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Mid culture and the world of childhood. Study of childhood in the works of M. Mead. Typology of cultures according to R. Lewis

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MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND SCIENCE OF THE RF

FEDERAL STATE BUDGET EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTION

HIGHER PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION

"NOVOSIBIRSK STATE PEDAGOGICAL UNIVERSITY"

PSYCHOLOGY FACULTY

DEPARTMENT OF GENERAL PSYCHOLOGY AND HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY

Abstract

M. Mead “Culture and the world of childhood. Growing up in Samoa"

NOVOSIBIRSK, 2011

Introduction

Over the past hundred years, parents and teachers have ceased to consider childhood and adolescence as something very simple and self-evident. Two factors forced them to re-formulate pedagogical tasks - the growth of scientific psychology, as well as the difficulties and conflicts of adolescence. Psychology has taught that much can be achieved by understanding the nature of children's development, its main stages, and understanding what adults should expect from a two-month-old baby and a two-year-old child. Angry sermons from pulpits, loud complaints from conservatives in social philosophy, reports from juvenile courts and other organizations testified that something must be done with that period of a person’s life that science calls youth. In America, psychologists are doing everything to explain the ferment of youth. As a result, we have works such as “Youth” by Stanley Hall, which see in the puberty period itself the causes of conflicts and dissatisfaction in adolescents. Youth is seen here as the age of the heyday of idealism, as a time of rebellion against authority, as a period of life in which difficulties of adaptation and conflicts are absolutely inevitable.

Mothers are warned that daughters between the ages of thirteen and nineteen are especially difficult. This, theorists say, is a transitional age. The physical changes taking place in the bodies of your boys and girls are accompanied by certain mental changes. They are as impossible to avoid as it is impossible to prevent physiological changes. Just as your daughter's body changes from the body of a child to the body of a woman, spiritual changes inevitably occur, and they happen rapidly. Theorists look around them at the teenagers in our civilization and repeat with conviction: “Yes, vigorously.” Such views, although not supported by the findings of experimental science, became widespread, influenced our pedagogical theory, and paralyzed our parental efforts. When a baby is teething, the mother must put up with his crying. In the same way, she must arm herself with maximum composure and patiently endure the unpleasant and stormy manifestations of “adolescence.” But gradually another path of science about human development was established - the path of the ethnographer, the researcher of people in a wide variety of social environments. Neither race nor general human nature can determine what form even such fundamental human emotions as love, fear, anger will take in different social environments.

We wanted to explore the influence of civilization on human development during puberty. In order to study it in the most rigorous way, we would have to construct different types of different civilizations and expose large groups of adolescents to different environments. We would vary one factor while leaving others completely unchanged. But we are denied such ideal experimental conditions. The selective method is also unlawful - selecting from our own civilization groups of children who satisfy one or another requirement.

The only possible method for us is the ethnographer's method, turning to another civilization and studying people living in another culture in some other part of the world. The subject of our research is primitive groups that have behind them thousands of years of historical development along paths completely different from ours. That is why, while exploring the problem of youth, M. Mead decided not to go to either Germany or Russia, but went to Samoa, one of the islands in the Pacific Ocean, located 13 degrees from the equator and inhabited by dark-skinned Polynesian people. M. Mead delved into the study of girls in this society. She carefully studied the home environment in which these teenage girls lived. Describing the life of Samoan girls, M. Mead always asked herself the question: are the problems that trouble our teenagers a product of adolescence as such, or are they a product of civilization? Would the teenager behave differently in other settings?

This description purports to do more than just highlight one specific issue. It should also give the reader some idea of a different civilization, a different way of life. Each primitive people chose for itself one set of human abilities, one set of human values and reshaped them in art, social organization, and religion. This is the uniqueness of his contribution to the history of the human spirit.

1. Day in Samoa

Life here begins at dawn. After a disturbing night full of ghosts, boys and girls cheerfully call to each other. The whole village, sleepy, unkempt, begins to stir, rub their eyes and, stumbling, wander towards the shore. The girls stop to giggle about a certain young slacker who ran away from his angry father last night, and confidently declare that this father's daughter knows something about where he is hiding now. The young man grapples with the rival who has driven him out of his beloved’s heart, and their feet get stuck in the wet sand. Children beg for food, older girls go fishing. Everyone is preparing for the meal. If today is a cooking day, and young people in the midday heat are quickly preparing lunch for their elders.

Noon. The village is sleepy and dead. Any sound seems strangely loud and out of place. Words have great difficulty breaking through the heat. But the sun gradually sets into the sea.

The sleepers wake up, perhaps awakened by the cry of “Boat!” that echoes through the village. Fishermen return from fishing with their catch. The echo carries throughout the village soft clapping of hands and the loud voice of the chief offering kava (evening drink). Evening. Everyone is doing their own thing to their heart's content, families are gathering in their houses, getting ready for dinner. First the head of the house, then the women and children, and finally the patient older boys eat their supper. If there is a guest, he is served dinner first.

After dinner, the elderly and young children are escorted to bed. If young people have guests, then the front part of the house is given to them. “The night is reserved for more frivolous matters.” If the moon shines brightly, young couples may stay up past midnight. The village sleeps until dawn.

2. Raising a Samoan child

Birthdays are not important in Samoa. But the birth of a child in a high-ranking family requires a big celebration and significant expenses. A woman must give birth to her first child in her home village. They bring food to the expectant mother, relatives on the maternal side are busy with the dowry for the newborn - they make white bast cloth for his clothes, weave several hefty small mats from pandanus leaves for the dowry. The expectant mother goes to her native village heavily laden with food as a gift to her relatives. When she is about to leave for her husband’s village, her relatives give her an equal number of mats and cloth as a gift to her husband’s relatives. During childbirth, any number of people can be present; the woman should not object to this, but squirm or scream. The midwife cuts the umbilical cord with a new bamboo knife, and then everyone waits impatiently for the placenta to come out, the signal for the celebration to begin. A girl's umbilical cord is buried under a mulberry tree, a boy's umbilical cord is buried under a taro or thrown into the sea. Then the guests disperse and everyone proceeds to their usual affairs. Immediately after birth, the child loses its ceremonial significance and regains it only after the end of puberty. Relative age is of great importance, but actual age can be completely forgotten.

Babies are always breastfed, except in rare cases when the mother loses milk (in this case, a relative). The child is also fed papaya, coconut milk, sugar cane juice: the mother chews the food and gives it to the child on her finger, or, if the food is liquid, moistens a piece of bast cloth with it and lets the child suck on it. Children are given food whenever they start crying. Once they are weaned, they are usually placed in the care of some little girl in the family. They are often washed with wild orange juice and rubbed with coconut oil until their skin shines.

The main nanny is usually a girl of six or seven years old. Little nannies do not encourage him to walk, since a walking child requires more trouble. Children begin to walk earlier than they talk. Children under three or four years old prefer to crawl rather than walk, since all housekeeping in Samoan villages is done on the floor.

A child under 4-5 years old must:

be absolutely obedient;

be able to sit or crawl around the house, but he is supposed to get up on his feet only in case of emergency;

do not address adults while standing;

do not go out in the sun;

do not confuse fibers prepared for weaving;

do not scatter coconuts folded to dry on the floor;

to ensure that his skimpy dress would at least nominally fit him;

handle knives and fire with due care;

Do not touch the kava bowl under any circumstances.

All these, of course, are simply prohibitions, reinforced from time to time by spanking, loud, irritated screams and ineffective suggestions.

The responsibility to punish disobedient people usually falls on children who are not much older in age. By the age of sixteen or seventeen, all these admonitions and warnings leave an indelible mark on the language of Samoan boys and girls. Every two minutes they insert into their speech remarks like “Be quiet!”, “Sit!”, “Shut up!”, “Stop making noise!” No mother will bother herself with the upbringing of her youngest child if there is some older child who can be entrusted with this responsibility. In Samoa, as soon as a child grows to an age where his willfulness becomes intolerable, the care of the younger one is entrusted to his shoulders. By the age of six or seven, a girl has mastered the main prohibitions well, and therefore she can be entrusted with caring for the youngest. By this time, everyone has developed a number of simple housekeeping skills. But for a little girl, all these services are just an addition to her main job, her duties as a nanny. Very young boys are also expected to care for younger children, but by the age of eight or nine they are usually relieved of this.

The upbringing of girls is less comprehensive than the upbringing of boys: boys not only go through the disciplined school of babysitting, but also quickly receive ample opportunities to learn to cooperate effectively under the guidance of their older comrades. Girls have a highly developed sense of individual responsibility, but their environment teaches them little about effective cooperation. This is especially noticeable when young people hold some kind of joint event: boys organize quickly, and girls, not accustomed to any quick and effective methods of cooperation, spend hours squabbling.

As soon as the girl gains sufficient physical strength to carry heavy loads, it is in the interests of the family to shift the care of small children to the shoulders of her younger sister, and the teenage girl is relieved of the duties of a nanny. The irritating, petty routine of housekeeping, which in our civilization is blamed for destroying the souls and embittering grown women, in Samoa falls on the shoulders of children of fourteen years of age.

Before her release from nanny duties, the little girl had virtually no opportunity to acquire complex work skills. Now they have to learn a lot:

weave all kinds of baskets for ourselves

choose taro leaves suitable for boiling

dig up only mature tubers of this plant

in the kitchen they learn to cook with palus

wrap large fish in palm leaves or wrap a bunch of small fish in a wide breadfruit leaf, etc.

As soon as they begin to look at a girl as a creature capable of some kind of long-term and purposeful activity, she, along with adults, is sent to the ocean for fish.

Until now, her knowledge of the plant world had mostly been related to games. Now she must get to know all these trees and plants, with more serious goals in mind. For example, she must know when pandanus leaves are ready to be harvested and how those long leaves can be cut with one swift, sure stroke of the knife. She must be able to distinguish between the three types of pandanus, since the quality of her mats will depend on this. At home, the girl’s main task is to learn to weave. Usually an elderly relative teaches a girl how to weave, making sure that she knows how to make all types of wickerwork. When a girl turns thirteen or fourteen years old, she begins to weave her first ceremonial mat. The ceremonial mat is the highest achievement of Samoan virtuosity in weaving. During all this time of more or less systematic training, the girl very subtly maneuvers between the reputation of a student who has successfully mastered the necessary minimum skill, and the fame of a virtuoso, which would bring her too much trouble. Her chances of marriage would be greatly harmed if a rumor spread through the village that she was lazy and incompetent at housework.

At the age of seventeen or eighteen, the young man is sent to the aumanga, a society of young and old untitled men, which, not figuratively, but simply in honor of it, is called “the strength of the village.” Here competition, teaching and example spur his activity. The old leaders who direct the activities of the aumanga look with equal disapproval at any lag and at any excessive precocity. The young man hopes that the future will bring him the title of matai, a title given to a member of the Fono - the assembly of heads of families. This title gives him the right to drink kava with the leaders, to work with them and not with the youth, the right to sit in the community house in the presence of the elders, although it is “intermediate” in nature and does not carry with it the fullness of character. But only in very rare cases can he be absolutely sure of receiving this title. But all this is constantly accompanied by the requirement: do not be too skillful, too outstanding, too precocious. You should only be slightly superior to your comrades. There is no need to arouse either their hatred or the disapproval of their elders, who would rather encourage the dismissal than reconcile with the upstart. And at the same time, the young man understands well the reluctance of his sisters to take on the burden of responsibility. If he hurries slowly, without being too conspicuous, then he has a good chance of becoming a leader. If he is talented enough, the Fono itself may think of him, finding him and granting him a vacant title so that he can sit among the old men and learn wisdom. The boy therefore faces a more difficult choice than the girl. He does not like responsibility, and at the same time he wants to stand out in his group; skill in some matter will hasten the day when he becomes a leader; and yet he is punished and scolded if he slackens in his efforts; but he is also severely condemned if he moves forward very quickly; and he must be respected among his companions if he is to win the heart of his sweetheart. On the other hand, his social prestige is increased by his amorous exploits.

