Margaret Mead’s “Coming of Age in Samoa” Critique

The impetus for Margaret Mead’s fieldwork in Samoa, very much championed by the anti-universalist sentiments of her mentor, Franz Boas, was to challenge and dispute the notion of an over-arching, predetermined psychological development of the individual.  Guiding, to a certain extent, Mead’s decision to examine the uniqueness of the American girl’s adolescent experience was Freud, whose focus on human psychology proposed and perpetuated the idea of a fixed trajectory that every individual, regardless of culture, experiences.  Showing the culturally relativistic background of Boas’s students, seen also in the work of her contemporary, Ruth Benedict, Mead situates herself in opposition to Freud’s concept of programmed psychological responses with her 1928 work “Coming of Age in Samoa.”  Mead’s position was that the American identification and understanding of adolescence, a time of singular unsettledness and unrest for girls maturing to womanhood, is a product of America itself.  That is, “adolescence” in America is not a product of a particular age, but the manifestations of being that age in America.  As Mead poses the question, “Were these difficulties due to being adolescent or to being adolescent in America?” (129)

To answer this specific inquiry as well as the broader question of if civilization has any bearing on the development of the individual (for Mead’s work, at the age of puberty), Mead makes an ethnographic study of young girls in Samoa (130).  Again, Boas’s influence on Mead is underscored in how she conducts her fieldwork.  Boas’s emphasis on understanding culture at the emic level, of the necessity of the anthropologist immersing himself in the culture in order to gain an understanding of their worldview, without doubt informs Mead’s analytic technique.  As stated during class, Mead’s ability to participate, to collapse as much of the division between her own frame of reference and that of the Samoan culture, is one of her great strengths as an anthropologist during the time when such ethnographic methods are just gaining a foothold.  Mead’s claims that the adolescent experience of the girls in Samoa was notably different than in America is lent credence by the depth of her sensitivity to the nuances of the culture, learned by her through “speaking their language, eating their food,” and seeking overall to “minimize the differences between us and to learn to know and understand all the girls of the three little villages” (131).  Mead’s conclusion that developmental behavior is in fact structured through culture leads to her claim at the end of her essay that the study of cultural differences is a useful tool for our own cultural introspection.  In a sense, Mead argues that the perspective gained by stepping outside of one’s culture forces the individual to acknowledge difference and, from this, provides the opportunity for self-realization and development, with an emphasis on the cultural change this may also bring.   

I recognize Mead’s pioneering role in the development of better fieldwork practices and support her emphasis on the role of culture in the formation of the individual.  However, I would like to highlight a specific part of Mead’s motivation for choosing Samoa as her ethnographic study that was not touched on as much during class discussion.  Although this is not a limitation of the fieldwork which she undertook, per say, Mead’s justification that “A primitive people without a written language present a much less elaborate problem and a trained student can master the fundamental structure of a primitive society in a few months” is, in my opinion, flawed (130).  In fact, this can be interpreted as a reversion back to the unilinealists, backtracking entirely from Boas’s progression towards anti-cultural evolutionism.  Embedded in this quote are remnants from Herbert Spencer’s biological metaphor, where cultures are represented on a spectrum of undifferentiated organisms to the intricate, specialized bodily forms of the European civilizations.  Mead, perhaps subconsciously though seemingly overtly, borrows from this antiquated view in anthropological research.  She even likens Europe to a “complicated civilization,” furthering this idea (130).  This certainly discounts Boas’s position that cultures should not be compared, especially when the result creates a discrepancy between a superior and lesser culture.   Although I do not think that this had much tangible bearing on the results themselves of her study on adolescence, I do think that it is a critical theoretical perspective that deserves to be analyzed as an overall weakness of Mead’s anthropological approach.  With this said, this notion did have some effect on the questionable population size she deemed acceptable for her study, as she felt justified in interviewing only fifty girls because Samoa was “an uncomplex, uniform culture” (131). 

Overall, Mead’s contributions to elevating the standards of ethnographic fieldwork and forwarding the importance of culture’s role in the development of the individual are invaluable to the field of anthropology.  Her reformist and activist attitudes are also seen in her call to use comparative studies to make changes in our own society.  In this sense, I think that Mead’s applicability to today is strong.  The use of anthropology as a stimulus for individual introspection, understanding, and change has merits that transcend Mead’s period in the field.  However, I did find the vestiges of evolutionary anthropology in her work, especially as a student of Boas, a step backwards rather than an advance for Mead.