Coming of Age in Samoa

(1928) A book written by Margaret Mead . Mead determined that the socialization of children in Samoa results in a generally happy adolescence and easy transition to sexual activity and adulthood. These findings challenged the widely held belief that biological changes occurring during adolescence were necessarily accompanied by social and psychological stress . Mead argued that adolescent stress is a cultural, not a biological, phenomenon. Coming of Age contributed to the popularization of anthropology and helped to establish the anthropology subfield of culture and personality . Her interpretation of Samoan society was later challenged by Derek Freeman, and a bitter controversy ensued.

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Chagnon’s riveting 1968 account of his field work, Yanomamo: The Fierce People, surpassed Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa to become the bestselling work of ethnography ever.

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Her first book, “Coming of Age in Samoa,” published in 1928, when she was twenty-six, was a best-seller, and for the next fifty years she was a progressive voice in national debates about everything from sex and gender to nuclear policy, the environment, and the legalization of marijuana.

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The jacket illustration for “Coming of Age in Samoa” featured a topless girl.

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The thrice-married Mead, whose “Coming of Age in Samoa” argued that many assumptions about adolescence and sexuality were culturally contingent, had little patience for the monogamy that was expected of her; what a puritan culture wanted to call “deviancy” was, King writes, “a simple mismatch between her own temperament and the society into which she had been born.”

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I first came across the word, naturally, by reading ahead of my grade level; at age 10, I was ostentatiously reading my father’s copy of Margaret Mead’s “Coming of Age in Samoa,” the book that had convinced him to become an anthropologist.

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comingle coming or going, not know if one is

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