructions on her research project.
She was to examine "the psychological attitude of the individual
under the pressure of the general pattern of culture" and
discover whether or not Samoan adolescent girls possessed
the same "rebellious spirit" found in American adolescents.
He warned her not to spend too much time studying Samoan
culture generally at the expense of this particular problem.
Boas begins and ends the letter with paternal reminders
to safeguard her health. Mead, who was thin and frail as
a young woman, went through frequent bouts of poor health,
including chronic pain from neuritis in her arms and severe
menstrual cramps. During her time in Samoa, Mead suffered
not only from these ailments, but also an infected foot,
conjunctivitis (which made reading difficult), tonsilitis,
and toothaches.
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Franz Boas.
Letter to Margaret Mead,
July 14, 1925.
Page 2
Typescript.
Manuscript Division
(61)
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Margaret Mead.
Letter to Ruth
Benedict,
October 11, 1925.
Holograph manuscript.
Manuscript
Division (52)
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Choosing a Household
Some critics of Mead's Samoan field study have objected
to her choice of housing on the island of Ta'u, where she
conducted her study of adolescent girls. She chose to live
in the naval dispensary with an American family rather than
in a Samoan household. In this previously unavailable letter
to Ruth Benedict, Mead explains her decision and expresses
concern that she may be "coddling" herself by not living
in a Samoan household.
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TRANSCRIPTION OF FIRST PAGE OF LETTER:
Ruth dearest- I'm enclosing a copy of
my letter to Dr. Boas - designed to concentrate his attention
upon the advantages of Ta'u. If he talks to you about it,
assure him that I'll be better off than in one of the villages
here. I will. I'm pretty sure. If I were only sure that
I wasn't sherking [sic] by living in a white home. But food
makes all the difference between efficiency and inefficiency.
The food here at the hotel [in Pago Pago] keeps me anything
but at my best - and Mrs. Holt is a good cook. It will mean
food bought from the canteen instead of from native stores
and it will mean pure water. I don't know whether I'm just
coddling myself, but there would be no place to work in
a native house - and no privacy for work. Every word I wrote
they'd be looking over my shoulder.
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Mead's Room in Samoa
On Ta'u, Mead lived in the household of the U.S. Navy's
chief pharmacist and his family. Her room occupied half
of the porch of the naval dispensary. A bamboo lattice separated
her bed from the rest of the porch. Living in a western-style
house instead of an open-sided Samoan house allowed Mead
extra privacy, but her room was also easily accessible from
the outside. Young visitors stopped by to socialize at all
hours, dancing and singing and providing her with information
for her research.
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Field Notes
This page is from one of the six field notebooks Mead kept
in Samoa. This notebook contains material from her stay
in Fitiuta, a village at the eastern end of Ta'u island,
about eight miles away from her home base in Luma, on the
west coast. Her notes here refer primarily to the material
culture of the village, including a diagram of a "porch
built out at end of house."
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Margaret Mead,
"Fitiuta,"
in field notebook #3
from Samoa. 1925-26.
Holograph manuscript.
Manuscript Division
(58)
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Margaret Mead.
Letter to Ruth
Benedict,
January 4, 1926.
Page 2
Holograph manuscript.
Manuscript
Division (63)
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"...As Cryptic and Illegible and Brief as I Like"
In this previously unavailable letter, Mead explains how
she approached her Samoan note-taking. She states that she
is preserving general ethnological materials carefully so
that they can be used by anyone with a knowledge of Polynesia.
Her incomplete notes on the problem assigned her by Boas
would be of no use to anyone else, however, "so I'm being
as cryptic and illegible and brief as I like." The materials
in the Library's Mead collection support this distinction.
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PARTIAL TRANSCRIPTION OF LETTER:
Will you do something for me? Will you
write me your notion of just how my results could be most
convincingly presented - convincing to your type of temperament?
