
Coming of Age in Samoa
1928 · 223 pages
Sixty-eight girls on the Samoan island of Ta'u convinced Mead that the turmoil of adolescence is made by culture, not biology. She turned anthropology into an argument ordinary Americans took sides in.
★ 6.4

Sixty-eight girls on the Samoan island of Ta'u convinced Mead that the turmoil of adolescence is made by culture, not biology. She turned anthropology into an argument ordinary Americans took sides in.

Levi-Strauss opens by declaring he hates traveling and explorers, then takes you into Brazil's interior among the Bororo and Nambikwara. Science, memoir, and philosophy run together in mourning for what contact destroyed.