A Critique of Coming of Age in Samoa

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! A Critique of Coming of Age in Samoa ! Coming of Age in Samoa is the book that resulted from Margaret Meadʼs fieldwork done in the Samoan Islands. This paper will show that the greatest success of Meadʼs ethnography was the accessible nature of her writing and the controversial nature of her subject. Although I believe that Coming of Age in Samoa was an overall success there are aspects of Meadʼs research and writing that I believe she should have done differently. First, I believe that a weakness in her methodology is that she does her research on only Taʼu, one island of Samoa, but she irresponsibly generalizes her findings to all of Samoa. I believe her conclusions would be more solid if she had gone to other Samoan Islands and repeated the study to confirm the results of the research apply to Samoa as a whole. Another weakness I found in Meadʼs ethnography are her comparisons to America. I believe that Meadʼs comparisons would have been stronger if she had conducted similar fieldwork studies in America that she would be able to reference. ! Meadʼs research in Samoa focussed on adolescent girls from the specific island of Taʻu. Meadʼs research goal was to study the transitional age of adolescence in Samoa in a cross-cultural comparison to that stage of life in western society. She was attempting to discover whether stress during the time of adolescence was present in Samoa as it is in America. A final conclusion of her study is "adolescence is not necessarily a time of stress and strain, but that cultural conditions make it so" (Mead1968: 170) Mead used this conclusion to focus two chapters on education problems in America. Her book was met with shock from the western world due to itʼs focus on sexuality. It was also met with criticism from others who had studied Samoa and disagreed with her conclusions. In spite of this, Coming of Age in Samoa is
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