And as an observer of the sexual development of teenage girls, Pipher is a faithful heir to Mead’s Samoan fieldwork and studies.

In the Introduction to the Perennial Classic edition of Coming of Age in Samoa, she places Mead as the matriarch of family therapy and child and adolescent development. Rather she wanted to understand the whole human race.Ĭlinical psychologist Mary Pipher’s work is infused with an awareness of the cultural impact on individual psychology. But Mead did not go to Samoa just to study Samoans. Even Mead, the expert on social change, couldn’t predict the rapidity with which worlds would disappear in the last century. The Samoa that Mead wrote about no longer exists. Her analysis of the problems of teens is strikingly modern. Early advocates of sexual freedom, such as Havelock Ellis, admired this book. Her viewpoint on the destructive effects of isolation and intensity in nuclear families influenced the first generation of family therapists. The argument she based on her findingsthat cultural and environmental factors can change our natures in the most fundamental wayswas adopted by generations of social thinkers and policy-makers who interpreted the Samoan experience as a. nurture debate that raged in the beginning of the 20th century and still rages today. This was the paradise Margaret Mead revealed to the world in Coming of Age in Samoa (1928). Coming of Age in Samoa influenced the nature vs. 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.īecause Mead had a rich and sophisticated view of the multiple factors that shape human beings, her work has a relevance and resonance with issues of today. Mead’s groundbreaking book, dedicated to the girls of Tau, was one of the first studies to pay attention to girls’ lives. It established Mead’s core insights into childhood and culture that challenged and changed our view of life.

This beautifully written study of youth details Margaret Mead’s historic trip and first fieldwork.

Coming of age in samoa by margaret mead