That is why a girl calms down after receiving a “mediocre” grade, while a young man is spurred on to greater efforts. A young man shuns a girl who has not received evidence of her usefulness and is considered stupid and inept. But the girl is seventeen and doesn’t want to get married, not yet. After all, it is better to live as a girl, to live without bearing any responsibility, to live experiencing all the richness and diversity of feelings. This is the best period of her life.

3. Samoan family

A Samoan village numbers thirty or forty families. Each of them is headed by an elder called matai. At official village meetings, each matai has the right to a seat that belongs only to him and represents all members of his family. He is responsible for them. These families consist of all individuals who have lived for a certain time under the protection of a common matai. Their composition varies from a small family, which includes only parents and children, to families consisting of fifteen to twenty members, that is, to large families related to the matai or his wife by blood, marriage or adoption, often without any close family ties together. Adopted family members are usually, although not necessarily, close relatives.

Widows and widowers, especially those without children, usually return to their blood relatives, but a married couple may live with both the in-laws and the in-laws. But a person permanently residing in another village cannot be considered a member of the family, since the latter is a strictly local unit of Samoan society.

Within a family, age rather than kinship gives disciplinary power. The matai has formal and often real power over every member of the family under his leadership, even over his own father and mother. The extent of this power, of course, depends on his personal characteristics, but everyone is strictly careful that some ceremonial forms of recognition of his dominant position are observed. The youngest child in a family of this kind is subordinate to all the other members, and his position does not improve one iota with age until the next youngest child is born. This process has the force of strict law. A girl's marriage gives her almost nothing in this regard. Only one thing will change: the number of sweet and obedient subordinates will be increased in the most pleasant way for her by her own children. Any older relative has the right to demand personal services from his younger relatives from other families, the right to criticize their behavior and interfere in their affairs. This loosely defined but nonetheless demanding kin group is not without its merits. Within its boundaries, any three-year-old child can wander in complete safety, confident that everywhere he will be given food and drink, put to sleep, that everywhere there will be a kind hand to wipe his tears or bandage a wound.

The distribution of ranks according to age is violated only in very rare cases. In every village one or two high chiefs have the hereditary right to elevate some girl of their family to the rank of taupou, the ceremonial princess of the house. Older women respectfully call her the title when addressing her. There are only two or three taupou for the whole village. This extraordinary increase in importance is accompanied by a fear of inadvertently hurting family ties, which is expressed in additional respect for the girl’s personality. Very few children live in the same house all the time. Most of them are constantly trying other possible places of residence. And all this can be done under the pretext of visiting, without causing any reproaches for avoiding family responsibilities. No Samoan child, except taupou and hardened juvenile delinquents, ever feels cornered. He always has relatives to run away to.

The most important kinship relationships in the Samoan family, the ones that most influence the lives of young people, are those between boys and girls who call each other “brother” or “sister” and the relationships between younger and older relatives. Relatives of the opposite sex in their communication with each other are guided by the rules of the strictest etiquette. After they reach the age at which decency must be observed, in this case nine or ten years old, they do not dare touch each other, sit next to each other, eat together, address each other casually, or mention anything in each other’s presence. there were no obscenities. They cannot be together in any other house except their own.

Tei, a word for a younger relative, emphasizes another human connection. The first manifestations of a girl's maternal instincts are never poured out on her own children, but on one of her younger relatives. The word ainga generally covers all relationships of kinship - blood, marriage, kinship by adoption, but its emotional meaning remains the same in all cases.

Any relative is considered as a person against whom many demands can be made. At the same time, this is a person in relation to whom there are just as many obligations. Refusal to help will brand the person refusing as a stingy, unkind person, and kindness is a virtue valued above all else by Samoans. At the moment when services of this kind are provided, no return is required, unless we are talking about sharing the products of family labor. But careful accounting of the value of the property given away or the service rendered is kept, and donations are demanded at the first suitable occasion.

Obligations to come to the rescue in general or to provide a service required by custom, as in the case of a wedding or the birth of a child, are determined by broad family relationships, and not by the narrow boundaries of the family hearth. Only in families of high rank, where the female line has priority in making certain decisions and in choosing the taupou - princess of the house, and the male line in the transmission of titles, does actual consanguinity continue to be of great practical importance.

A matai of any family is, in principle, exempt from performing minor household chores. But in practice this almost never happens, except for a high-ranking leader. However, he is assigned the role of leader in any type of work. All work is carefully distributed according to age - according to the ability of a person at a given age to complete them. Except among people of very high rank, an adult may reject a particular job simply because it can be done by younger people, and not because it is beneath him.

If the girl’s father is a matai, the matai of her family, then his position does not affect her in any way. But if another family member is a matai, then he can protect the girl from the excessive demands of her own father. In the first case, her disagreements with her father lead to her leaving her own home and going to live with relatives; in the second, minor family tensions arise.

And yet, rank, not by birth, but by title, is very important in Samoa. The status of an entire village depends on the rank of its main chief, the prestige of a family on the title of its matai. These titles have two gradations - leader and speaker; each of them carries with him many responsibilities and rights in addition to the responsibility of the head of the family.

In many families, the shadow of noble birth is cast over the lives of children - sometimes easily, sometimes painfully; imposed long before they are old enough to understand the meaning of these values.

4. Girl and her age group

Until the age of six or seven, a girl communicates very little with her peers. But around the age of seven, large groups begin to form, a kind of voluntary partnerships, which subsequently disintegrate. These groups include children of relatives and neighborhood children. They are strictly divided along gender lines, and hostility between little girls and boys is one of the most noticeable features of the life of these groups. These children's groups usually consist of children from eight or ten neighboring houses. These are all fluid, random communities, clearly hostile to their peers in other villages or even to similar groups in their own. Strong friendships never form at this age. The structure of the group is clearly dominated by kinship or neighborly relationships, with the individual in the background. The strongest attachments always arise between close relatives, and a couple of little sisters take the place of our bosom girlfriends in Samoa. The emotional tone towards the residents of another village leads to the fact that even two cousins from different villages glance at each other sideways. Children of this age, gathering in groups, only play; they have no other activities. And in this respect, being in a group is diametrically opposed to the home life of a Samoan girl, where she only works: babysits children, performs countless simple household chores. The girls gather in groups early in the evening, before the late Samoan dinner, and sometimes during the general afternoon siesta.

On moonlit nights they run around the village, either attacking or fleeing from gangs of boys, spying on what is happening in the houses behind the curtain-mats, catching shore crabs, ambushing unwary lovers, or sneaking up to some distant house to look at childbirth, and maybe a miscarriage. Obsessed with fear of the village elders, of little boys, of their own relatives, of night ghosts, they will not risk going on their nocturnal adventures unless there are four or five of them. But these whimsically emerging communities of girls were only possible between the ages of eight and twelve. As puberty approaches, and as the girl gains physical strength and acquires new skills, she again becomes preoccupied with household chores. Her days are filled with long work and new responsibilities. After 17 years, girls no longer gather in groups of friends. Now similar sexual interests and family relationships come first. If someone dear to her heart has a bosom friend who is not indifferent to her cousin, then a passionate, albeit transient, friendship arises between these relatives. Sometimes friendships of this kind extend beyond the purely kinship group. Although girls at this time may only confide in one or two of their young female relatives, their changed sexual status is felt by other women in the village.

Little boys follow the same pattern as little girls, forming gangs based on the double ties of neighborhood and kinship. The feeling of age superiority is always stronger here. Between boys there are two institutionalized forms of relationship, designated by the same word, which, perhaps, at one time defined the same relationship (coa). Boys are circumcised in pairs, and they themselves organize this ritual, finding an old man famous for his skill in this matter.

The choice of a comrade by a boy who has already reached puberty two or three years ago is also determined by custom: a young man very rarely speaks about his love and never asks a girl to marry him. He needs a friend of about his own age whom he can trust to sing his madrigals and carry the matter forward with the required ardor and care. Friendship is often, but not necessarily, based on mutual favors. The love expert, when the time comes, frees himself from the services of an intermediary, wanting to fully enjoy the sweet fruits of all stages of courtship.

Aualuma is an organization of young girls and untitled wives - an extremely loose partnership, gathering for very rare community work and for even more rare celebrations. At the same time, the aumanga - an organization of young people - occupies too large a place in the village economy to be eliminated with the same ease. Indeed, the aumaiga is the most stable social formation of the village. Matai meetings are a more formal organization, as they spend most of their time with their families.

It can be said that as an organizing principle, friendships based on age end for girls before the onset of puberty, their household responsibilities are very individual and they need to hide their love affairs. For boys the opposite is true: their greater freedom, the more obligatory nature of the organization of their groups, their constant participation in social labor give rise to age groups that persist throughout life. Kinship has a certain, but not decisive, influence on the organization of such groups. The solidarity of these groups is negatively affected by differences in the ranks of their members, different claims of young people for a future position in society, and different ages of people of equal rank.

6. Accepted forms of sexual relations

The first thing a little girl learns in her relationships with boys is a desire to avoid them and a sense of antagonism. After she is eight or nine years old, she will never go near a group of older boys. Children aged 13-14 outgrow the framework of same-sex age groups and age-related sexual antagonism. However, they do not yet have an active sexual consciousness. When teenagers get together, they have a fun romp, without experiencing the slightest embarrassment, good-naturedly teasing each other.

In two or three years, all this will change. The first independent love experiments of adolescents, as well as the Don Juan adventures of adult men among the girls of the village, are options that are on the very edge of permitted types of sexual behavior. This also includes the first experiences of a young man with a woman of a more mature age. More recently, this is extremely common, so the success of these experiments is rarely hampered by the mutual inexperience of the partners. Yet these forms of behavior lie outside the boundaries of recognized sexual norms. The worst deviations from the recognized forms of sexual relations, however, are the love of a man for some young woman who is dependent on him from his own family, a child he has adopted, or the younger sisters of his wife. Everyone starts screaming about incest, and feelings sometimes become so heated that the perpetrator is forced to leave his own home.

Apart from official marriage, there are only two other types of sexual relations that are fully approved by Samoan society: love affairs between unmarried young people (including widowed people) and adultery.

Among young people, before marriage, there are three forms of love relationships: secret dates “under the palm trees,” open flight with the beloved—avanga—and ceremonial courtship, when “the boy sits in front of the girl.” Beyond all this is a curious form of stealth violence called moetotolo: a young man who does not enjoy the favor of any girl creeps up on the sleeping people at night.

In all three accepted forms of love affairs, the young man needs a confidant and messenger, whom he calls soa. Soa behaves in the same way as the speaker: he demands certain material benefits from his master in exchange for intangible services rendered to him. If his mediation leads to marriage, the groom is obliged to give him a particularly beautiful gift. One overly cautious and disappointed lover said: “I had five soas, and only one of them turned out to be true.”

Among possible candidates for the position of coa, preference is most often given to two figures - a brother and some girl. A brother by his very nature must be faithful. The girl is more dexterous in these matters. But the best suited for the position of soa is a female envoy - “soafafine”. However, it is difficult to get any woman to fill this position. The young man cannot choose her from among his relatives. The strongest enmity is between a young man and a soa who betrayed him, or between a lover and his beloved friend, who somehow interfered with his courtship.

