Book Reading #5 - Coming of Age

References:
Title: Coming of Age in Samoa
Author: Margaret Mead
Venue: Edited by M.L. Loeb; 1908

Summary:
In this book, Mead discusses the culture of Samoa, as she found while living there as an ethnography. She then takes this knowledge to find why girls in our society have so much trouble.

She begins by describing the overall culture of Samoa. She describes what women can and cannot do, the social structure, and what qualities they like and dislike. She then goes on to describe the daily lives of a few of the girls, and then describes their conflicts.

After that, she makes some theories about why, in many cases, the lives of the Samoan girls have less conflict that girls in our society. She believes it is because of the lack of conflicting views in their society as opposed to ours. She also believes another reason is that children in their civilization are exposed to death and sex in childhood, which makes them better equipped to deal with them later in life.

Discussion:
While I cannot say that I liked this book, I think that as far as teaching us the basics of ethnography the book is a success. I really didn't get the grasp of how detailed we needed to be until I read the appendices in this book, where she has her research notes and polls. When I saw those, I finally got the concept of how the ethnography needs to be.

Additionally, I think that the points she makes about society in this book are quite valid. The many conflicting viewpoints lead to quite a lot of unnecessary conflict between people. However, I don't think we would ever be able to excise this from our society.

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