Coming of Age in Samoa and Brazil: an analysis of the concept of puberty in two indigenous backgrounds
What does it mean to become a woman in primitive cultures, so similar yet so different when it comes to their beliefs and the place of women in their society?
Introduction
As said by Paloma Gay y Blasco and Huon Wardle in their book “How to read Ethnography”, ethnographic writing is a conversation between three parties: the ethnographer, the people they study and other authors and their articles. An ethnography creates concepts that are mere tools for explanation and translation, and it all comes to one question: what it means to be human.
“Coming of Age in Samoa” by Margaret Mead has made a significant impact in the ethnographic and anthropological field by comparing two completely different cultures in regards to a common subject: the adolescence and how it is like for children to become young adults in the Samoan islands. Through her work, Mead has not only brought light to a new insight in the nature vs nurture debate, she has also portrayed puberty in a different perspective in order to understand more about her own culture.
Coming to age is not something that usually happens in one exact moment, it is a gradual experience. A person coming of age is very vital to how they develop their personal characteristics. In opposition to the Samoan transition, the process of becoming a woman in Western society is marked by responsibilities and social pressure, usually meaning that it is quite a turbulent period for a girl to go through. It can mean emotional distress, anxiety and confusion. What Margaret Mead seeks to study and analyse is what Western society can learn from such a “primitive” environment like the Samoan Islands.
Mead’s ethnographic work has caused a lot of repercussion due to its debunk of a largely accepted belief that the common disturbances of adolescence are physiological in nature and consequently unavoidable. It uses ethnography as a provocation, cross-culturally comparing both societies in a groundbreaking field work amongst Samoan people, analyzing every aspect of their society such as social structure and rules, household, personality and sexuality.
However, Margaret Mead was an American, therefore her comparisons were based in that society. I, as a Brazilian, will try to create a contrast between the Samoan culture and my own while discussing her ethnography in this review, using scarce data I’ve about this subject on developing countries what I am looking to do is to compare Mead’s work to the coming of age in Brazilian society, in the light of the Tembé e Kaxuyana tribes from the North of Brazil. I will also refer to Ruth Benedict’s book “Patterns of Culture” to support my arguments.
After all, what does it mean to become a woman in those primitive cultures, so similar yet so different when it comes to their beliefs and the place of women in their society?
Paraphrase
The research site for Margaret Mead’s field work was situated in the village of Tau, in the main island of Tutuila and counted on sixty-eight Samoan girls between the ages of eight and nineteen or twenty years old. For better purpose of classification, the ethnographer divided the girls into three groups: the first one of girls who showed no mammary signs of puberty; the second one of girls who would be mature within a year or so (ranging from twelve to fifteen years old); and finally the group of girls who were already past puberty, but not yet considered adults by the community (Appendix V).
Throughout nine months, from August 1925 to June 1926, Mead studied that society inch by inch. Moved by a simple question such as “what is coming of age like in Samoa?” she lived side by side with the girls as an observer and talked to them with the help of a translator. She mapped the village, studied their culture and rituals and interpreted their social hierarchy.
The first four chapters, from “A Day in Samoa” to “The Samoan Household”, portray the core of that society when it comes to social structure — how the household is organized, the hierarchy between the chiefs and the relationship between people from the same village. They live in “longhouses”, tents without any divided rooms seen as a common place for a family, formed not necessarily of blood relatives like in Western society, but aggregating other people that were in some sort of way belonging and relevant to that particular group. A peculiar thing she noted about social relations in Samoan villages is the fact that arguments and tensions do not happen very often; when a conflict happens within a household, formed of not necessarily immediate family, one of the people involved simply goes to live with other relatives in another longhouse, what avoids tension and conflict among the villagers. Overall, a pacific society.
Margaret Mead then jumps to the specific subject of her work: the girls. Along the following chapters she depicts their relationship with other boys the same age, almost antagonistic throughout their childhood, and also with their older relatives in the tribe. She notes, all through the book, some very interesting points about Samoan society that will be key concepts in order for the reader to understand why there is so much the Western culture can learn from them, and why the transition into puberty and womanhood can be made simpler by that.
For instance, in Samoa nudity and sex are seen as natural — many young children walk around unclothed, the bathing is done in the sea and the beach is used as a latrine. Besides, due to many people living in one household, the lack of privacy in sexual life is evident (Mead, p. 95).
Throughout chapter seven, “Formal Sex Relations”, Mead defends her point of view by depicting a few issues still considered taboos in Western society through the eyes of the Samoans. She invites the readers, in a subtle way, to compare the views of the islanders to their own and see how they think about such subjects in a more casual and simple way. For them, casual sexual intercourse between the unmarried is a natural thing and does not gain recognition or judgment, unless it becomes a persistent monogamy rewarded by conception (Mead, p. 65). That fact already makes the reader compare that scenario with nowadays, when casual sex still happens but most Westerners do not see it as something natural or experimental, instead, in Christian tradition, sex before marriage is condemned.