In such a love affair, the lover never shows himself in the house of his beloved. Only his companion can go there, either with some group, or under a fictitious pretext. His task is to get her to agree to a date. Love affairs of this kind are usually very short-lived, and both a boy and a girl can have several of them at the same time. According to the native theory, sterility is a punishment for promiscuity; conversely, it is a common belief that only stable monogamy is rewarded with conception.

Often a girl is afraid to leave the house at night, because the night is full of ghosts and devils. Then the lover bravely sneaks into the house. Taking off his lavalayu, he rubs coconut oil all over his body. The date takes place in absolute silence, and he must leave until the morning so that no one can see or hear him.

Moetotolo is the only sexual activity that represents a clear deviation from the usual pattern of sexual relations. Violence in the form of brutal assault on a woman has occurred from time to time in Samoa since the islanders' first contact with white civilization. If the girl suspects deception or becomes indignant, she will raise a terrible cry, and the whole family will rush in pursuit. Moetotolo fishing is considered an exciting sport.

There are most often two motives behind the behavior of a moetotolo - anger and love failure. A Samoan girl flirting with boys does not do so without risk. Some young men cannot achieve their beloved by any legal means, and there is no prostitution, excluding guest prostitution, in Samoa. But some of the young men who brought mototolo into disrepute were the most charming and handsome youths of the village. Moetotolo becomes the laughing stock of the entire village and must achieve the title in order to be able to choose again. Homosexuality is, to some extent, a way out of this “loveless” situation.

Between these adventures in the most literal sense of the word and the formal marriage proposal, there is also some middle form of courtship, in which the boy encourages the girl to express her feelings. Since this form is considered a preliminary step towards marriage, both kinship groups must more or less approve of this union. Soa, meanwhile, noisily and skillfully courtes the girl, whispering to her at the same time odes of praise in honor of his friend.

He who declares his love risks taking a thorny path. The girl doesn’t want to get married or break off her love affairs in the name of an official engagement. Now that the whole village knows that he is seeking her hand, the girl indulges her vanity, neglecting him, and becomes capricious. The official marriage ceremony is postponed until the boy's family has raised and collected enough food, and the girl's family has prepared a sufficient amount of dowry - tapas and mats.

This is how the love affairs of ordinary young people from the same village or young people of plebeian origin from neighboring villages are handled. These free and easy love experiments are not allowed by taupou. Custom demands that she be a virgin. Although the virginity test ceremony should always be observed at weddings of people of all ranks, it is simply bypassed.

The attitude towards virginity in Samoa is quite funny. Christianity brought with it, of course, the moral encouragement of chastity. Samoans treat it with respect, although with complete skepticism, and the concept of celibacy is absolutely meaningless for them. Virginity certainly adds something to a girl's attractiveness.

The prestige of the groom and his relatives, the bride and her relatives increases in the case of her virginity, so that a girl of high rank, hastening to part with her virginity before the wedding and thereby avoid a painful public ceremony, would encounter not only the watchful supervision of her older relatives, but also to the groom's ambition. If secret and casual “love under the palm trees” as an expression of disordered sexual intercourse is characteristic of people of modest social origin, then bride kidnapping finds its prototype in the love stories of taupou and the daughters of other leaders. These girls of noble birth are carefully guarded. Secret meetings at night or secret meetings during the day are not for them. The leader instructs some old woman from his family to be his daughter’s constant companion, a duenna. Taupou should not visit and should not be left alone at night. Some older woman always sleeps next to her. She is strictly forbidden to go to another village unaccompanied. Tradition requires the taupou to find a groom outside her own village - to marry a high chief or manaia of another village. No one pays any attention to the opinions and feelings of the girl herself.

During all this time, the wooing leader leaves his speaker in his place in the bride's house - the equivalent of a more modest soa. This commissioner has one of the best opportunities of his life to get rich. He remains here as an emissary of his leader to observe the behavior of the bride. He works for her family, and every week the matai at home must reward him with a nice gift. A young man from another village, having escaped from the taupou of a rival community, gains the loudest fame. After her flight, the marriage contract is certainly dissolved, although the angry relatives of the taupou may not approve of her new marriage plans and, as punishment, marry her off to the old man.

So great is the honor that accrues to a village where one of its young inhabitants has succeeded in stealing a taupou that the efforts of a whole malanga are often concentrated on making such an escape.

It is very rare that a girl from an ordinary family is supervised with such strictness as to make kidnapping the only possible way to end a love affair. But the kidnapping itself is spectacular; the young man is not averse to raising his prestige as a successful Don Juan, and the girl wants everyone to know about her victory, and often hopes that the kidnapping will lead to marriage. The runaway couple rushes to the boy’s parents or to some other relative of his and waits for the girl’s relatives to demand her back. Kidnappings are much less common than secret love affairs because the girl is at greater risk.

Kidnapping becomes practical when one of the families opposes the marriage that the young people have decided on. The couple finds refuge in a family that is favorable to their union. If their marriage is legalized, this stigma will remain on them forever. The community does not approve of a couple of young upstarts breaking the rules.

Romantic love in the form in which it is found in our civilization is inextricably linked with the ideals of monogamy, monogamy, jealousy, and unbreakable fidelity. This kind of love is unknown to Samoans. Marriage, on the other hand, is seen as a social and economic transaction in which the wealth, social status and skills of the future husband and wife must be taken into account in their relationship to each other. There are many marriages in Samoa in which both partners, especially if they are over thirty, are completely faithful to each other. This fidelity cannot be explained by passionate attachment to a spouse. The decisive factor here is the suitability of the partners for each other and expediency.

Adultery in Samoa does not necessarily mean the end of a marriage. The chief's wife, who commits adultery, is condemned for dishonoring her high position and is banished. The leader will be extremely indignant if she marries a man of lower rank for the second time. If her lover is considered more guilty, then the village will take upon itself the right of public retribution. In less noticeable cases of adultery, the degree of public outrage depends on the difference in the social status of the offender and the offended, or on individual feelings of jealousy, which arise only in rare cases. If the offended husband or offended wife is too deeply offended and threatens the offender with physical violence, then the culprit must resort to public ifonga - ceremonial repentance to the one from whom he asks for forgiveness.

If, on the other hand, the wife really gets tired of her husband or the husband gets tired of his wife, then divorce in Samoa is very simple and informal: one of the spouses living in the other’s family simply returns to his parental home, and the relationship is considered “past.” " Monogamy in Samoa is very fragile, it is often violated and even more often abandoned completely.

In theory, a woman in a family submits to her husband and serves him, although, of course, there are often husbands who are under the thumb of their wives. The social rank of a wife never exceeds the rank of her husband, because it always directly depends on the rank of the husband. Her family may be richer and more famous than his. Her actual influence on village affairs, through her blood relations, may be much greater than his, but in the circle of her present family and in the village she is always tausi, the speaker's wife, or faletua, the chief's wife. This sometimes leads to conflict. It depends on where she lives.

7. The role of dance

Dancing is the only activity in which almost all ages and both sexes take part.

There are no professional dance teachers here, there are virtuosos. Dancing is a very individual activity, carried out as part of an event in the community (from 12 to 20 people). The main reasons for the holiday:

the arrival of two or three young people from another village;

It's at small, casual dance parties that children learn to dance. The number of songs performed is small; young people in the village rarely know more than a dozen melodies and twice as many song lyrics, which are sung now to one tune, now to another. The verse here is based on the equality of the number of syllables; It is allowed to change the stress in the word, rhyme is not required. The content of the song can be extremely personal and include many jokes about individuals and their villages. The form of audience participation in the dance depends on the age of the dancers. At these dance festivals, young children are dragged onto the stage with almost no prior preparation. Even as babies, sitting in the arms of their mothers, they get used to clapping their hands at such evenings. The rhythm is indelibly imprinted on their minds. Two and three year olds stand on mats in the house and clap their hands when the adults sing. Then they are required to dance in front of the audience themselves. While children dance, boys and girls decorate their clothes with flowers, necklaces made of shells, and bracelets made of leaves. One or two girls may sneak out of the house and return dressed in pretty skirts made of bast. A bottle of coconut oil comes from the family closet and the adult dancers lubricate their bodies with it. The form of the dance itself is very individual. The dance comes in three styles:

buffoonish.

A little girl who learns to dance has these three styles to choose from, twenty-five to thirty figures from which she must be able to compose her dance, and, finally, and most importantly, she has role models - individual dancers. The style of any more or less virtuoso dancer is known throughout the village, and when copied, the imitation immediately catches the eye. Imitations are not considered something vicious, but they also do not bring glory to the author.

Dance Meaning:

Dance effectively compensates for the child’s system of strict subordination in which he constantly finds himself. Here the adults’ command: “Sit and be silent!” is replaced by the command: “Get up and dance!” In their dance there is not even the slightest semblance of coordination of partners, subordination of the wings of the group of dancers to its center.

Participation in dancing lowers the threshold of shyness. A child in Samoa, suffering and tormented, still dances. A girl's grace and composure in dancing do not extend into everyday life as easily as it does in boys.

These informal dance evenings are closer to our pedagogical methods than all other aspects of Samoan pedagogy: it is in dancing that the precocious child is constantly encouraged, creating more and more opportunities for him to show his skills. The inferiority complex is based on two sources: awkwardness in sexual relations and awkwardness in dancing.

The highest sign of politeness of a chief towards his guest is to make the taupou dance for him. Boys dance after getting tattooed, manaia dances before going to the wedding, and the bride dances at her wedding. At midnight gatherings in Malanga, dancing often takes on an openly obscene and exciting character.

8. Attitude to the individual

A simple change of residence excludes the Samoans from the very possibility of very strong oppression of one person by another. Their assessments of human personality are a curious mixture of precautionary behavior and fatalism. They have a word - musu, which means a person’s reluctance and intransigence. Manifestations of musu in humans are treated with almost superstitious reverence. Samoans are not deaf to differences between people. But the completeness of their assessment of these differences is hampered by the theory of a certain general stubborn reluctance, the tendency to mistake resentment, irritation, intractability, and some particular partialities as simply multiple forms of manifestation of the same attitude—musa. The lack of interest in the motives of behavior is also facilitated by the fact that it is customary to answer any personal question completely vaguely (“Ta But” - “Who knows”). Sometimes this answer is supplemented by a clarifying answer: “I don’t know.” This answer is considered quite sufficient and acceptable in any conversation, although its harshness precludes its use on solemn ceremonial occasions. If a person falls ill, then an explanation for his illness is sought in the attitude of his relatives towards him. Anger against him in the heart of one of them, especially a sister, is the strongest cause of evil.

How this attitude protects the individual is easy to understand if we remember how little here everyone is left to himself. There is virtually no inviolability of personal property. But in general, the whole village knows well what each of its residents is doing. The Samoan language does not have special grammatical comparative forms. Relative quality, relative beauty, relative wisdom - all this is unfamiliar to them. They have less difficulty distinguishing between the degrees of bad than good. When describing another person, the sequence of characteristics mentioned always fit into the same objective system: gender, age, rank, family ties, defects, occupation. If your interlocutor is a very smart adult, then he can give an assessment to the person, which you need to specifically ask for. In accordance with the local classification, the psychological characteristics of a person are divided into four characteristics that form pairs: “good - bad” and “easy - difficult”.

Expressions of emotion are classified as “caused by something” or “uncaused.” A well-adapted individual who has sufficiently internalized the opinions, emotions and attitudes of his age and sex group will never be accused of laughing, crying or getting angry without reason. If a person deviates from the norm in temperament: his behavior will be subject to the most careful analysis and will cause contempt.

One of the most disliked traits in a peer is expressed by the word “fiasili” - literally “wants to be above everyone else”, or, more briefly, “arrogant”. They are interested in a person primarily in his actions, without in any way trying to penetrate the depths of the motives of his behavior.

