Coming of Age in Samoa

Reference
Coming of Age in Samoa
- Margaret Mead

Summary
Over the course of this book Mead examines and explains the culture of the Samoan people.  But mainly, she focuses on the lives of the Samoan female progressing from child to adolescent to adult.  This included the method of education of the children, the way their household operates, the way the children interact with each and how this changes over time, and how the girls role in her community changes.  As the girls began to his puberty, she even studied their sex relations and reproductive system habits.  She also collected immense amounts of data to back up and explain all of her qualitative findings that she writes about.

Her main goal was to try and use the Samoan female as a comparison to how adolescents behave in Western cultures.  The level of rebellion and troublesome natures of many children of that age in the United States for instance had many people worried, so she wanted to see if there was an underlying reason for why this was.  What she found was that even when the Samoan culture had some Western influences and the children were given some more choices in education and job options besides the traditional options, their core values and traditions remained intact.

This led her to an interesting conclusion.  The core of the problem could be choice and the adolescents’ inability to make proper choices on their own.  She claims that society is not the source of the problem generating the issues of the adolescent.  Instead, adolescents have not been taught how to make choices within the society.  There is too much stress on choosing the correct choice instead of teaching everyone how to make their own choices for themselves.  This is causing the stress and the issues she set out to solve in the first place.

Discussion
I feel that Mead is absolutely correct.  I think it would also be safe to say this is still the case today and not much if anything has been done to fix this issue.  To me, the key is discovering how to think for yourself.  The second you stop caring so much about what others will think of you and catering to their expectations and begin making decisions for yourself is the beginning of what Mead was pointing out towards the end of the book.  Yes, the way she conducted her ethnography was interesting and extremely in depth, but the main take away message for me was when she discovered a possible explanation for the adolescent issue.  Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s realistic for adolescents to completely let go of the social expectations of pleasing others and being accepted.  The way it is not is the natural order of things, and this realization will just need to come on its own whenever people are ready for it.