I wasn't there, it's hard to really know, but I do appreciate her early anthropological work with groups of women. She even puts the girls living with the missionaries in a different category of girlhood because of the additional restrictions they had on their life. Even when she wrote this book, missionaries had taken root there, attempting to change the cultural practices governing various elements of everyday life. There are claims now that she was lied to by the women and that many of the young girls made up stories of sexual activity, but that sounds like church-related coverup to me, not knowing anything about it. This book is her first, pre-dating the work she would do next in New Guinea. After reading Euphoria by Lily King, which is loosely based on Margaret Mead's earliest research, I wanted to go back and read some of her work from that time period. I'm finally leaving New Guinea behind in an attempt to read about some other parts of Oceania before the end of the year. She looked disconcertingly like my grandmother. 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. Alas! My culture wasn't like that, but it did serve a bit to liberate my imagination if not my behavior. 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. The book was not at all as sexy as I'd hoped, but it was informative. The third, the tropical setting, was just iceing on the cake. The first two topics had been interesting me more and more over the last few years. Indeed, a perusal of this particular title suggested a lot of material about girls and sex on some tropical island. However, as I grew older and explored more and more of the adult books in the resident collection, they became less intimidating. Initially, of course, is seemed too grown-up. Consequently, I depended a lot on the books at the house or brought up by guests.Ĭoming of Age in Samoa had been in the living room bookshelf as long as I could remember. But even at a penny per cigarette butt collected from around the house, earning enough for a fifty cent paperback took a while, especially after the grounds had been scoured a couple of times. Some of the books I obtained myself with money earned from doing chores. The "civilized" world, she taught us had much to learn from the "primitive." Now this groundbreaking, beautifully written work as been reissued for the centennial of her birth, featuring introductions by Mary Pipher and by Mead's daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson.ĭuring 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. Adolescence, she wrote, might be more or less stormy, and sexual development more or less problematic in different cultures. Here, for the first time, she presented to the public the idea that the individual experience of developmental stages could be shaped by cultural demands and expectations. It details her historic journey to American Samoa, taken where she was just twenty-three, where she did her first fieldwork. Margaret Mead accomplished this remarkable feat not once but several times, beginning with Coming of Age in Samoa. When they do - as in Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, for example - they become classics, quoted and studied by scholars and the general public alike. "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.Rarely do science and literature come together in the same book. The "civilized" world, she taught us had much to learn from the "primitive." Now this groundbreaking, beautifully written work as been reissued for the centennial of her birth, featuring introductions by Mary Pipher and by Mead's daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson. Rarely do science and literature come together in the same book.
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