An assessment of a person is always given in terms of age group - both the age group of the speaker and the age of the person being assessed. And the speaker’s assessments are influenced by his age, so assessments of a person’s strengths and weaknesses change with the age of the assessors. In adult assessments, norms of behavior are correlated with age as follows: young children should be quiet, get up early, obey, work hard and joyfully, play with children of the same sex; young people should be hardworking and skillful in their work, not be upstarts, show prudence in marriage, loyalty to their relatives, not gossip, not hooligans; adults must be wise, peace-loving, serene, generous, caring for the good name of their village, they must lead their lives in compliance with all the rules of decency.

9. Our pedagogical problems in the light of Samoan antitheses

In we met girls going through the same process of physiological development as ours. That is why here one could say: “These are the most suitable conditions for our experiment.” The developing girl is a constant factor in both America and Samoa; The civilizations of America and Samoa are different from each other. With the exception of physiological changes, we did not find any other significant differences that would distinguish the group of girls going through puberty from the group that will mature after two years, or from the group that went through this period two years ago.

The recipe for educators recommending special pedagogical tactics for dealing with teenage girls, applied to Samoan conditions, would be: tall girls are different from short girls of the same age, and we must use different methods in their education.

What, then, does Samoa have that America doesn't, and what does America have that Samoa doesn't, on what basis could one explain the difference in behavioral expression of adolescence? Two main components of the reason for this

specifically Samoan conditions;

living conditions of primitive society in general.

The Samoan background, which makes the growth of children so easy and such a simple matter, is the general spontaneous character of the whole society. Here no one suffers for their beliefs or fights to the death in the name of certain goals. The conflict between parents and child here is resolved by the child moving to live on the other side of the street, between the village and the adult by the fact that the adult leaves for the neighboring village, between the husband and the seducer of his wife by several pairs of finely made mats. Neither poverty nor major misfortunes threaten these people, and therefore they do not struggle so frantically for life and do not tremble with fear of the future. No merciless gods, quick in anger and harsh in vengeance, disturb the smooth flow of their lives. Wars and cannibalism are a thing of the past a long time ago, and now the biggest reason for tears, if not taking death itself, is a trip to visit relatives on another island. Here no one is in a hurry in life and no one is punished for falling behind. On the contrary, here the gifted, developed beyond their age, are held back so that the slowest can catch up with them. And in the personal relationships of Samoans, we do not see strong attachments. Love and hate, jealousy and revenge, sadness and bereavement - all this is only for weeks. From the first month of his life, a child, passed from one random female hand to another, learns a lesson: do not become very attached to one person, do not have very high expectations with any of your relatives. This is where the main reason for the painless transformation of a Samoan girl into a woman lies. Where no one experiences deep feelings, the teenager will not be tormented by tragic situations.

CULTURE AND WORLD OF CHILDHOOD

Selected works

From the editorial board

I. Frost on a blooming blackberry

Chapter 11. Samoa: Teenage Girl

Chapter 12. Return from the expedition

Chapter 13. Manus: the thinking of children among primitive peoples

Chapter 14. Years between expeditions

Chapter 15. Arapesh and Mundugumor: Sex Roles in Culture

Chapter 16. Chambuli: gender and temperament

Chapter 17. Bali and the Iatmuls: a qualitative leap

II. Growing up in Samoa

I. Introduction

II. A day in Samoa

III. Raising a Samoan Child

IV. Samoan family

V. The girl and her age group

VII. Accepted forms of sexual relations

VIII. The role of dance

IX. Attitude to personality

XIII. Our pedagogical problems in the light of Samoan antitheses

III. How to grow in New Guinea

I. Introduction

III. Early Childhood Education

IV. Family life

VII. Child's world

XIV. Upbringing and personality

Appendix I. An Ethnological Approach to Social Psychology

IV. Mountain Arapesh(chapters from the book “Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies”)

1. Life in the mountains

2. Joint work in society

3. Birth of a child among the Arapesh

4. Influences shaping the Arapesh personality in early childhood

6. Growing up and betrothal of a girl among the Araneshas

8. The Arapesh ideal and those who deviate from it

V. Human paternity is a social invention

VI. Culture and continuity. Study of conflict between generations

Chapter 1. The Past: Postfigurative Cultures, and Well-Known Ancestors

Chapter 2. The Present: Cofigurative Cultures and Familiar Peers

VII. Spiritual Atmosphere and the Science of Evolution

Comments

Application. I. S. Kon. Margaret Mead and the ethnography of childhood

Bibliography of the most important works of M. Mead

FROM THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Institute of Ethnography named after. N. N. Miklukho-Maclay of the USSR Academy of Sciences and the Main Editorial Board of Oriental Literature of the Nauka Publishing House have been publishing the book series “Ethnographic Library” since 1983.

The series publishes the best works of domestic and foreign ethnographers, which had a great influence on the development of ethnographic science and retain their important theoretical and methodological significance to this day. The series includes works in which, using ethnographic materials, the patterns of life of human societies at a particular historical stage are illuminated, and major problems of general ethnography are considered. Since the integral task of the science of peoples is the constant replenishment of factual data and the depth of theoretical generalizations depends on the reliability and detail of the factual material, works of a descriptive nature will also find their place in the “Ethnographic Library”, which are still of outstanding interest due to the uniqueness of the information they contain and the importance of the methodological principles underlying field research.

The series is intended for a wide range of specialists in the field of social sciences, as well as teachers and students of higher educational institutions.

The series opened with the publication of two books: “The League of the Chodenosaunee, or Iroquois” by L. G. Morgan and “Structural Anthropology” by C. Lévi-Strauss. Both were published in 1983 (in 1985, Lévi-Strauss's book was published in an additional edition). Suggested book by Margaret Mead “The Culture and World of Childhood. Selected Works" introduces the Soviet reader for the first time to the works of the famous American scientist, the founder of the ethnography of childhood.

The work of the Russian scientist - Turkologist, linguist and ethnographer - Academician V.V. Radlov (1837-1918) “From Siberia. Diary pages" (translation from German). In the future, the series also includes works by D. I. Zelenin, M. Moss, L. Ya. Sternborg, V. G. Bogoraz, I. F. Sumtsov and others.

HOARFROST ON BLOWING BLACKBERRY

Chapter 11. Samoa: Teenage Girl

When I went to Samoa, my understanding of the obligations imposed on a researcher by working in the field and writing reports about it was vague. My decision to become an anthropologist was based in part on the conviction that a simple scientist, even one without the special gifts required of a great artist, can contribute to the advancement of knowledge. This decision was also associated with the acute sense of anxiety conveyed to me by Professor Boas 1 and Ruth Benedict 2 . In remote parts of the earth, under the onslaught of modern civilization, ways of life about which we know nothing are breaking down. We need to describe them now, now, otherwise they will be lost to us forever. Everything else can wait, but this has become the most pressing task. Such thoughts came over me at meetings in Toronto in 1924, where I, the youngest participant in the convention, listened to others constantly talk about “their people.” I had no people to talk about. From that time on, I had a firm determination to go out into the field, and not sometime in the future, after reflection at my leisure, but immediately, as soon as I had completed the necessary preparation.

Then I had very little idea of what field work was. The course of lectures on her methods, given to us by Professor Boas, was not devoted to field work, as such. These were lectures on theory - how, for example, to organize material to justify or challenge a certain theoretical point of view. Ruth Benedict spent one summer on an expedition with a group of completely domesticated Indians in California, where she took her mother with her on vacation. She also worked with Zuni 3. I read her descriptions of the landscape, the appearance of the Zuni, the bloodthirstiness of the bugs, and the difficulty of cooking. But I gleaned very little from them about how it worked. Professor Boas, speaking of the Kwakiutl 4 , called them his “dear friends,” but there was nothing that followed that would help me understand what it was like to live among them.

When I decided to take a teenage girl as my research subject, and Professor Boas allowed me to go into the field in Samoa, I listened to his half-hour pep talk. He warned me that on an expedition I should be prepared for the apparent loss of time, to simply sit and listen, and that I should not waste time doing ethnography in general, the study of culture in its entirety. Fortunately, many people - missionaries, lawyers, government officials and old-school ethnographers - had already been to Samoa, so the temptation to “waste time” on ethnography, he added, would be less strong for me. In the summer, he wrote me a letter in which he once again advised me to take care of my health and again touched on the tasks facing me:

I am sure you have thought carefully about this issue, but there are some aspects of it that particularly interest me that I would like to draw your attention to, even if you have already thought about them.

I am very interested in how young girls react to the restrictions on their freedom of behavior imposed on them by custom. Very often, in our teenage years, we are faced with a rebellious spirit, which manifests itself either in gloominess or in outbursts of rage. Among us we meet people who are characterized by humility accompanied by suppressed rebellion. This manifests itself either in the desire for loneliness, or in obsessive participation in all social events, behind which lies the desire to drown out internal anxiety. It is not entirely clear whether we can encounter similar phenomena in a primitive society and whether our desire for independence is not a simple consequence of the conditions of modern life and more developed individualism. I am also interested in the extreme shyness of girls in primitive society. I don't know if you will find it in Samoa. It is typical for girls of most Indian tribes and manifests itself not only in their relationships with outsiders, but also within the family circle. They are often afraid to talk to older people and are very shy in their presence.

Another interesting problem is the outburst of feelings among girls. You should pay special attention to cases of romantic love among older girls. According to my observations, it can in no way be considered excluded, and it naturally appears in its most striking forms where parents or society force marriages on girls against their will.

Look for the individual, but also think about the scheme, pose the problems as Ruth Bunzel 5 posed them in her study of art among the Pueblos and Geberlins on the northwest coast. I assume you have already read Malinowski's article 6 in Psyche on family behavior in New Guinea 7 . I think he was heavily influenced by the Freudians, but the problem he posed is one that confronts me as well.

Here it is also necessary to mention G. Stanley Hall's voluminous book 8 on adolescents, in which, identifying the stages of human growth with the stages of human culture, he argued that the development of each child reproduces the history of the human race. The textbooks started from the premise, borrowed largely from German theory, 9 that puberty was a period of rebellion and stress. At that time, puberty and adolescence were strongly identified by everyone. Only much later did researchers involved in child development begin to talk about a hypothetical “first adolescence” - around the age of six - and about a second crisis - during puberty, about the continuation of adolescence after twenty years, and even about some manifestations of it. in adults over forty.

My training in psychology gave me an understanding of samples, tests, and systematic behavioral questionnaires. I also had even a little practical experience with them. My Aunt Fanny worked for the Association for the Protection of Youth at Hull House in Chicago, and I devoted one summer to reading the reports of that Association. They gave me an idea of what the social context of individual behavior is, what the family should be considered and what its place in the structure of society is.

I understood that I would need to learn the language. But I did not know anyone, except the missionaries and their children who became ethnologists, who could speak the spoken language of the people they were studying. I read only one essay by Malinovsky and did not know to what extent he spoke the Trobriand language 10 . I myself didn’t know a single foreign language, I only “learned” Latin, French and German in high school. Our language training in college consisted of brief exposure to the most exotic languages. During classes, without any prior preparation, we were bombarded with the following sentences:

And it was kind of a great teaching method. He taught us, like our seminars on kinship patterns and religious beliefs, to expect to encounter anything on expeditions, no matter how strange, incomprehensible, or bizarre it may seem to us. And of course, the first commandment that a practicing ethnographer must learn is: it is very likely that you will encounter new, unheard of and unthinkable forms of human behavior.

This attitude towards the possibility of a collision at any moment with a new, not yet recorded form of human behavior is the reason for frequent clashes between anthropologists and psychologists who try to “think with natural scientific precision” and do not trust philosophical constructs. This attitude was the reason for our clashes with economists, political scientists and sociologists who use the model of the social organization of our society in their studies of other social structures.

