Abstract
The apparently readily comprehensible descriptive discourse in Margaret Mead’s famous ethnographic study Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) (CAS) presents a discursive challenge that is greater than one might expect from a book that has gained a wide readership. Through theoretical analysis, and in relation to the notorious Mead/Freeman controversy, we seek to contribute to understanding CAS as discourse, and even more specifically as educational discourse. Three research questions are addressed: How can the account of Samoan culture presented by Mead in CAS be understood as discourse? How can her account of early childhood education be understood in relation to Freeman’s account? Is Mead describing permissive education when describing patterns of early childhood education in Samoa? We argue that Mead produced an overlapping research discourse that has appealed to the wider public because of its cultural suppressed message aimed at the unconscious in culture. Mead’s and Freeman’s contradictory accounts of Samoan cultural patterns in relation to early childhood education can be explained by differences in the perspectives of the social and hierarchical positions of respectable elders and chiefs (Freeman) and of young girls who were caregivers of even younger children (Mead). Finally, we argue that early childhood education in Samoa at that time was clearly not permissive. Young Samoan girls internalized the symbolic Law (Lacan) and were therefore able to act in an authoritative way as caregivers. In the field of education nearly a century later, Mead’s descriptions of early childhood education in Samoa still provide an intricate case study.
Highlights
In her celebrated anthropological study Coming of Age in Samoa (CAS; Mead, 1928), “one of the most influential anthropological works of the twentieth century” (Stocking, 1989), Margaret Mead analyzed the way young girls grew up in Samoa in the mid-1920s and, within this context, the cultural patterns of early childhood education
Why has this study—and not, for instance, Mead’s sober ethnography of Samoa, Social Organization of Manu’a (Mead, 1930/1969)—resonated so much and so long among the American public? In a very insightful defense of CAS, Rappaport (1986) pointed out that as science CAS is “not so much incorrect as thin and in need of enrichment, it did make a modest contribution to Samoan ethnography” (p. 347)
The implication that “this myth works at the level of American culture, independent of the discipline of anthropology” “is unpersuasive” (Strikwerda, 1991, p. 301)
Summary
In her celebrated anthropological study Coming of Age in Samoa (CAS; Mead, 1928), “one of the most influential anthropological works of the twentieth century” (Stocking, 1989), Margaret Mead analyzed the way young girls grew up in Samoa in the mid-1920s and, within this context, the cultural patterns of early childhood education. With this “famous apprentice book” (Kuper, 1989), she embarked on a career that established her as “a symbol for the women’s movement”
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