Another issue portrayed in this chapter is the virginity — still making a comparison with Christianity which “introduced a moral premium on chastity” (Mead, p. 69). The Samoans do not perceive virginity as being something crucial, in fact it is quite meaningless for them. Although, it does add to the girl’s attractiveness and makes her be more desired by the men in the village. Abortion is also mentioned as being almost non-existent in Samoa, since even illegitimate babies are welcomed to the village with no further judgment.
The role of the dance in the Samoan culture is one of the most important chapters in my opinion. Mead herself shows her amazement through her narration of that activity of which all ages and both sexes participate — she describes it as “athletic, slightly rowdy and exuberant”. There is no such thing as judging others on the dancefloor, and during that celebration the rigorous subordination the children are usually kept under is not given much importance (Mead, p. 82).
By depicting that festivity as an outsider, however, she makes a very serious observation which fits the Gay y Blasco & Wardle concept that ethnography is used as a provocation (Gay y Blasco & Wardle, p. 191). Mead invites the reader to make an analogy to how dancing unites and separates the Samoan children, just like the Western educational methods. During the dance, “the precocious child is applauded, made much of, given more and more opportunities to show its proficiency while the stupid child is rebuked, neglected and pushed to the wall” (Mead, p. 83).
With that argument, she incites the reader into rethinking their own culture and the concepts rooted in the society he or she lives in, making a powerful criticism about how the education system in the West gives more opportunity for those who already have good conditions then to those who need it the most in order to prevail in society.
According to Linda Darling-Hammond, professor at Stanford University in her article on American education, the U.S. educational system is one of the most unequal in the industrialized world, and students routinely receive dramatically different learning opportunities based on their social status.
Yet, Margaret Mead makes it clear that the comparison above cited is only an exceptional occasion that caught her attention as a foreigner, but that in general, the concept of inferiority amongst the Samoan is rare — in opposition to American society. One is only seen as inferior for two reasons: if a man is unable to pleasure a woman during sex and therefore is recognized as inept; or if he is clumsy in dancing.
As Gay Blasco & Wardle investigate ethnography being perceived as a fact in their book, Mead herself has been through some controversy following her fieldwork in Samoa. After her ethnography got published in 1928, another anthropologist fluent in Samoan language, Derek Freeman, sparked some criticism about the information she cites as being the absolute truth. In How to Read Ethnography, they support this point by introducing the notion that after 1980, ethnography was seen as ‘fiction’ based on the sole sense that it was a creative construction elaborated through the medium of writing (p. 188). That notion is exactly what Freeman tried to prove by claiming that the uncomplicated sexual freedom depicted by Mead was misleading and written to support academic theory, rather than portraying the true reality of the Samoan culture.
Dr. Freeman also claim that Margaret Mead did not know the native language in order to fully understand the concepts and suffered from pressure from her sponsor, along with the fact she had spent more time with white islanders, an American family, instead of amongst the natives. By the 1960s it was revealed that studies done on the Samoan culture by other ethnographers were creating an inconsistency between what they were finding and what Mead had found.
That only reinforces what Gay y Blasco & Wardle say in their first chapter, that ethnography concepts serve to stabilise anthropological knowledge and allow new material and ideas to enter the anthropological conversation (p. 26). Even though there is no way to know for sure whether Mead’s work was accurate enough, the spark of that controversy involving Derek Freeman has only given more life to the anthropological constant discussion and refutation that ethnography is by essence.
In conclusion, what Margaret Mead tries to prove through her fieldwork and study of the Samoan girls is that a society more open to questions related to sex and body and not tied to Western notions of chastity and moral increases the enjoyment of puberty as a casual transition, and not as a turbulent and stressful time full of pressure as lived by many people outside of that culture. She defends the fact that what causes those troubles is not the puberty itself, but what society implies it is expected from it and all the responsibilities it carries.
Discussion
As Margaret Mead illustrates the slow process of puberty in the Samoan villages and the changes it brings to the girls’ lives, it is possible to note that those changes are not necessarily bad or turbulent compared to Western society and its beliefs about puberty, they are simply part of the traditions of that culture and often do not carry much meaning or responsibility to it as it does for outsiders.
Amongst Tembé and Kauyana indigenous societies in the states of Pará and Amapa in Brazil, studied by Travassos, the arrival of puberty is marked by rites of passage that introduce the child in the adult world, without going through the adolescence phase as defined in western culture of non-indian.
Differently from the Samoan tradition, the indigenous tribes of Tembé and Kaxuyana celebrate a girl’s first menstruation with a large party for all the villagers. The festivities last for a week and a major part of it is the Kae Kae dance, in which the boys and girls engage and dance together. If there is any mutual sexual interest during the dance, both of them go to one of the tents and have intercourse, and just like that a new couple is formed in the village with no more formalities.
As Mead stated, any sexual activity such as suggestive dancing and salacious conversations and songs are all acceptable in the Samoan culture (Mead, p.103), which explains why they are so accustomed to each other’s bodies and naturally engage in that kind of behaviour. The Samoans do not perceive those experimentations as “wrong” or “dirty”, they embrace it as being part of human nature — and brings comfort to the girl in the transition from a child to a woman. There is no pressure for girls to engage in sexual activities and the Samoans also believe it takes longer to learn about sexual activity than a man does, which should be respected.