The good school we received from Professor Boas destroyed our inertia and instilled in us a readiness to face the unexpected and, let it be said, the extremely difficult. But we were not taught how to work with an exotic foreign language, bringing knowledge of its grammar to such an extent that we could learn to speak. Sapir 11 noted in passing that learning a foreign language is devoid of a moral aspect: one can be honest, he believed, only in one’s native language.

Thus, in our education there was no knowledge of how to. It only gave us the knowledge of what to look for. Many years later, Camilla Wedgwood, during her first expedition to Manam Island, would address this issue in her first letter home: “How do you know who is someone’s mother’s brother? Only God and Malinovsky know this.” In Lowy's question 12, "How do we know who someone's mother's brother is unless someone tells us?" - the striking difference between his methods of field work and mine is clearly visible.

The education we received instilled in us a sense of respect for the people we studied. Every nation consists of full-fledged human beings leading a way of life comparable to our own, people possessing a culture comparable to the culture of any other people. No one among us ever spoke of the Kwakiutl, or the Zuni, or any other people as savages or barbarians. Yes, these were primitive peoples, that is, their culture was unwritten, it took shape and developed without the support of writing. But the concept “primitive” meant only that to us. In college we learned firmly that there is no correct progression from simple, “primitive” languages to complex, “civilized” languages. In fact, many primitive languages are much more complex than written ones. In college we also learned that while some art styles evolved from simple patterns, there were others that evolved from more complex forms to simpler ones.

Of course, we also had a course on the theory of evolution. We knew that it took millions of years for humanoid creatures to develop language, learn to use tools, and develop forms of social organization capable of transmitting the experience acquired by one generation to another. But we went into the field not to look for early forms of human life, but for forms that were different from ours, different because certain groups of primitive people lived in isolation from the main stream of great civilizations. We did not make the mistake of Freud, who assumed that primitive peoples living on distant atolls, deserts, jungles or the Arctic North were identical to our ancestors. Of course, we can learn from them how long it takes to fell a tree with a stone axe, or how little food a woman can bring into the house in societies where the main source of food is hunting by men. But these isolated peoples are not links in the family tree of our ancestors. It was clear to us that our ancestors were at the crossroads of trade routes, where representatives of different nations met and exchanged ideas and goods. They crossed the mountains, went overseas and returned home. They borrowed money and kept records. They were influenced greatly by the discoveries and inventions made by other peoples, which was impossible for peoples living in relative isolation.

We were prepared to encounter differences in our field work that far exceeded those we find in the interconnected cultures of the Western world or in the lives of people at different stages of our own history. Reports on what was found and on the way of life of all the peoples studied will be the main contribution of anthropologists to the treasury of accurate knowledge about the world.

This was my intellectual background in the field of theoretical anthropology. I, of course, to some extent learned to use methods for a generalized description of such, for example, phenomena as the people’s use of their natural resources or the forms of social organization developed by them. I also had some experience analyzing observations made by other researchers.

But no one talked about what real skills and abilities a young anthropologist entering the field must have - whether he is able, for example, to observe and accurately record what he sees, whether he has the intellectual discipline necessary to work hard day after day when there is no one to guide him, to compare his observations, to whom he could complain or to whom he could boast of his success. Sapir's letters to Ruth Benedict and Malinowski's personal diaries are full of bitter complaints about idleness, and they were written at a time when, as we well know, they were doing magnificent work. No one was interested in our ability to endure loneliness. No one asked how we would establish cooperation with the colonial authorities, with the military or with officials of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, but we had to work with their help. No one here gave us any advice.

This style, which developed at the beginning of the century, when the researcher was given a good theoretical training and then sent to live among primitive people, assuming that he would figure out everything else on his own, has survived to this day. In 1933, when I gave advice to a young explorer traveling to Africa on how to deal with the drunkenness of British officials, anthropologists in London grinned. And in 1952, when, with my help, Theodore Schwartz 14 was sent to learn new skills - operating a generator, recording on magnetic tape, working with a camera - all the things that were expected to be encountered in the field, the professors at the University of Pennsylvania thought it was ridiculous. Those who teach students now teach them the way their professors taught them, and if young ethnographers do not fall into despair, do not undermine their health, or die, then they will become ethnographers of the traditional style.

Mead " Culture And world childhood" What aspects of mental development makes... I.S. Child and society. M., 1988. Ch. 1. pp. 6-65. 4. Mead M. Culture And world childhood. M., 1988. Chapter VII MENTAL DEVELOPMENT...

I. O. Last name Self-actualization of mothers raising a child with disabilities

Document

family models, childhood and values accepted in this culture, to maternal... at a transitional stage in relation to culture and economy, is characterized by a wave... http://mkb-10.com/) M. Mead, Culture And world childhood. M., 1988 Nikolaeva E.I. Psychology...

Family education among the peoples of the world Questions for discussion: National-ethnic and cultural features of the Western education system

Literature

I.E. Man and family in Africa. - M., 1989. - 311 p. Mead, M. Culture And world childhood/ lane from English and comment. Yu. A. Aseeva; composed... O.V. Chinese family organization // Chinese traditional culture and problems of modernization. - M., 1994. - Part 2. - P.28- ...

All in all, I had a strange evening today. Crematorium, Mead and discussions on the topic of open relationships in the context of all of the above.
Below is a lot of books on the stated topic, but since (in general) this is work for the university, it is written, perhaps, a little boringly *Moscow refuses to take the information in the least critical way after 12 hours of reading/summarizing*
Well, whoever reads it, well done)) The work, by the way, is on the social psychology of childhood.

Margaret Mead’s book “The Culture and World of Childhood” examines the growing up processes of girls of the Samoan tribe, which was primitive and little studied at the time of the study. M. Mead describes the differences in approaches to raising children in the “American” - Western and Samoan cultures, posing the main question of the reasons for the differences in the experiences of adolescence of a Western teenager (controversial, aggressive, dissatisfied and insecure) and a Samoan girl, whose development from a girl to a woman occurs naturally and painlessly. The main differences can be reduced to the following provisions with the ensuing consequences:
1. the great importance of ancestral ties in Samoa, raising children in their context (responsibility for younger children lies with their siblings or half-sisters, which reduces the child’s dependence on parents and teaches him to satisfy his needs in different ways and with the help of different people)
2. play activities are inextricably linked with work activities (for example, 5-6 year old girls no longer play with dolls or dishes, but look after children or help with housework, carrying out instructions for their elders, and boys do not launch toy boats, but learn to steer a canoe in safe lagoons , catch fish or help elders, mastering activities that are significant for society and gaining a position in society)
3. the child is raised in natural conditions, which allows him to register the full range of interpersonal interactions and understand the essence of phenomena occurring in the tribe (birth, death, sex, illness, miscarriages, etc.)
4. communication between the sexes is possible only before adolescence and after the end of adolescence, which contributes to treating the opposite sex not as an emotionally and ideologically close person, but as a partner who performs very specific functions and reduces the risk of incest. Close, trusting friendship is possible mainly between relatives, usually of the same sex.
5. There is practically no pressure on children - they decide for themselves when to break off the relationship between brother and sister (and this is determined by the youngest child - when the girl reaches a conscious age, the age of understanding, she herself will feel “shame” and establish formal barriers between her and opposite sex). Another important point is the freedom to choose the time of marriage without restrictions in sexual life. In our current society, this is already the norm, but during the research (the first half of the twentieth century), pressure from parents in terms of choosing spouses and the time of the wedding was often a traumatic factor.
From the above features, the following consequences of growing up arise:
1. Independence, ease of communication between relatives (if a conflict arises between a parent and a teenage child, the child resolves it by simply changing his place of residence (most often with his many relatives), which is not reprehensible and even with normal parent/child relationships in Samoa a widespread practice and is considered not as a conflict of interest, but from a practical point of view - “I’d better live with my uncle, since there is better fishing in his village now,” while in our society leaving the parental family without forming one’s own is conflict situation and entails complete or partial removal from the parent or parents)
2. Independence from a specific parent and, as a consequence of this, the absence of sexual complexes (according to Freud), emotional independence in the future from an intimate partner, because sex is seen as a purely physical component of life, satisfaction of needs (which reduces the risk of loneliness, painful experiences of breakups, jealousy, infidelity, as well as frigidity and impotence)
3. Independence from a partner (spouse) greatly simplifies family relationships. In particular, if this relationship does not suit one of the couple, divorce is carried out by simply returning to the parental home or forming a new family, which negates dissatisfaction in the marriage and the negative feelings experienced in connection with this.
4. Natural education (here I mean a transparent philosophy of issues of birth and death, illness, interpersonal interactions) allows adolescents to form a healthy attitude towards issues of death, etc., by the puberty period, which also has a positive effect on mental flexibility and soundness of perception and acceptance. all aspects of existence.
5. The closedness of the information space unites all communities, which gives the same attitude to religion, philosophy, the way of life of the entire society and its individual members, thereby simplifying the choice of education strategy and children’s behavior in society (unlike our culture, where great variability places teenagers into a dead end and separates not only children and parents, but also contributes to the formation of self-doubt and the choice of one’s life path, and therefore the painful experience of a feeling of loneliness among a large number of people around)
6. The continuity of play and work activities sets up the inseparability of “theory” from practice - in contrast to our society, where the professional definition only just appears at the end of adolescence, and as for the process of schooling, its practical significance for the child remains virtually ununderstood right up to entry into adulthood and is perceived as something inevitable, obligatory for everyone, but not bringing concrete results.
M. Mead pays attention to how upbringing and the educational process in our society can be improved, but, unfortunately, he encounters a number of contradictions that arise precisely as a result of differences in cultures - something that is normal in a small society will never take root in a developed information space , suggesting different development options and opportunities for each of its individual members. But nevertheless, modern practice shows that in its development, society still returns to some basics, simplifies and separates many areas of life, theories of natural education are created, which have more and more followers every year. I believe that such a return to the roots can significantly increase a person’s adaptation in the modern world, increase the flexibility of judgment and reduce traumatic development factors in society, which, in fact, is the work of a practical psychologist.

Culture and the world of childhood.

Mead M. - Culture and the world of childhood.

Selected works

From the editorial board

Institute of Ethnography named after. N.N. Miklukho-Maclay of the USSR Academy of Sciences and the Main Editorial Board of Oriental Literature of the Nauka Publishing House have been publishing the book series “Ethnographic Library” since 1983.

When I decided to take a teenage girl as my research subject, and Professor Boas allowed me to go into the field in Samoa, I listened to his half-hour pep talk. He warned me that on an expedition I should be prepared for the apparent loss of time, to simply sit and listen, and that I should not waste time doing ethnography in general, the study of culture in its entirety. Fortunately, many people - missionaries, lawyers, government officials and old-school ethnographers - had already been to Samoa, so the temptation to "waste time" on ethnography, he added, would be less strong for me. In the summer, he wrote me a letter in which he once again advised me to take care of my health and again touched on the tasks facing me:

Here it is also necessary to mention G. Stanley Hall's voluminous book 8 on adolescents, in which, identifying the stages of human growth with the stages of human culture, he argued that the development of each child reproduces the history of the human race. The textbooks started from the premise, borrowed largely from German theory, 9 that puberty was a period of rebellion and stress. At that time, puberty and adolescence were strongly identified by everyone. Only much later did researchers involved in child development begin to talk about a hypothetical "first adolescence" - around the age of six - and about a second crisis - during puberty, about the continuation of adolescence after the age of twenty, and even about some manifestations of it. in adults over forty.

