Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization - Softcover

Mead, Margaret

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0688309747 ISBN 13: 9780688309749

Publisher: William Morrow, 1971

Synopsis

The groundbreaking classic detailing Margaret Mead's first field work at age 23, establishing Mead’s core insights into childhood and culture that challenged and changed our view of life. 

Rarely do science and literature come together in the same book.  When they do -- as in Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, for example -- they become classics, quoted and studied by scholars and the general public alike.

Margaret Mead accomplished this remarkable feat not once but several times, beginning with Coming of Age in Samoa. It details her historic journey to American Samoa, taken when she was just twenty-three, where she did her first fieldwork. Here, for the first time, she presented to the public the idea that the individual experience of developmental stages could be shaped by cultural demands and expectations. Adolescence, she wrote, might be more or less stormy, and sexual development more or less problematic in different cultures. 

Mead’s revolutionary book, dedicated to the girls of Tau, was one of the first studies to pay attention to girls’ lives. Her keen observations contain many ideas that are still powerful today—that sexuality is culturally-shaped, that adolescence need not be stressful, and that the lives of adolescent girls are worthy of attention and respect.

Now this groundbreaking, beautifully written work as been reissued for the centennial of Mead's birth, featuring introductions by Mary Pipher, Ph.D. (Reviving Ophelia) and by Mead's daughter, Mary Catherine Bateso (Composing a Life).

About this title

From the Back Cover

Coming of Age in Samoa, Margaret Mead's psychological study of youth in a primitive society, is today recognized as a scientific classic. However, when first published, as Dr. Mead points out in her preface to this Morrow Quill edition, it was "the first piece of work by a serious professional anthropologist written for the educated layman in which all the paraphernalia of scholarship designed to convince one's professional colleagues and confuse the laity was deliberately laid aside."

Edition details

• Publisher: William Morrow
• Publication date: 1971
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0688309747
• ISBN 13: 9780688309749
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304