Name: Coming of Age in Samoa
ISBN: 9784871872348

Margaret Mead

This book is the outstanding and most frequently cited work in the field of Anthropology. It made the author world-famous and established her as the leader in her field for the next 50 years. One of the reasons this book became so famous was her observation that young Samoan women deferred marriage for many years while enjoying casual sex before eventually choosing a husband. This led to the Sexual Revolution that swept America in the 1960s and brought about the establishment of the Sexual Freedom League and other organizations. The Free Love generation idolized Margaret Mead.

A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation

Coming of Age in Samoa

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 where 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. The "civilized" world, she taught us had much to learn from the "primitive." Now this groundbreaking, beautifully written work as been reissued for the centennial of her birth, featuring introductions by Mary Pipher and by Mead's daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson.

Coming of Age in Samoa A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation

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