I'm a little in the air about the case
method, the statistical
method, etc. And it will make a difference in the
way I take my notes. I've gotten over my notion of attempting
to make all my notes immortal in case I perish before working
them up. Ethnology, I type - 2 carbons - with careful notes
as to informant, locality, etc. All that will be strictly
usable by anyone, an open book to anyone who knows Polynesian.
But if I left this problem in the middle no one could possibly
make anything of it anyhow - so I'm being as cryptic and
illegible and brief as I like. Besides, I've got to save
my energy in every possible way - tho I'm getting steadily
more acclimated and the days are also getting a little cooler.
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Letters and Images of Life in the Field
Mead did not keep a field diary in Samoa. While she wrote
a series of field bulletins for family and friends, the
most intimate view of her time there comes from her almost-daily
letters to Ruth Benedict. These letters chronicle her activities
and varied emotional states in great detail. These three
photographs were enclosed in a letter Mead sent Benedict
dated February 10, 1926. In the accompanying text, Mead
has written of her appearance: "I look very prim and
proper and unpolynesian." In these photographs, Mead
is wearing a wedding dress woven by Makelita, last Queen
of Manu'a. Mead's Samoan name was also Makelita.
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Margaret Mead standing between
two Samoan girls, ca. 1926.
Gelatin silver print.
Manuscript Division.
(50a)
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Margaret Mead sitting between
two Samoan girls, ca. 1926.
Gelatin silver print.
Manuscript Division. (50b)
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Margaret Mead sitting on a
canoe in Samoa, ca. 1926.
Gelatin silver print.
Manuscript Division. (50c)
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Nature versus Nurture: At
the time Margaret Mead journeyed to Samoa in the mid-1920s,
scientists and scholars were engaged in an ongoing dispute
over the relative importance of biological versus socially-acquired
determinants of human behavior, the so-called "nature-nurture
debate." The question is still discussed today: To what
extent are human personality and behavior the products of
biological factors and to what extent are they products
of cultural forces?
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Margaret Mead.
"Field Bulletin
XIII from Samoa,"
March 7, 1926.
Page 2
- Page 3
- Page 4
Typescript.
Manuscript
Division (78)
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Field Bulletin from Samoa
During her field trips, Mead customarily wrote detailed
field bulletins, which were circulated among her family
and friends at home. She wrote this bulletin near the end
of her time in Samoa, a day before departing for Ofu, one
of the other two islands in the Manu'a group. Derek Freeman
later claimed that Mead was not very far along in the work
for her adolescent study when she departed for Ofu. Mead,
however, reports here that her work on her problem is "practically
completed." An abridged version of this bulletin was included
in Mead's Letters from the Field (1977).
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Advice from William Morrow
Beginning with her Samoan materials, Mead sought to convey
her findings to a wide audience. Her publisher, William
Morrow, counseled her to be careful about publishing in
popular publications, lest it damage her scholarly and scientific
reputation among her peers. Morrow thus foresaw the dilemma
Mead would face in being both a public figure and a scientist
and the impact her popular success would have on her professional
career.
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William Morrow.
Letter to Margaret Mead,
June 20, 1928.
Typescript.
Manuscript Division
(65)
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Margaret Mead.
Letter to Derek Freeman,
November 6, 1968.
Page 2
- Page 3
Typescript carbon.
Manuscript
Division (64)
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Mead Responds to Freeman
One of the most prominent critics of Coming of Age
in Samoa was New Zealand-born anthropologist Derek
Freeman (1916-2001). In 1964, Mead and Freeman met in Australia
and discussed disparities in their research. They continued
to correspond until her death. In this letter, Mead answers
some of Freeman's criticisms, addressing his concerns about
seeming anomalies in the appendices to the book, and explains
that she changed some identifying characteristics of people
and households in order to protect the privacy of her subjects.
