Book Author: Margaret Mead
CHAPTER 1: Introduction
Summary
In this first chapter, the author sets the historical and sociological context of the book. She starts by talking about the general state of the american youth in the United States in the post first World War era. She evokes the overall sense of unease, and the difficulty of youth in their transition through adolescence. Attempting to understand the origins of the problems, she offers her anthropological background, and the anthropological method which is the study of another less complex civilization to extrapolate an explanation. The civilization she decides to study is the Samoan people. In particular the samoan adolescent girl.
In this first chapter, the author sets the historical and sociological context of the book. She starts by talking about the general state of the american youth in the United States in the post first World War era. She evokes the overall sense of unease, and the difficulty of youth in their transition through adolescence. Attempting to understand the origins of the problems, she offers her anthropological background, and the anthropological method which is the study of another less complex civilization to extrapolate an explanation. The civilization she decides to study is the Samoan people. In particular the samoan adolescent girl.
She proposes to explore two main questions:
- Are the disturbances which vex our adolescents due to the nature of adolescence itself or to the civilisation?
- Under differenct conditions does adolescence present a different picture?
Discussion
This is a widely read book in the anthropology field that we have been assigned to read.
Reading this first chapter gave me flashbacks of the time I took ANTH 205: Peoples and Cultures of the World. I'm eager to find out whether her study of the samoan girl provided an explanation to the state of the american youth.
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