This book is a record of my first field trip, work done when I was twenty-three years old, almost fifty years ago. Between the time that I sailed from Pago Pago in 1926 to return to the Western world and try to set down what I had learned and November 1971, when I stepped off a plane in a blaze of TV lights, the world had gone through enormous changes. The young people who will read this book have lived their lives on the other side of the generation gap; the little girls whom I studied are buxom grandmothers still dancing light-footed as Samoan matrons do. The young Samoans in universities throughout the United States often find this account of how their ancestresses lived as embarrassing as all of us find the clothes our mothers wore when we were young. And I, instead of being a dutiful granddaughter writing letters home so that my grandmother might experience some of the Samoan joy in life, am now a grandmother delighting in a dancing grandchild.
This is the fourth time that I have written a preface to a different edition of this book, published originally in 1928. Each one was dated carefully, 1939, 1949, 1953, 1961. In each preface I discussed how long ago the book was written and how different the world of readers was for whom it would again be published. But in the contemporary world I find that readers pay little attention to dates, and some even read this account of a bygone style of life as if it were, indeed, an account of life in the more bustling and vastly more complicated Samoa of today, and fail to take account of the differences. Others read my strictures on the way in which Americans are brought up—denied all firsthand knowledge of birth and love and death, harried by a society which will not let adolescents grow up at their own pace, imprisoned in the small, fragile, nuclear family from which there is no escape and in which there is little security—and think that I am indeed writing for today’s world, so little have we altered the way in which young people are reared. It seems more than ever necessary to stress, shout as loud as I can, this is about the Samoa and the United States of 1926-1928. When you read it, remember this. Do not confuse yourselves and the Samoan people by expecting to find life in the Manu’an Islands of American Samoa as I found it. Remember that it is your grandparents and great-grandparents I am writing about when they were young and carefree in Samoa or plagued by our expectations from adolescents in the United States.
Some young critics have even asked me when am I going to revise this book and look unbelieving and angry when I say that to revise it would be impossible. It must remain, as all anthropological works must remain, exactly as it was written true to what I saw in Samoa and what I was able to convey of what I saw; true to the state of our knowledge of human behavior as it was in the mid-1920’s; true to our hopes and fears for the future of the world. I can write new prefaces as I am doing now. I can stress how little we knew then, before film and tape and elaborate methods of recording human behavior were available to fieldworkers. I can emphasize that this was the first piece of anthropological fieldwork which was written without the paraphernalia of scholarship designed to mystify the lay reader and confound one’s colleagues. It seemed to me then—and it still does—that if our studies of the way of life of other peoples are to be meaningful to the peoples of the industrialized world, they must be written for them and not wrapped up in technical jargon for specialists. As this book was about adolescents, I tried to couch it in language that would be communicative to those who had most to do with adolescents—teachers, parents, and soon-to-be parents. I did not write it as a popular book, but only with the hope that it would be intelligible to those who might make the best use of its theme, that adolescence need not be the time of stress and strain which Western society made it; that growing up could be freer and easier and less complicated; and also that there were prices to pay for the very lack of complication I found in Samoa—less intensity, less individuality, less involvement with life.
When this book was written, the very idea of culture was new to the literate world. The idea that our every thought and movement was a product not of race, not of instinct, but derived from the society within which an individual was reared, was new and unfamiliar. In earlier prefaces I have stressed why I did this and have written as if culture were becoming better understood today. But the renascence of racism among some scientists and the pleas for a harsh, manipulative behavioralism among some psychologists make me wonder whether the modern world understands much more about the significance of culture—the interplay between individual endowment and cultural style, the limits set by biology and the way in which human imagination can transcend those limits—than was known in 1928. So I do not apologize for the emphasis. Although it seemed hopefully less appropriate in 1949, in the Year of Our Lord 1972 it is still, alas, very necessary, when learned behaviour is either attributed to race or skin color or sex, and psychologists dream of substituting conditioning for culture transmission, just as the crudest behaviorists did in the 1920’s and the apostles of despair do when told that our planet is in danger and we must take steps to save it, retreating into elaborate and sophisticated nonsense which can be summed up in the words of itinerant lecturers in the Chautauqua tents of 1916, insisting raucously that “you can’t change human nature.” I wrote this book as a contribution to our knowledge of how much human character and human capacities and human well-being of young people depend on what they learn and on the social arrangements of the society within which they are born and reared. This is still something that we need to know if we are to change our present social institutions in time to prevent disaster. In 1928, the disaster we faced was a coming war; in 1949 the disaster was a possible worldwide nuclear war; today there is also the environmental, technical, and population crisis which threatens our existence. The usefulness of this account of how life could be, on one small group of faraway islands, is still, and perhaps more urgently, relevant.
