Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa and Boasian Culturalism

Abstract

The history of Margaret Mead's Samoan research is an important anthropological issue. In 1925, Franz Boas, “the father of American anthropology,” faced by what he called “the difficulty of telling what part of our behavior is socially determined and what is generally human,” arranged for his 23-year-old-student, Margaret Mead, to go to Samoa in Western Polynesia. Her task was to obtain, under his direction, an answer to “the problem of which phenomena of adolescence are culturally and which physiologically determined.” In 1928, in Coming of Age in Samoa, after a woefully inadequate period of fieldwork, Mead concluded, unreservedly, that the phenomena of adolescence are due not to physiology, but to “the social environment.”