Coming of Age in Samoa

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Coming of Age in Samoa, first published in 1928, is a book by Margaret Mead based upon youth in Samoa and lightly relating to youth in America. Mead's findings seemed to show that youth in Samoa are taught to grow together and strengthen the confidence of each other. As a result, their community is much more tightly knit than that of other cultures, and the individuals themselves are more emotionally secure. In contrast, American youth are taught to compete against each other, leaving them isolated within their own cliques. The book also put forward the thesis that Samoan teenagers (with greater sexual permissiveness) suffered less psychological stress than American teenagers (with stricter sexual morals). In it:

"[s]he emphatically criticized the neurosis-inducing nuclear family, including the stress of Christian monogamy, and used her Samoan material to demonstrate an alternative to premarital chastity..."^[1]

Contents 1 Criticism 2 Derek Freeman controversy 3 See also 4 References 4.1 Footnotes

[edit] Criticism

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 USA. It established Mead as a substantial figure in American Anthropology, a position she would maintain for the next fifty years. The book has always been highly controversial, and the debates around it ideologically charged. Some claim that Mead's research was fabricated, and the National Catholic Register has even argued that Mead's findings were merely a projection of her own sexual beliefs and reflected her desire to eliminate restrictions on her own sexuality.^[2] The Intercollegiate Studies Institute listed Coming of Age in Samoa as #1 in the list of what it thinks are the "50 Worst Books of the Twentieth Century".^[3] Other critiques center on the lack of scientific method and the unsupported nature of many of Mead's assertions,^{[citation needed]} although this represents the lesser strand of criticism compared to claims of ideological bias and of deliberate public provocation.

[edit] Derek Freeman controversy

Derek Freeman, a New Zealand anthropologist, was inspired by Mead's work and traveled to Samoa to follow up on it. He held that Mead had been misled in the extreme by the two girls to whom she spoke or was completely fabricating her research. Harvard University Press published his book, Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth in 1983, in which he outlined his case: "In this and in his 1999 book, The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead, Freeman claimed that Mead's fieldwork was rushed and unstructured, and that her interviews with two Samoan girls about their social and sexual relationships was unsupported by other informants or additional evidence. His re-interviews of the two original informants also threw doubt upon Mead's thoroughness.

"She must have taken it seriously," one of the girls would say of Mead on videotape years later, "but I was only joking. As you know, Samoan girls are terrific liars when it comes to joking. But Margaret accepted our trumped up stories as though they were true." If challenged by Mead, the girls would not have hesitated to tell the truth, but Mead never questioned their stories. The girls, now mature women, swore on the Bible to the truth of what they told Freeman and his colleagues."^{[citation needed]}

Much like Mead's work, Freeman's account has been challenged as being ideologically driven to support his own theoretical viewpoint (sociobiology and interactionism), as well as assigning Mead a high degree of gullibility and bias. Freeman's refutation of Samoan sexual mores has been challenged, in turn, as being based on public declarations of sexual morality, virginity, and tapou rather than on actual sexual practices within Samoan society during the period of Mead's research.^[4] Freeman was also criticised for not publishing Margaret Mead and Samoa until after Mead's death in 1978, thus denying Mead a "right of reply."

Considerable controversy remains over the veracity of both Mead's and Freeman's accounts. Lowell Holmes, who completed a lesser publicised restudy commented later, "Mead was better able to identify with, and therefore establish rapport with, adolescents and young adults on issues of sexuality than either I (at age 29, married with a wife and child) or Freeman, ten years my senior".^[5]

[edit] See also

• Margaret Mead - Discusses this book, and the controversy in more depth.
• Culture of Samoa
• Heretic (play) - A play by Australian playwright David Williamson on the controversy.

[edit] References

• Hiram Caton, "The Mead/Freeman Controversy is Over: A Retrospect", Journal of Youth and Adolescence 29, 5 (Oct 2000).
• Derek Freeman, Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth (1983) (first making his case against Mead)
• Derek Freeman, The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead (1999)
• Holmes, L.D. and Holmes, E.R, Samoan Village Then And Now, Harcourt Brace, 1992.
• Paul Shankman, "The History of Samoan Sexual Conduct and the Mead-Freeman Controversy", American Anthropologist 98, 3 (1996).

[edit] Footnotes