Mead, Margaret (1901–1978)

Coming of Age in Samoa

Mead's research focused on ethnographic studies of Pacific island cultures; her work examined topics including child rearing, adolescence, sexuality, gender roles, and conflict between generations. Comparing these issues with modern U.S. society gave her work a public resonance. She felt that anthropology was particularly suitable for popularization and widespread media coverage because it focused on people.

Her first book, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), presented the findings of a field trip between 1925 and 1926, where she worked with the people on the island of Tau in American Samoa. It became a best seller, translated into several languages and reprinted in dozens of editions. It vaulted her and her scientific specialism into public consciousness. Its analysis of young Samoan girls found that adolescence was a time of smooth transition, without the emotional or psychological difficulties common among American teenagers. Samoan girls were also more sexually liberated.

The book's clear and readable style contributed to its widespread popularity (Mead intended it to be written for teachers). It was also an original contribution to anthropology, as she interpretated her data from a viewpoint of cultural determinism, where individual personalities and values were formed largely by culture, rather than biology, which was the then-prevailing view within anthropology. Mead also revised the original introduction and conclusion of her manuscript, adding two chapters that discussed the implications of her findings for child rearing in the United States.

Mead pioneered the field of cultural anthropology, which is concerned with the history and development of human culture. Her ideas of cultural determinism spread to other disciplines, including literature, history, psychology, and sociology.

She regularly published technical works from the same research she used for her popular books: Alongside Coming of Age in Samoa, she wrote an academic account of Samoan culture, The Social Organization of Manua (1930). More than 20 of her 44 books were aimed at general readers, and she was awarded UNESCO's Kalinga Prize in 1970 for the popularization of science.

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