The book comprises of fourteen chapters and five appendices, the chapters are ethnographic description of Samoan life and adolescence among the Samoan girls, their adjustments and reactions to it. Mead’s mission was to emphasize the existence of bio-psychological plasticity in human affairs sufficient to permit the cultural conditioning of adolescent behavioral patterns along the lines which contrast with the stereotype of adolescence in middle class Euro-American culture. The author concentrated on the individual’s reaction to her social setting. The major point of study among the inhabitants, particularly the adolescent girls of the three little villages of Luma, Siufaga and Faleasao of the little island of Tau was to answer questions such as: 1) “Are the disturbances which vex our adolescents due to the nature of adolescence itself or to the civilization?” 2) “Under different conditions does adolescence present a different picture?”. The book ‘Coming of Age in Samoa’ bore sub-title, ‘A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization’. The book launched Mead as a pioneering researcher and established her as one of the most famous anthropologists in the world. In each preface of the book, the author has discussed the difference in the world of readers for whom it would be published.
The book has been republished four times in 1939, 1949, 19. ‘Coming of Age in Samoa’ is Mead’s first book published in the year 1928.
Configurationalism, the identification of salient cultural characteristics, representing the patterns of culture, and their presentation in a familiar psychological idiom, was the forerunner of reconciliation between historical particularism of Boas and psychoanalysis of scholars of culture personality school.
She was a student of both Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict.
Margaret Mead, one of the leaders of the Culture and Personality school of Thought was a leading lady anthropologist of Columbia University.
0 kommentar(er)
