Title: Coming of Age In Samoa
Author: Margaret Mead
Summary
This book presents an ethnography done by Margaret Mead on the Samoan people where she unpacks her findings on the ways of the culture, their beliefs and concluding with her results of the impact of those choices in how the society functions and even compares to our American society.
The book opens up with an introduction about how science and psychology has impacted the upbringing of children and adolescence. The second chapter provides information on how a typical day would be in the Samoan society from specific tasks to various scenarios that one might encounter. The Education chapter opens up discussing about a child's birth and progressing as they grow older what their duties consist of and what role they play in society. We are presented with the information that shows that everyone plays a part and it's a collective society in doing many things. The next chapter than presents what's considered to be the household in the Samoan society. It not only consist of blood related relatives but others as well. As the children grow they are set more in the roles of their genders and they are guided by the elders in their community.
Beginning in chapter 5, we see that the author takes a shift towards focusing on the female role. First discussing how a girl is grouped with females her age and then progressing to discuss how she fits into the community, and how she makes choices in her intimate actions. The book then shifts back to the role of the society in presenting how they view dancing and how it mirrors the education of the individual even though dance is never formally taught to the Samoans. The book then transitions to the view of attitude towards personality for the entire culture but then begins to narrow the focus of discussion of how females are shaped by what they know, are exposed to and the roles they play from a young age throughout life. Even covering the girl's way of life that would be considered counter-cultural. The book transitions to how one is viewed as they go into adulthood as a married individual or not married and how their view changes with age. Woman are continuously expected to have a maintained skill set despite their age in comparison to a males role.
The book closes out the final two chapters comparing the findings of the author to our American culture and offers suggestions in how we could change our society and views of educating our children.
The Appendices provide an in depth of information of all her quantitative data in order to provide the reader with a thorough understanding of how well she knew the people she observed and analyzed. The last Appendix (III) provides a comparison of how the culture was the time her study was performed and how American/European perspectives influenced their society and structure.
Discussion
This was the first ethnography that I had really read from beginning to end. I was told that the author plays a vital and foundational role in Anthropology and now I can understand that reasoning. She provided a book with a lot of information and found a way to interconnect all her findings and focus on different aspects to contrast with the American culture. Before this class I guess I had never really given it much thought as to the importance of referring to the culture when designing or implementing something we create in computer science. It's important for us to understand those we interact with from a cultural level in order to better communicate and fit with them.
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