I am an adjunct professor of anthropology at the local university. I mostly teach a class about language and culture, but once in a while I teach some other classes as well. Like next semester, when I will teach a class about the Pacific islands. My Masters degree was in cultural anthropology, and I have long loved to read ethnographies about distant societies. In both of these classes I talk about Margaret Mead and her 1928 book "Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation", but I have never actually read the whole thing until now. I am glad I gave it a go, because it is very insightful and I quite enjoyed it!

Even though this book is nearly 100 years old, I felt like it was a good snapshot of a time and place that few people really know much about. It is a bit hard to imagine Mead, a 24 year old young woman fresh from college, traveling so long and far to live with a largely unknown people. But do it she did! She lived among them for several months and spent her time observing and interviewing the young women there. Her research question was basically: do Samoan girls face the same problems in adolescence that American girls do? Not to spoil the book, but her conclusion is "no". She concludes that the different attitudes of Samoan society, as a whole, make adolescence much easier for Samoan girls than Americans.

I'm not going to summarize the book because you can find plenty of other places that do that. Nor am I going to talk about all the criticism of Mead and her methods in Samoa. You can find all of that on Wikipedia. I am just going to say that I really enjoyed reading this book, and I side with Margaret. It made me think about how much our own culture and society affect our personalities. Sometimes, here in the USA, I've heard people say things like "If I lived then/there I would do things differently! I would change things!" and I think those are bold, but unrealistic, words. I imagine that if you or I grew up in another time or place that we would behave just like the people who did grow up in that time or place. I feel our social environment very much influences us.

However, what I think doesn't matter too much. If you are interested you can read Mead's book for free at several online places - there is a good copy at the wonderful Project Gutenberg. So go check it out, and decide for yourself if what she says makes sense to you, or not.