Coming of Age in Samoa

Title:
Coming of Age in Samoa
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Reference:
Mead, Margaret. Coming of Age in Samoa. Harper Perennial, 1928 (1971)

Summary:
Margaret Mead is interested in the adolescent girl.  In America, Mead says that adolescent girls are a field of emotions and inner struggle with so many important decisions to make, conflicting ideas, overarching parents, and the like.  She wants to see if this is a typical trait of all adolescent girls over all societies or if this is an outcome of the western world.  To study this, she decides to venture to Samoa, pictured right.  She planed to study the eduction, family structure, social interaction, and religion of Samoa in order to get a better grasp at an answer to her initial problem.  She studies three villages of the same island for a little less than a year.  She is acclimated to their culture and immerses herself in their way of life to truly understand their inner workings.

The village is a very cohesive unit that is much unchanged from the way it was a hundred years prior to her coming.  Fishing, farming, taking care of infants, and leisure catalog a typical day in Samoa.  Children are raised by family members of their household, often the younger females.  Responsibility is transfered to younger siblings as caretakers reach the years just before being a teenager as the family structure allows.  They are taught by model of their parents the ways in which to take care of little ones, fishing, weaving, and other activities.  There is a very lackadaisical attitude toward obedience and punishment is often differed.  A household consists of many people in a small hut.  There is very little privacy as everything is for the most part open.  All the extended family usually stays in the same house.  If children are having difficulty living under the authority of a home, they often just go to stay with other family members.  This is an accepted practice.

Each age of people have their own group of which they are a part.  There are matais, or heads of villages, the aumaga which is a classification of men that aren't boys, the aualama which is the female group of older people, there are wives of matais, and then there are gangs of boys and gangs of girls.  These groups never really mix as relations across sex lines are fairly taboo.  Boys continue on with these groups until older teen years, but girls grow out of them by about age 12.  This allows the boys more social interaction while the girls don't have the pleasure of such social growth.  Up until puberty, boy-girl relations are mostly antagonistic, but at puberty, sexual play is highly rampant.  This is seen in homosexual and heterosexual relations.  These are not necessarily discouraged by the elders.  The way in which boys court females is with the help of a soa, or a close friend (usually relative) who is loyal to the boy's cause of finding a mate.

Dance plays an important role in the Samoan society.  The dance is a place that children of all ages are free to express themselves as they want and there is no view of outside influences which affect people interpretation of the dance; it is an encouraging time for the children.  Almost all ages of both sexes participate in dances.  They are community events.  Mead points to this as a place where much education occurs simply because of the fact that children are not always hushed and shooed away.

Mead looks at education for both America and Samoa to do a bit of a comparison in order to find if there is any way to improve the way we raise our children to eliminate the turmoil of the adolescent girl.  She sees Samoa as a cultural that cares very little about most things whereas Americans make a big deal out of everything.  Samoan children have much less responsibility as well as choices.  The American child on the other hand is constantly having decisions and opportunity forced upon them.  The relation between parents and children is less close in Samoa than in America.  She points out that America separates work, play, and school to the point where we loathe school because we don't see any application to real life and work because it is just what we have to do in order to play.  She sees American children with double standards being shown to them everywhere.  She conjectures that any change in the way we raise our children would most likely be a backtrack in our societal gain and only hurt future generations because of our preconceived notions as they are.  She says the solution is to simply teach children the way in which to make choices for themselves.  This eliminates putting unnecessary forced beliefs on the child and frees them to choose between what they see as best in the future.


Discussion:
I would like to first point out that I do not agree with her conclusion.  That being said, I believe insight can be gained from reviewing the findings of the differences in our two societies.  The Samoan's obviously have a completely different way of life than we do here in America and I think she accurately points out that we cannot directly implement some of the things they do there just as they cannot implement some of the things we do here simply because of cultural and physical constraints.

The missionaries coming over and planting the church give an interesting dynamic to Samoa.  I would be interested to see how things would have played out with Mead had they not already made ties there.  She even pointed out how the culture had changed significantly in terms of status of women and others in the household as well as punishment because of the missionaries influence.  It doesn't seem like the girls going to the missionary boarding school have too significant an effect on the rest of the village.