What is Coming of Age in Samoa about?
The groundbreaking classic detailing Margaret Mead's first field work at age 23, establishing Mead’s core insights into childhood and culture that challenged and changed our view of life.
Rarely do science and literature come together in the same book. 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.
Margaret Mead accomplished this remarkable feat not once but several times, beginning with Coming of Age in Samoa. It details her historic journey to American Samoa, taken when she was just twenty-three, where she did her first fieldwork. 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. Adolescence, she wrote, might be more or less stormy, and sexual development more or less problematic in different cultures.
Mead’s revolutionary book, dedicated to the girls of Tau, was one of the first studies to pay attention to girls’ lives. 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.
Now this groundbreaking, beautifully written work as been reissued for the centennial of Mead's birth, featuring introductions by Mary Pipher, Ph.D. (Reviving Ophelia) and by Mead's daughter, Mary Catherine Bateso (Composing a Life).
This foundational text in social anthropology continues to challenge and inform our understanding of human development by exploring:
- A Groundbreaking Field Study: Journey with a 23-year-old Margaret Mead to 1920s American Samoa as she conducts the immersive fieldwork that would launch her legendary career.
- The Adolescent Experience: A powerful counter-narrative to the idea of universal adolescent turmoil, showing how Samoan girls experienced a smoother transition to adulthood.
- Cultural Relativity: Discover how social structures and cultural expectations—not just biology—shape human behavior, from childhood innocence to adult sexuality.
- The Female Perspective: Explore one of the first academic works to treat the lives of young girls as worthy of serious, respectful attention and analysis.