Is teenage turmoil biology or culture? Margaret Mead went to Samoa to find out
Fresh out of graduate school, Margaret Mead sailed to American Samoa to test whether adolescent storms were built into human bodies. Her 1928 book said culture mattered more, made her famous, fed the 1960s sexual revolution and, decades later, provoked one of anthropology's bitterest disputes when Derek Freeman accused her of getting Samoa wrong.
Mead was born in Philadelphia on 16 December 1901, the eldest of five; her father taught finance at Wharton and her mother was a sociologist studying Italian immigrants. After Barnard she trained at Columbia under Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict, and in 1925 began fieldwork on Taʻū in the Manu'a islands. Her method was participant observation, living inside a community for long stretches and paying attention to girls and women as well as men.
Coming of Age in Samoa set out a nature-versus-nurture question: was adolescent upheaval a universal biological transition, or a product of particular societies? Mead described Samoan youngsters as largely left alone until about 15 or 16, marriage as an economic arrangement weighing rank and skills, and attitudes to sex as far more relaxed than American ones. She concluded that culture, not physiology, drove most of what Americans took for granted about growing up.
The New Zealand anthropologist Derek Freeman, who had lived in Samoa during the early 1940s, disagreed. From a 1968 paper and in books of 1983 and 1998 he argued that Samoa was marked by sexual repression, violence and delinquency, citing police records. Many anthropologists rejected his harshest charges, yet the controversy badly dented her public reputation and became a battleground over cultural relativism.
Her career ranged far beyond one island. On Manus she studied the village of Peri, returning in 1953 to chart how conversion, wartime occupation and the Paliau Movement had transformed it. In Bali with Gregory Bateson she shot so much film and photography that she is called the mother of visual anthropology. From 1946 to 1969 she ran ethnology as a curator at New York's natural history museum, wrote a Redbook column with Rhoda Métraux, and in 1975 led the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She died on 15 November 1978.
Source: Margaret Mead
