MARGARET MEAD Selection from Coming of Age in Samoa

The most obvious function performed by social scientists in modern America has been a cognitive one: the advancement of knowledge about society. Another, more subtle function has been a moral one: the articulation and criticism of standards for conduct. The role of the public moralist had long been performed by the clergy and by men and women of letters, but in the twentieth century this role increasingly came to be filled by psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists, and other practitioners of social science. The anthropologist Margaret Mead (1901-78) was perhaps the most influential single example of "the social scientist as public moralist." Mead wrote thirty-four books on a multitude of topics, many of which were only remotely anthropological. She was a formidable presence in American intellectual life for half a century, beginning with her Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), from which the selection that follows is taken. Mead's study of adolescent girls in Samoa was offered frankly as a means of fostering a critical perspective on the growing-up experiences of young people in Mead's own society. In our excerpt she sums up the lessons she wishes readers to derive from her study. Mead was an inveterate enemy of American middle-class provincialism and invited her readers to develop a diverse culture in which individuals could choose between a great variety of ways of life. Although she expressed much sympathy for the homogeneous, easygoing culture she attributed to the people of Samoa, she defended the heterogeneous, complex culture of modern America and sought to foster the knowledge and attitudes that would better equip Americans to take advantage of their opportunities. A readable, popular biography is Jane Howard, Margar~t M~ad: A Lif~ (New York, 1984). The quality of Mead's fieldwork as an anthropologist has been a matter of dispute, especially in recent years. For a brief, judicious commentary on this controversy see the remarks of James Clifford in the Times Literary Supplement, May 13, 1983, 475-76. See also Roy Rappaport, "Desecrating the Holy Woman: Derek Freeman's Attack on Margaret Mead," American Scholar, Summer 1986, 313-47. For an analysis of the cultural-critical role played by Mead, Ruth Benedict, and other anthropologists of the school of Franz Boas, see Richard Handler, "Boasian Anthropology and the Critique of American Culture," American Quart~rly 42 (1990), 252-73. On Boas and the larger Boasian tradition, see George W. Stocking, Jr., Th~ Shaping of Am~rican Anthropology (New York, 1974), esp. 1-20.