My training in psychology gave me an understanding of samples, tests, and systematic behavioral questionnaires. Do practical work with them. My Aunt Fanny worked for the Association for the Protection of Youth at Hull House in Chicago, and I devoted one summer to reading the reports of that Association. They gave me an idea of what the social context of individual behavior is, what the family should be considered and what its place in the structure of society is.

Thus, in our education there was no knowledge of how to. It only gave us the knowledge of what to look for. Many years later, Camilla Wedgwood, during her first expedition to the island of Manam, would touch upon this issue in her first letter home: “How do you know who is someone’s mother’s brother? Only God and Malinovsky know that.” In Lowy's question 12, "How do we know who someone's mother's brother is unless someone tells us?" - the striking difference between his methods of field work and mine is clearly visible.

The education we received instilled in us a sense of respect for the people we studied. Every nation consists of full-fledged human beings leading a way of life comparable to our own, people possessing a culture comparable to the culture of any other people. No one among us ever spoke of the Kwakiutl, or the Zuni, or any other people as savages or barbarians. Yes, these were primitive peoples, that is, their culture was unwritten, it took shape and developed without the support of writing. But the concept “primitive” meant only that to us. In college we learned firmly that there is no correct progression from simple, "primitive" languages to complex, "civilized" languages. In fact, many primitive languages are much more complex than written ones. B, that although some artistic styles developed from simple patterns, there were others that evolved from more complex forms to simpler ones.

But it's a wasteful system, a system I don't have time for. I combat this by giving my students the opportunity to re-enact my fieldwork preparation, to work on my notes, by encouraging them to practice photography, by creating situations for my class in which students are faced with real problems and real difficulties, situations where there is the unexpected and unexpected. Only in this way will we be able to evaluate the real merits of different ways of recording what they see and see how students react in cases where they lose the camera key or forget to remove the lens cap during an important photo.

However, in this struggle I constantly fail. A year of training in how to protect each item from moisture or falling into water does not prevent a young ethnographer from wrapping a single copy of a unique manuscript in plain wrapping paper, putting a passport and money in a dirty, torn bag, or forgetting to pack an expensive and necessary camera in an airtight container. This is unfortunate, because students studying other sciences acquire practical skills: chemists learn the rules of laboratory work, psychologists get used to using a stopwatch and writing experimental protocols.

The fact that anthropologists prefer to be self-taught in everything, even in mastering the theories taught to them in college, is, in my opinion, an occupational disease that is associated with extremely difficult conditions of field work. To do it well, the researcher must empty his mind of all preconceived ideas, even if they relate to other cultures in the same part of the world where he is now working. Ideally, even the appearance of a dwelling that appears before an ethnographer should be perceived by him as something completely new and unexpected. In a certain sense, he should be surprised that there are houses at all, that they can be square, round or oval, that they have or do not have steps, that they let in the sun and block winds and rains, that people cook or don’t cook there, eat there, Where live. In the field, nothing can be taken for granted. If we forget about this, we will not be able to freshly and clearly perceive what is before our eyes, and when something new appears to us as one of the options for something already known, we can make a very serious mistake. Considering a certain dwelling seen as larger or smaller, luxurious or modest in comparison with dwellings already known, we risk losing sight of what exactly this dwelling is in the minds of its inhabitants. Later, when the researcher becomes thoroughly acquainted with the new culture, everything in it should be subsumed under what is already known about other peoples living in a given region, included in our theories about primitive cultures in general, in our knowledge about man as such - knowledge for today, of course. But the main goal of ethnographic expeditions is to expand our knowledge. That is why the focus on recognizing new variants of what is already known, rather than on searching for something fundamentally new, is unfruitful. It is very difficult to clear one’s own consciousness of preconceived ideas, and without spending years on this, it is almost impossible to free oneself from prejudices by studying only one’s own culture or another one close to it.

On his first expedition, the ethnographer does not know all this. He only knows that he faces the most difficult task of learning to clearly understand and speak a foreign language, to determine who is what, to understand thousands of actions, words, looks, pauses that are part of a still unknown system, and, finally, to “embrace "the structure of the entire culture. Before my trip to Samoa, I was well aware that the categories used by other researchers to describe cultures were neither very original nor very pure. The grammars they created bore the imprint of the ideas of Indo-European grammars, and the descriptions of the native leaders bore European ideas about rank and status. I realized that I would have to make my way in this fog of half-truths and half-misconceptions. In addition, I was tasked with studying a new problem, a problem for which there was no research and therefore no guidance.

But, in essence, what has been said is true for any expedition that truly deserves this name. Nowadays, researchers go into the field to work on some small problem that can be solved by simply filling out a few questionnaires and running a few special tests. In cases where the questions are unsuccessful, and the tests are completely incomprehensible and alien to the subjects, this work can encounter considerable difficulties. However, if the culture is already fairly well understood, the success or failure of surveys of this kind does not matter much. The situation is quite different when it is necessary to accurately record the configuration of an entire culture.

At the same time, it must always be remembered that a certain holistic configuration perceived by a researcher in a culture is only one of the possible ones, and that other approaches to the same human situation can lead to different results. The grammar of the language you are working on is not a capital-G grammar, but only one of possible grammars. But since this may well be the only grammar you have to develop, it is extremely important that you listen to the language and record the facts with the utmost care and do not rely, as far as possible, on the grammar that is emerging in your mind.

All this is very important, but it does not clarify the tasks of daily work. There is no way to know in advance what kind of people you will encounter or even what they will look like. Although there are many photographs taken by others, the appearance of the tribe's people may have changed by the time you arrive at the site. One summer I worked among the Omaha Indians. Just in time for my arrival, the girls got their hair permanent for the first time. I couldn't foresee this. We do not know which real colonial official, planter, policeman, missionary or merchant life will confront us with. We don’t know where we will live, what we will eat, whether we will need rubber boots, shoes to protect against mosquitoes, sandals to rest our feet, wool socks to absorb sweat. Usually, when preparing expeditions, they try to take as few things as possible (and when ethnographers were poorer, they took even less) and make as few plans as possible.

When I went to Samoa, I had half a dozen cotton dresses (two very fancy ones) because I was told that silk fabric decomposes in the tropics. But when I arrived in Samoa, I discovered that sailors' wives wore silk dresses. I had a small bag for money and papers, a small Kodak and a portable typewriter. Although I had been married for two years, I had never lived in a hotel alone, and my travel experience was limited to short train rides as far as the Midwest. Living in towns and cities and in the farming areas of Pennsylvania, I had met different types of Americans, but I had no idea about the men who served in the U.S. Navy in peacetime, nor did I know anything about the ethics of sea life on bases. I've never been to sea before.

At a reception in Berkeley, where I made a brief stop, Professor Kroeber 16 came up to me and asked in a firm and sympathetic voice: “Do you have a good flashlight?” I didn't have any lamp at all. I carried with me six thick notebooks, typewriter paper, carbon paper and a flashlight. But I didn't have a flashlight.

When I arrived in Honolulu, I was met by May Dillingham Frier, my mother's Wellesley friend. She, her husband and daughters lived in their house in the mountains, where it was cooler. She placed “Arcadia” at my disposal - their beautiful, large house in the city. The fact that my mother once became friends with May Dillingham and her husband's sister Constance Frier at Wellesley solved all my problems in Honolulu for many years. May Dillingham was the daughter of one of the first missionaries to Hawaii, and her husband Walter Freer was the governor of the Hawaiian Islands. She herself somehow strangely did not fit into the framework of her noble, large and wealthy family. She was filled with some very delicate feelings, and her attitude towards life was purely childish. But she knew how to give orders when she needed to, and with her influence, which extended all the way to Samoa, she was able to find hundreds of opportunities to make my path smooth. Everything was arranged under her supervision. The Bishop Museum included me on its staff as an honorary member; Montague Cook, representative of another old family in Hawaii, took me every day to the museum, and E. Craighill Handy 17 sacrificed a week of his vacation to give me daily lessons in the Marquesan language, akin to Samoan. A friend of “Mama May,” as I affectionately called her, gave me a hundred pieces of old, torn muslin “to wipe children’s noses,” and she herself gave me a silk pillow. This is how she reacted to practical advice given to me this time by a biologist: “Always have a small pillow with you, and you can go to sleep anywhere.” Someone introduced me to two Samoan children attending the school. It was assumed that their families would help me in Samoa.

All this was extremely pleasant. I, protected by the authority of the Friers and Dillinghams, could not have had a more successful start to the expedition. But I was only vaguely aware of this, since I could not separate what stemmed from their influence from the most ordinary courtesy. However, many researchers suffered a real fiasco already in the first weeks of their expeditions. Circumstances made them so pitiful, so unwanted, so disgraced (perhaps because another anthropologist had once turned everyone against him) that the whole expedition failed even before it began. There are many unforeseen dangers from which you can only try to protect your students. The role of chance is also great. Mrs. Freer may simply not have been in Honolulu at the time I arrived there. That's all.

Two weeks later I hit the road, surrounded by garlands of flowers. At that time, garlands were thrown from the deck into the sea. Now Hawaiians (* In the original - Samoans (probably erroneously). - Ed.) give garlands of shells, because the import of flowers and fruits to other ports is prohibited. They bring plastic bags with them in which they take flowers and fruit home. But when I set sail, the wake of the ship sparkled and sparkled with floating colors.

So, I arrived in Samoa. Remembering Stevenson's poems, I rose at dawn to see with my own eyes how the first South Sea island in my life would float over the horizon and stand before my eyes.

No one met me in Pago Pago. I had a letter of recommendation from the Surgeon General of the Navy, Father Luther '19's medical school classmate. But at that time everyone was too busy to pay any attention to me. I found a room in a run-down hotel and hurried to the square, where a dance was held in honor of those arriving on the ship. Black umbrellas were visible everywhere. Most Samoans wore clothes made of cotton fabric: men wore suits of a standard cut, while women wore heavy, uncomfortable blouses. Only the dancers wore Samoan robes. The priest, mistaking me for a tourist with whom he could take a little liberties, turned over my Phi Beta Kappa badge 20 to see my name. I said: "This is not mine." This remark confused my affairs for many months to come.

Then came a time that was very difficult for any young researcher, no matter how difficult he was preparing for. I was in Samoa. I had a room in the hotel that was the setting for Somerset Maugham's story and play "The Rain," which I saw in New York. I had letters of recommendation. But I never managed to lay the foundations for my future work. I paid a visit to the governor, an elderly grumpy man who had not risen to the rank of admiral. When he told me that he had never learned the Samoan language and that I would not learn it either, I had the temerity to notice that after twenty-seven years it is difficult to learn languages. This certainly didn't help me at all.

I don't know if I would have been able to start work at all if it weren't for the letter from the chief surgeon. This letter opened the doors of the medical department to me. The eldest sister, Miss Hodgeson, obliged the young Samoan sister J. F. Pene, who lived in the United States and spoke excellent English, to tutor me for an hour a day.

After that, I had to plan my work for the remaining time. I was fully aware of both my independence and responsibility to the commission that financed my work, which did not agree to pay me money even three months in advance. Since there was no other way to measure my diligence, I decided to work eight hours a day. Pepo taught me for one hour. I spent seven hours memorizing the dictionary. So, purely by chance, I came across the best method of learning a language - to learn it in such large portions and as quickly as possible, so that each memorized part reinforces the other.

I sat in an old hotel and ate disgusting dishes prepared by Faalavelave - the name means "Misfortune" - dishes designed to prepare me for Samoan food. From time to time I was invited to the hospital or to the families of medical workers. The National Research Council insisted on sending me money by mail, and only the next ship delivered the mail. This meant that I would be broke for six weeks and unable to plan to leave until I paid off my hotel bill. Every day I wandered around the port city and tested my Samoan language on the children, but all this was a poor substitute for a place where I could do real field work.