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Afterward: Derek Freeman and Margaret Mead
In 1983, five years after Margaret
Mead's death, Harvard University Press published a book by Derek
Freeman (1916-2001), an anthropology professor at the Australian
National University, which challenged the accuracy of Mead's findings
in Coming of Age in Samoa. The book, Margaret Mead
and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth,
received widespread media attention. It became a prominent case
study in the ongoing battle over the relative importance of "nature
versus nurture."
Freeman had corresponded with Mead
during her lifetime and questioned her on some of her methods
and results in Samoa. He argued that Mead had erred in her Samoan
work and that she misunderstood the culture because she wanted
to provide her professor Franz Boas with information to demonstrate
his view of the importance of culture. Among other criticisms,
Freeman argued that Mead ignored violence in Samoan life, did
not have a sufficient background in--or give enough emphasis to--the
influence of biology on behavior, did not spend enough time in
Samoa, and was not familiar enough with the Samoan language. Freeman's
charges did not go unchallenged. Other researchers have argued
that he overemphasized the violent and competitive aspects of
Samoan life, quoted Mead selectively, and studied a different
part of Samoa at a later time period. Freeman subsequently published
other books and articles on Mead's Samoan researches, most notably
The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead (1999). In that
book Freeman argued that Mead had been lied to by two of her female
informants and thus came to erroneous conclusions about Samoan
culture and the sexual freedom of the girls. Freeman's claims
were again challenged by other researchers. Even after Freeman's
death on July 6, 2001, scholars continue to debate the issues
raised by this controversy.
Coming of Age in Samoa
Based on her study of 68 girls in three villages in the
western part of Ta'u island, Mead reported that adolescence
was not a stressful time, compared with the expectation
of adolescent "storm and stress" in Western societies. She
attributed this difference to cultural factors. She argued
that, living in a homogenous culture, Samoan adolescent
girls did not face numerous conflicting personal choices
and demands. Because Mead only had a few months to conduct
her study, she developed a cross-sectional approach, looking
at girls of different ages to compensate for not being able
to follow them over time.
Mead later accounted for the book's phenomenal success
by saying that she wrote it "in English." She targeted the
book at an educated public and to those who worked specifically
with children. At the suggestion of her publisher, William
Morrow, Mead revised her original manuscript to focus on
the implications of her findings for American child-rearing
and education and to urge the creation of an educational
system that would prepare American youth for life in a society
filled with abundant choices.
While the book was generally lauded upon publication, there
have been various objections to it over the years, including
criticism of Mead's ahistorical approach and her decision
to apply her findings to American life. Despite its flaws,
Coming of Age in Samoa has been an enduring
popular success. It has been reprinted more than a dozen
times in a variety of languages and editions.
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The Library of Congress does not have
permission to display these images online.
Margaret Mead. Coming of Age in Samoa:
A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization.
Translated into Japanese by Sachiko Hatanaka and Matori
Yamamoto. Tky, Japan: Sju Shob, 1976.
Manuscript Division
(67b)
Margaret Mead. Coming of Age in Samoa:
A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization.
Translated into Hebrew by Nitsah Sabo {Haifa, Israel}: "Ah,"
1978.
Manuscript Division
(67c)
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The Library of Congress does not
have permission to display this image online.
Margaret Mead. Social Organization
of Manu'a. Honolulu: Bernice P. Bishop Museum, 1930
(80)
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Additional Research for the Bishop Museum
As she prepared to leave for the field, Mead was asked
by the director of the Bishop Museum in Honolulu to gather
ethnological information for them in Samoa. Though Boas
in his farewell letter cautioned Mead about spending too
much time on other questions at the expense of her specific
problem, she found time to collect information for the Museum
as well as to carry out her study on adolescent girls. Near
the end of her time in American Samoa, Mead estimated that
the extra research had taken no more than "three weeks--concrete
solid." In 1930 the Bishop Museum published Mead's technical
monograph on Samoan culture, Social Organization of
Manu'a.
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