But there are two things about the original book which need comment. One is my expectation that Samoan life would change even more than it has. I feared that the grace and zest and gaiety of the Samoans, carried only by them as a people, without the kind of art and literature and architecture which has left us something of Greece and Egypt after their civilizations were gone, would disappear altogether, transmuted beyond recognition by the diffusion of Euro-American culture around the world. The other is my failure to include Samoan young people themselves as possible readers and so address the book to them also, as well as to the readers of the Western world. These two miscalculations are linked. Samoans were very literate—in Samoan—in 1928, but only a very few of them read English, and only a very few English-speaking people could read Samoan. I protected the identity of my informants and of the big girls and the little girls whom I was studying, carefully changing their names, occasionally giving one person two names or two identities, so that no one would ever embarrass them by quoting what I said about them. These protective devices were so thorough that later fieldworkers have been unable to decode them and, baffled, have even accused me of falsification. I did not include Samoan young people as possible readers for two reasons, one because those about whom I wrote, although they themselves wrote letters in Samoan, read no books, and second, because I was discussing their own lives, lives which they themselves were living. I did not have to tell them what life was like in the villages of Manu’a; the young Manu’ans knew. And I was writing then for the contemporary world, not for fifty years hence. And I did not know then, could not know then, how extraordinarily persistent Samoan culture would prove, and how fifty years later the grace that I had attempted to record as something that was surely going to vanish would still be there. I could not have prophesied that forty-seven years later there would be over 20,000 American Samoans living in the United States; that an American Samoan would be chosen for a first experiment in a new kind of educational TV; that there would be a community college on Tutuila, and yet that I would be greeted on my arrival with flower leis even more beautiful than the garlands of 1928, and farewelled with shell garlands—as botanical objects are forbidden on airplanes—and a plastic bag to carry them in when the plane touched down. In the years between I met many Samoans who came to the United States; I saw how effortlessly they put on and put off American clothes, American speech, and American manners, without losing their Samoan distinctiveness. But I had to return to Samoa, to a Samoa hopeful and optimistic and exuberant, a Samoa which made my return into a festival where ceremonies which very few living people had ever seen were brought out for the occasion to solve a typical Samoan problem—how to arrange precedence as between their governor, John Haydon, to whom they were devoted, and “Makelita,” returning after so many years, returning to dedicate the new museum and participate in the opening of the first power plant in Manu’a.
In the changed climate of opinion of the post–World War II world, where identity is being sought and kept by thousands of small, recently pre-literate and exotic peoples, the Samoans are taking a proud place, a place so proud and happy that they are overflowing their small islands, and what Westernization threatened before, overpopulation threatens today. If so many Samoans are born now, there may be no room for those who might have been born later. But today they dance with unabated delight in life.
Inevitably, young Samoans who read this book will feel somehow not included, because this account of young people two generations ago was written about them, but not for them, as I would write such a book today. But to the students who have the strange experience of having a book about how their ancestors lived on the reading lists of their introductory courses at Cornell or the University of Hawaii, I can only say that neither their grandmothers nor I guessed where we would be today.
The appendices remain impersonal, cast in the mold of a technical book. For the scholarly reader, there is a new edition (1969) of The Social Organization of Manu’a, published by the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, revised in the light of contemporary ethnographic theory. But in this book, all persons are living persons as they were known to me and to their friends and relatives, human in their lives and loves, and I hope their grandchildren’s generation will find this to ring true.
Margaret Mead
The American Museum of Natural History
New Tork
June 26, 1972