A STUDY IN HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT

BASED ON AN INVESTIGATION OF THE

PHENOMENA OF ADOLESCENCE

AMONG PRIMITIVE AND CIVILIZED PEOPLES

(Plan of research proposed by Margaret Mead and submitted with

application for a Fellowship in the Biological Sciences, 1925)

    This investigation aims to provide data from a primitive culture which can be compared with observations made in our own civilization, in an attempt to throw light on the problem of which phenomena of adolescence are culturally and which physiologically determined.

    Theories of adolescence have been evolved upon the basis of our own culture, and what material from primitive cultures has been utilized has necessarily been of a scattered comparative character. The survey of the available information concerning the adolescent girl among primitive people which was made by Miriam Van Waters illustrates conclusively the limitations of this information. Such information has per force to be gathered from general ethnological works which deal with the problem from the behavioristic point of view only. Thus, while it is possible to obtain from the literature a good deal of material upon puberty ceremonials or their absence, no data upon the individual religious experience of the adolescent is available. Interpretations of this external evidence are also open to numerous errors because of lack of familiarity with the various cultural backgrounds from which the observations were drawn. What is true of the religious experience of the adolescent applies also to such problems as the sudden or gradual development of the manifestations of sex, the effects of inhibition of the sex impulse through various types of social pressure, the physiological manifestations of shame, and similar problems, all of which should be investigated from the point of view of the individual experience of the primitive adolescent.

    It is therefore proposed to make an intensive study of the adolescent girl in one primitive culture, that of the Samoan islands. By confining the investigation to one culture, it is hoped to avoid the errors due to interpretations based on insufficient knowledge of the whole cultural milieu. The applicant proposes to spend a year in actual field work in Samoa. It will be possible to make a realistic study of this aspect of a Samoan girl’s life in its relation to the other aspects of Samoan culture. This particular locality has been chosen because the applicant is familiar with the literature relating to the Polynesian area and could therefore begin this investigation with a useful working knowledge of the culture. The native culture in American Samoa is still sufficiently primitive to make such a study practicable.

    Such a problem will involve working almost entirely with women, and should therefore add appreciably to our ethnological information of the subject of the culture of primitive women. Owing to the paucity of women ethnologists, practically no ethnological has been done among women as such, and this investigation offers a particularly rich field for the study of feminine reactions and participations in the culture of the group.