Finally the ship arrived. And then, using the services of the mother of half-Samoan children whom I met in Honolulu, I managed to get out to the village. This woman arranged for me to stay for ten days in Waitongi, where I was to stay with the family of a chief who loved to receive guests. It was in his house that I received my basic training in Samoan etiquette. My constant companion was his daughter Faamotu. She and I slept together on piles of mats in a separate bedroom. We were separated from the rest of the family by a curtain of fabric, but it goes without saying that the house was open to the eyes of the entire village. When I washed, I had to put on something like a Malay sarong, which could easily be thrown off in a village shower, but I put on dry clothes in front of a gawking crowd of children and adult passers-by. I learned to eat Samoan food and find flavor in it, and to feel at ease when I was at a party being the first to eat, while the whole family sat sedately around me, waiting for me to finish the meal so that they, in turn, could eat. I memorized complex politeness formulas and learned to circulate kava 21 . I have never made kava itself, because it should only be prepared by an unmarried woman. But in Waitongi I didn't say I was married. I had only a vague idea of what the implications of this might be for me in terms of role responsibilities. Day by day, I mastered the language better, sat more correctly, and experienced less and less pain in my legs. In the evenings there were dances, and I took my first dance lessons.

Waitongi is a beautiful village with a wide square and tall, round palm-roofed guest houses. The leaders sat at the pillars of these houses on special occasions. I learned to recognize leaves and plants used for weaving mats and making tapas. I learned to address others according to their rank and to respond to them according to the rank they assigned to me.

The only difficult moment I experienced was when a speaker 22 from British Samoa 23 who arrived in the village started a conversation with me, which was based on the experience of the freer sexual world of the port of Apia. Still unsure of my Samoan, I explained to him that marriage between us would be indecent due to the disparity of our ranks. He accepted this formula, but added regretfully: “White women have such beautiful thick legs.”

Having lived these ten days, which were as delightful and fulfilling for me as the previous six weeks had been difficult and useless, I returned to Pago Pago to prepare for a trip to Tau, an island in the Manu'a archipelago. Everyone agreed that the traditions were more intact in the Manu'a Islands and that it would be best for me to go there. There was a medical station on Tau, and Ruth Holt, the wife of Mate's chief pharmacologist Edward R. Holt, who was in charge of that station, was in Pago Pago giving birth to a child. The chief physician in Pago Pago ordered that I be accommodated directly at the medical station. I arrived on the island with Mrs. Holt and the newborn on a minesweeper that temporarily replaced the station ship. During a dangerous unloading through the reef, a whaleboat with schoolchildren capsized, and Mrs. Holt breathed a huge sigh of relief, finding herself and her baby, named Moana, safe on land.

Housing was arranged for me on the back veranda of the outpatient clinic. A grate separated my bed from the entrance to the dispensary, and the village was visible across the small courtyard. There was a Samoan-style house nearby where I was supposed to work with teenagers. A Samoan pastor from a neighboring village assigned a girl to me, who became my constant companion, since it was not appropriate for me to appear anywhere alone. I settled in a new place, regulated my economic relations with the Holts, who also had a boy, Arthur. He was not yet two years old, but he already spoke both Samoan and English.

The advantages of my settlement at the dispensary soon became clear to me. If I had stayed with a Samoan family, I would not have been able to communicate with the children. I was too big a person for that. People knew that when the warships arrived in Pago Pago, I dined on the flagship. This determined my rank. On the other hand, I insisted that the Samoans call Mrs. Holt faletua, so that there would be no questions about where and with whom I ate.

Living in the dispensary allowed me to do things that would otherwise be completely indecent. Teenage girls, and later younger girls, whom I was then convinced of the need to study, filled my lattice room day and night. Subsequently, I received the right to use the school premises for “exams”. Under this pretext, I interviewed them and offered several simple tests to each girl. I could walk freely around the village, participate in fishing with everyone else, and go into houses where women were weaving. Gradually, I conducted a census of all the village residents and studied the family of each of my charges. Along the way, I certainly delved into many ethnological problems, but I never took part in the political life of the village.

My field work was extremely complicated by a fierce hurricane, which destroyed the front veranda of the dispensary - the room that I had converted into my office. This hurricane destroyed all the buildings in the village and destroyed the crops. All ceremonies were almost completely suspended while the village was being reconstructed, and I, having become accustomed to Samoan food with great difficulty, had to switch with all the villagers to rice and salmon supplied by the Red Cross. The naval chaplain, sent to monitor the distribution of food, increased the number of inhabitants of our small dwelling. Moreover, his presence in the house caused deep irritation to Mr. Holt, who, having not received a higher education at one time, was just a pharmacist's assistant. He experienced burning pain when faced with any manifestation of rank and distinction.

During all these months I had almost nothing to read, but this did not matter much, since work occupied all my waking hours. The only distraction was letters. The reports about my life addressed to my family were well balanced, they were reports of my joys and hardships. But in my letters to friends I focused too much attention on the difficulties, so Ruth decided that I was going through a difficult and unsuccessful period in my life. The point, first of all, was that I didn’t know whether I was working with the right methods. What should these correct methods be? I didn't have any examples to rely on. Just before leaving Pago Pago, I wrote a letter to Professor Boas in which I shared my plans with him. His encouraging reply came just as I had finished my work at Tau and was getting ready to go home!

These letters nevertheless bring back to life scenes from those distant times. In one of them I wrote:

The most pleasant time of the day here is sunset. Accompanied by about fifteen girls and small children, I walk through the village to the end of the Siufang pier. Here we stand on a platform fenced with iron bars and look at the waves. The spray of the ocean hits us in the face, and the sun floats over the ocean, descending behind the hills covered with coconut palms. Most of the adults went ashore to swim. They are dressed in lavalavas, each with a bucket on a rocker. The heads of the families sit in the faletele (village guest house) and prepare kava. At one location, a group of women fill a small canoe with a solution of local arrowroot starch. Sometimes, as soon as we approach the shore, the languid sounds of a wooden bell calling for evening prayer overtake us. Children should hurry to take cover. If we are on the shore, they run to the barn steps and sit there, curled up, until the bell rings again, announcing that the prayer is over. Sometimes, at the sound of the bell, we are all already safe, in my room. Here the prayer must be said in English. The girls take flowers out of their hair, and a festive song fades on their lips. But as soon as the bell rings again, the not-so-serious reverence is thrown off: the flowers again take their place in the girls’ hair, and the festive song replaces the religious chant. The girls begin to dance, and their dancing is by no means puritanical. They have dinner around eight and sometimes I get a little respite. But usually dinner is so short that I don’t have time to take a break from them. The children dance a lot for me; they love to do it, and the dance is an excellent indicator of their temperament, since the dance in Samoa is individual, and the audience considers it their duty to accompany it with continuous comments. Between dances they look at my pictures, and I always try to show Dr. Boas higher up on the wall. This slide fascinates them...

With the greatest pleasure I remember trips to other villages, to other islands of the Manua archipelago, to another village on Tau - Fitiuit, where I lived as a young village princess who came to visit. I was allowed to gather everyone who could tell me about something interesting to me, and as a return favor I had to dance every evening. All these trips fell at the end of my expedition, when I felt that the task was completed and I could “waste time” on ethnology in general, to analyze in what details the current way of life on the Manua archipelago differs from other islands.

In all my subsequent expeditions, where I had to work with completely unknown cultures, I was faced with a more rewarding task - first to get acquainted with the culture in general, and only then to work on its particular aspects. There was no need to do this in Samoa. That's why I was able to complete a work about the life of a teenage girl in nine months.

While studying a prepubescent girl, I also discovered the method of age sections, 24 which can be used when it is impossible to spend many years on an expedition and at the same time it is necessary to reproduce the dynamic picture of the development of the human personality. I only took the first step in Samoa. Later I turned to young children and then to infants, clearly realizing that I needed all stages of human development. But in Samoa I was still influenced by the psychology I had learned in college. That's why I studied individual cases and invented tests myself: a test for naming objects in pictures that I borrowed from Flaherty's magazine story "Moana of the South Seas", and a test for identifying colors, for which I drew a hundred small squares.

When I wrote “Growing Up in Samoa,” I carefully camouflaged all the real names, sometimes even having to use double disguise to exclude any possibility of recognizing the real persons behind this or that name. In the introductions I wrote to subsequent editions, I did not address the girls I studied as the readers for whom I was writing. It was hard to imagine that any of them would ever learn to read English. Today, however, the children and grandchildren of girls like those I studied at Tau attend American colleges—half of Samoans today live in the United States 25—and when their classmates read about Samoans fifty years ago, they ask themselves , what from what you read applies to them.

1. Introduction

Over the past hundred years, parents and teachers have ceased to consider childhood and adolescence as something very simple and self-evident. They tried to adapt educational systems to the needs of the child, rather than squeezing him into a rigid pedagogical framework. Two factors forced them to this new formulation of pedagogical tasks - the growth of scientific psychology, as well as the difficulties and conflicts of adolescence. Psychology has taught that much can be achieved by understanding the nature of children's development, its main stages, and understanding what adults should expect from a two-month-old baby and a two-year-old child. Angry sermons from pulpits, loud complaints from conservatives in social philosophy, reports from juvenile courts and other organizations testified that something must be done with that period of a person’s life that science calls youth. The spectacle of a younger generation increasingly deviating from the norms and ideals of the past, unmoored from respectable family standards and group religious values, frightened the cautious conservative and seduced the radical propagandist into missionary crusades against defenseless youth. It bothered even the most thoughtless of us.

In American civilization, with its many contradictions of different immigrant strata, dozens of conflicting standards of behavior, hundreds of religious sects, with its fluctuating economic conditions of life, the disturbed status of youth was more noticeable than in the older and more established civilizations of Europe. American conditions challenged the psychologist, educator, and sociologist, demanding from them an acceptable explanation for the growing suffering of children. Just as in today’s post-war Germany (* This refers to Germany after the First World War. - Ed.), where the younger generation faces an even more difficult problem of adaptation to living conditions than our children, bookstores are flooded with literature, theorizing about youth, so here in America, psychologists are doing everything to explain the fermentation of youth. As a result, we have works such as Stanley Hall's Youth, which see in the puberty period itself the causes of conflicts and dissatisfaction in adolescents. Youth is seen here as the age of the heyday of idealism, as a time of rebellion against authority, as a period of life in which difficulties of adaptation and conflicts are absolutely inevitable.

A cautious child psychologist, basing his judgment on experiment, would disagree with this theory. He would say: "We have no data to draw conclusions from. We now know very little even about the first months of a child's life. We have only just begun to learn when his eye will be able to follow the movement of a beam of light, so can we give a definite answer to the question “How will a developed personality, about whom we still know nothing, react to religion?” But science's cautionary tales are always unpopular. And if the experimental scientist does not want to associate himself with a certain theory, then the sociologist, preacher and teacher are all the more persistent in trying to get a direct and unambiguous answer. They observe the behavior of teenagers in our society, note the obvious and widespread symptoms of rebellion in them and take them out of age as such. Mothers are warned that daughters between the ages of thirteen and nineteen are especially difficult. This, theorists say, is a transitional age. The physical changes taking place in the bodies of your boys and girls are accompanied by certain mental changes. They are as impossible to avoid as it is impossible to prevent physiological changes. Just as your daughter's body changes from the body of a child to the body of a woman, spiritual changes inevitably occur, and they happen rapidly. Theorists look around them at the teenagers in our civilization and repeat with conviction: “Yes, vigorously.”

