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

Margaret Mead

May 2016 · Sold by HarperCollins

About this ebook

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).

Ratings and reviews

Margaret Mead was an ethnocentric white woman who took up too much space as an outsider in Samoan lands. She wrote as if she was an expert when she most certainly was not.

A true classic. I still remember it well and fondly 60 years since I read it. Am ordering a new copy.

No free sample of the book itself. Only Preface, Forward, Opinion etc..

About the author

Margaret Mead (1901-1978) began her remarkable career when she visited Samoa at the age of twenty-three, which led to her first book, Coming of Age in Samoa. She went on to become one of the most influential women of our time, publishing some forty works and serving as Curator of Ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History as well as president of major scientific associations. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom following her death in 1978.