The Kaxuyanas from Brazil, however, have a stricter posture about sex. For them, the act of intercourse is exclusively reproductive and is allowed as soon as the girl gets her period, sometimes as young as the age of nine years-old. In their culture, a girl is free to do what she wants until she bleeds for the first time, and that is when she learns sewing, crafting, household work and how to behave in society. There is no transition such as adolescence for the Kaxuyanas, the girl simply goes from child to woman, she is “ready”. (TRAVASSOS, 2014, p. 51).
Ruth Benedict, another anthropologist and Mead’s close friend and academic mentor, reinforces this natural point of divergence between two indigenous communities in her book “Patterns of Culture”, published in 1958.
According to Benedict, primitive tribes have different age periods in which they focus they attention in, or different concepts of “puberty”. However, in general the puberty they refer to is not the psychological puberty as in America, but the social puberty and what it represents for the child within the social hierarchy he or she is inserted in (Benedict, p. 34).
She names a few examples to illustrate this fact: in North America, for instance, male puberty means warfare. In Australia, on the other hand, it means participation in an exclusively male cult known for the exclusion of women.
Through these examples, just like Margaret Mead, she also makes a provocation: that these puberty rites of passage, more common for boys than girls, only emphasize the social fact that male adult prerogatives are more far-reaching in every culture than female’s, therefore there are generally more notes of what this period means for a young boy than for a young girl.
That is exactly what Mead aims on her fieldwork: to study almost exclusively what the transition to adulthood mean for young girls in Samoa, including their tribe’s posture regarding certain aspects such as abortion, casual sex and masturbation. She mentions that masturbation was common amongst the Samoans, starting at a very young age. R.P. Neuman, an anthropologist specialized in adolescence, argues in his book “Masturbation, Madness and the Modern Concepts of Childhood and Adolescence”, that this practice was seen as an illness before the First World War in Western society.
In our culture, the literature on masturbation was always heavily aimed towards young men and, although the same strictures applied to male and female masturbators back then, the reasons to condemning the practice varied according to the sex, mostly aimed at females (Neuman, p. 1). This has to do with Christianity and how it preaches chastity and purity when it comes to the female body, something that Mead does not fail to mention on her notes.
Conclusion
What we can learn from Margaret Mead’s work in the Samoan islands is that the rites of passage that mark puberty amongst different cultures can take away all the stress and pressure from this period, but also make it turbulent and painful.
There is an evident contrast between rites of passage in different indigenous cultures such as the Samoans and the Tembé and Kauyana tribes from Brazil. In the first one there is more freedom for the girls to transition than the second, which has more of a patriarchal configuration. However, both of them reflect the aspects of their own geographic and cultural background and also how their social structure is organized, with no further pressure and expectations besides reproduction and helping the village.
In Western tradition, the transition a girl undertakes during adolescence comes along with psychological, emotional and social aspects — they are expected to leave aside their child-like ways and behave like women, their body starts to change, they start to be sexualized by society and, most of the time, sexually repressed.
Living amongst a society that is much more relaxed on sexual morals than the American one and where things considered taboos in the West were treated in a natural way and part of human nature was the main cause of why Samoan girls undergo puberty in a much more relaxed and casual way.
They have the freedom to experiment, the time to learn and explore their bodies. There are no strict rules on how they should dress or behave, and respect is mutual amongst every person in the village. The point highlighted by Mead is the concept of “choice” without judgements coming from the society around them, one of the major claims of the feminist movement of nowadays.
Although this is a wide discussion that would take a lot more study and field work, what I’ve learned from this is that in both indigenous backgrounds, puberty is a period of reassurance for men, their time to achieve their place within the social hierarchy and gain respect. For girls, in the other hand, it can be a smooth period of transition which is the case of the Samoans, but that does not change the fact that, in the long run, they are also expected to integrate in society and execute women-only duties.
Both tribes have the patriarchal aspect in common, but that aspect is more evident in Brazil, where the girls are expected to become wives and reproduce right away, than in Samoa.
Bibliography
Benedict, Ruth. Patterns of Culture. Boston, Mass. ; New York, N.Y.: Houghton Mifflin, 2005. Print.
Blasco, Paloma Gay Y, and Huon Wardle. How to Read Ethnography. London: Routledge, 2008. Print.
Darling-Hammond, Linda. “Unequal Opportunity: Race and Education.” Brookings. Brookings, 28 July 2016. Web. 06 May 2017.
Mead, Margaret. Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation. New York: Harper Perennial, 2001. Print.
Neuman, R. P. “Masturbation, Madness, and the Modern Concepts of Childhood and Adolescence.” Journal of Social History. Oxford University Press, 01 Mar. 1975. Web. 06 May 2017.
Travassos, Maria Do Rosário De Castro, and Paulo Roberto Ceccarelli. “Ritos De Passagem: O Lugar Da Adolescência Nas Sociedades Indígenas Tembé Tenetehara E Kaxuyana.” PEPSIC. Círculo Psicanalítico De Minas Gerais, June 2016. Web. 04 May 2017.