Such views, although not supported by the findings of experimental science, became widespread, influenced our pedagogical theory, and paralyzed our parental efforts. When a baby is teething, the mother must put up with his crying. In the same way, she must arm herself with maximum composure and patiently endure the unpleasant and stormy manifestations of “adolescence.” If there is nothing to scold a child for, then the only reasonable pedagogical policy that we have the right to demand from a teacher is tolerance. Theorists continue to observe the behavior of adolescents in American society, and each year brings them confirmation of their hypothesis: reports from schools and juvenile courts provide more and more examples of developmental difficulties in adolescence.

But gradually another path of science about human development was established - the path of the ethnographer, the researcher of people in a wide variety of social environments. The ethnographer, as he comprehended the ever-growing material about the customs of primitive peoples, began to understand the enormous role of the social environment, the environment where each person was born and raised. One after another, various aspects of human behavior, which were considered to be the inevitable consequences of our nature, turned out to be simple products of civilization, that is, something that is present in the inhabitants of one country and absent in the inhabitants of another, although the latter belong to the same race. All this taught the ethnographer that neither race nor general human nature can predetermine what form even such fundamental human emotions as love, fear, anger will take in different social environments.

Therefore, ethnographers, based on their observations of the behavior of adults in other civilizations, come to many conclusions similar to those of behaviorists1 who studied infants who had not yet been exposed to the influence of civilization that shapes their malleable human nature.

It was on the basis of this view of human nature that ethnographers listened to the current rumors about youth. And they heard that precisely those attitudes that, from their point of view, are determined by the social environment - rebellion against authority, idealistic impulses, philosophical doubts, rebellion and militant fervor - are attributed to the action of a specific period of human physiological development. However, their knowledge of the determining role of culture and the plasticity of human nature made them doubt this. Do teenagers have all these adjustment difficulties just because they are teenagers, or because they are teenagers living in America?

A biologist who doubts an old hypothesis and wants to test a new one has a laboratory at his disposal. There, under conditions of the strictest control, he can change the light, air, food that his animals or plants receive from the very moment of their birth and throughout their entire life. By holding all but one condition constant, he can make the most accurate measurements of the influence of that single condition. This is the ideal method of science, the method of controlled experiment, with the help of which it is possible to carry out a strict objective test of all hypotheses.

Even in the field of early child psychology, the researcher can only partially reproduce these ideal laboratory conditions. He cannot control the prenatal environment of the child, and he can carry out his objective measurements only after his birth. He can, however, control the environment in which the child lives during the first few days of his life and decide which visual, auditory, olfactory or gustatory stimuli affect him. But such simple working conditions do not exist for adolescent researchers. And we wanted to explore nothing more and nothing less than the influence of civilization on human development during puberty. In order to study it in the most rigorous way, we would have to construct different types of different civilizations and expose large groups of adolescents to different environments. At the same time, we would compile a list of factors whose influence we would like to study. And only then, if we wanted, for example, to study the influence of family size on the psychology of adolescents, we would have to build a series of civilizations, similar in all respects, except for one thing - family organization. And then, if we found differences in the behavior of our teenagers, then we could confidently say that it is the size of the family that causes this difference, that, for example, an only child will have a more turbulent youth than a child who is a member of a large family. We could do exactly the same thing with a dozen other factors supposedly influencing adolescent behavior: early or late knowledge of sexuality, early or late sexual experience, separate or joint education of the sexes, division of labor between the sexes or those shared labor tasks, pressure put on the child to force him to make a certain religious choice, or the lack thereof. We would vary one factor while holding others completely constant, and analyze which aspects of our civilization, if any, are responsible for the difficulties our children experience in adolescence.

Unfortunately, we are denied such ideal experimental methods when the subject of our research becomes humanity or the entire structure of social relations. Herodotus's experimental colony, where babies are taken from their parents2 and the results of their upbringing are carefully recorded, is a utopia. The selective method of selecting from our own civilization groups of children who satisfy one or another requirement is also unlawful. Using this method, we would have to select five hundred adolescents from small families and five hundred from large ones, and then try to determine which of them experienced the greatest difficulties in adjusting to their environment in their youth. But at the same time, we would not know what other factors were influencing these children - how their exposure to sexuality or the neighbors in their immediate environment had an impact on their adolescent development.

What method, then, is available to us who wish to conduct an experiment on humans, but have no means either to create controlled conditions for such an experiment, or to find examples of these conditions in our own civilization? The only possible method for us is the ethnographer's method, turning to another civilization and studying people living in another culture in some other part of the world. For such studies, ethnographers choose very simple, primitive peoples, whose society has never reached the complexity characteristic of ours. When choosing such simple peoples as the Eskimos, Australian Aborigines, South Pacific Islanders, and Pueblo Indians, ethnographers are guided by the following consideration: the simplicity of civilization makes it easier to analyze.

In advanced civilizations like those of Europe or the higher civilizations of the East, it would take years for the explorer to begin to understand the forces operating within them. To study only the French family as an institution would require him to first study French history, French law, and the relation of Protestantism and Catholicism to gender and personality. A primitive people without a written language presents us with a much less difficult problem, and an experienced researcher can understand the principles of organization of a primitive society in a few months.

Nor do we make the subject of our study a simple peasant community in Europe or an isolated group of white mountain dwellers in the American South. The way of life of these people, although simple, belongs, in essence, to the same historical tradition to which the complex parts of European or American civilization belong. The subject of our research is primitive groups that have behind them thousands of years of historical development along paths completely different from ours. The categories of Indo-European grammar are absent from their language, their religious ideas are by their very nature different from ours, their social organization is not only simpler, but also significantly different from ours. All these contrasts, which are at once striking enough to surprise and awaken the thought of everyone accustomed only to our way of life, and simple enough to be quickly understood, will help to learn a lot about the influence of civilizations on the individuals living in them.

That is why, while researching the problem of youth, I decided not to go to either Germany or Russia, but went to Samoa, one of the islands in the Pacific Ocean, located 13 degrees from the equator and inhabited by dark-skinned Polynesian people. I am a woman and, therefore, I could count on more trust when working with girls than with boys. In addition, there are few female ethnologists, and therefore our knowledge of girls belonging to primitive peoples is much more meager than knowledge of boys. This prompted me to focus my research primarily on the Samoan adolescent girl.

But by setting myself the task in this way, I had to behave completely differently than I would have behaved if the subject of my study was a teenage girl in Kokomo, Indiana. In the latter case, I would immediately get to the heart of the matter. I wouldn't have to think long about Indiana language, table manners, or bedtime rituals. I would also not have to study in the most exhaustive way how children are taught to dress, use the telephone, or what is meant by the concept of conscience in Indiana. All this is part of the general structure of the American way of life, known to me as a researcher and to you as readers.

But the situation is completely different when we conduct an experiment with a teenage girl belonging to a primitive race. She speaks a language whose very sounds are unusual, a language where nouns become verbs and verbs become nouns in the most bizarre way. All her life habits turn out to be different. She sits cross-legged on the ground, and to sit her on a chair means to make her tense and miserable. She eats with her fingers from a wicker plate and sleeps on the floor. Her house is simply a circle of stakes driven into the ground, covered with a cone-shaped palm roof, with a floor made of pieces of coral turned by the sea. The nature surrounding her is completely different. The foliage of coconut palms, breadfruit and mango trees sways above her village. She has never seen a horse, and the only animals she knows are a pig, a dog and a rat. She eats taro3, breadfruit, bananas, fish, wild pigeons, medium-cooked pork and shore crabs. And just as it was necessary to understand the profound differences between the natural environment and the daily habits of life of a Polynesian girl from ours, it was also necessary to realize that the social environment of this girl in its relation to sex, children, and personality was in equally strong contrast with the social environment of a young American girl. .

I delved deeper into studying girls in this society. I spent most of my time with them. I carefully studied the home environment in which these teenage girls lived. I spent more time on children's games than on the advice of elders. Speaking their language, eating their food, sitting on the pebble floor, barefoot and cross-legged, I did everything to smooth out the differences between us, to get closer and understand all the girls from three small villages located on the shore of the small island of Tau in the Manu'a archipelago .

During the nine months I spent in Samoa, I became acquainted with many details about the lives of these girls - the size of their families, the position and wealth of their parents, and found out how extensive their own sexual experience was. All these facts of everyday life are summarized by me in the table attached to the book. All this is not even raw material, but just the bare bones for the study of family problems and sexual relationships, norms of friendship, devotion, personal responsibility, all those elusive boiling points that disturb the quiet life of our young Polynesians. But since all these subtle aspects of the girls' lives were so similar to each other, since the life of one girl so closely resembled the life of another in the simple homogeneous culture of Samoa, I felt entitled to generalize, although I met only fifty girls living in three small neighboring villages.

In the chapters that follow this introduction, I have described the lives of the girls, the lives of their younger sisters who will soon be teenagers, their brothers with whom they are strictly taboo to speak, their older sisters who have gone through puberty, their fathers and mothers, the opinions and whose attitudes determine the opinions and attitudes of their children. And while describing all this, I always asked myself the question that sent me to Samoa: are the problems that trouble our teenagers a product of adolescence as such, or are they a product of civilization? Would the teenager behave differently in other settings?

But this formulation of the problem, due to the dissimilarity of this simple life on a small Pacific island with ours, forced me to recreate a picture of the entire social life in Samoa. At the same time, we were interested only in those aspects of this life that shed light on the problems of youth. We were not interested in questions of the political organization of Samoan society, since they do not affect or affect the girls. Details of kinship systems or ancestor worship, genealogy and mythology of interest only to specialists will be published elsewhere. Here I have tried to show the Samoan woman in her social environment, to describe the course of her life from birth to death, the problems that she will have to solve, the values that guide her decisions, the sufferings and pleasures of the human soul abandoned on an island in the South Seas.

This description purports to do more than just highlight one specific issue. It should also give the reader some idea of a different - and contrasting to ours - civilization, of a different way of life, which other representatives of the human race found both satisfactory and pleasant. We know well that our most subtle sensations and the highest values always have a contrast at their core, that light without darkness, beauty without ugliness would lose their qualities and would be experienced by us differently than they are now. Likewise, if we wished to appreciate our own civilization, this complicated order of life which we have created for ourselves and strive so hard to pass on to our children, we would have to compare it with other civilizations very different from ours. A man who has made a trip to Europe returns to America in a state of heightened sensitivity to the nuances of his own manners and views, to what he was completely unaware of before the trip. But Europe and America are parts of the same civilization. Already simple variations of the same great pattern of life sharpen the power of critical evaluation in the student of modern Europe or in the student of our own history. But if we leave the stream of Indo-European culture, then the ability to critically evaluate our civilization will increase even more. Here, in remote parts of the world, under historical conditions very different from those that led to the rise and fall of Greece and Rome, a group of human beings have developed patterns of life so different from ours that even in our wildest dreams we cannot allow their influence on our decisions. Each primitive people chose for itself one set of human abilities, one set of human values and reshaped them in art, social organization, and religion. This is the uniqueness of his contribution to the history of the human spirit.

The Samoan Islands provide us with just one of these attractive and diverse life patterns. But just as a traveler who has once left home is wiser than a man who has never crossed his own threshold, so knowledge of another culture should sharpen our ability to explore with greater persistence, to appreciate our own with greater sympathy.

Since we have set ourselves before ourselves a very concrete modern problem, this narrative of a different way of life will be devoted mainly to education, that is, the process by which an infant of either sex, arriving on the scene of human affairs completely uncultivated, becomes a full-fledged adult member of his society . We will most clearly present those aspects of Samoan pedagogy, taking this word in the broadest sense, in which it differs from ours. And this contrast, by renewing and making more alive both our self-knowledge and our self-criticism, may help us to re-evaluate and even build the education that we give to our children.

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