page_title: Coming of Age in Samoa
section_title: Samoan household
hierarchical_section_title: Coming of Age in Samoa / Content / Samoan household
caption_attribution_description: English: Three Samoan women preparing to make kava, ca 1890. Reference Number: PA1-o-547-24. Three Samoan women preparing to make kava. They are seated on mats in a row in front of a screen of plants and tapa cloth. The kava bowl is placed in front of the central woman. Photographed by an unknown photographer in about 1890.
context_page_description: Coming of Age in Samoa is a book by American anthropologist Margaret Mead based upon her research and study of youth – primarily adolescent girls – on the island of Ta'u in the Samoan Islands. The book details the sexual life of teenagers in Samoan society in the early 20th century, and theorizes that culture has a leading influence on psychosexual development.
  First published in 1928, the book launched Mead as a pioneering researcher and as the most famous anthropologist in the world. Since its first publication, Coming of Age in Samoa was the most widely read book in the field of anthropology until Napoleon Chagnon's Yanomamö: The Fierce People overtook it. The book has sparked years of ongoing and intense debate and controversy on questions pertaining to society, culture, and science. It is a key text in the nature versus nurture debate, as well as in discussions on issues relating to family, adolescence, gender, social norms, and attitudes.
  In the 1980s, Derek Freeman contested many of Mead's claims, and argued that she was hoaxed into counterfactually believing that Samoan culture had more relaxed sexual norms than Western culture.
context_section_description: The next section describes the structure of a Samoan village: "a Samoan village is made up of some thirty to forty households, each of which is presided over by a head man". Each household is an extended family including widows and widowers. The household shares houses communally: each household has several houses but no members have ownership or permanent residence of any specific building. The houses may not all be within the same part of the village.
  The head man of the household has ultimate authority over the group. Mead describes how the extended family provides security and safety for Samoan children. Children are likely to be near relatives no matter where they are, and any child that is missing will be found quite rapidly. The household also provides freedom for children including girls. According to Mead, if a girl is unhappy with the particular relatives she happens to live with, she can always simply move to a different home within the same household. Mead also describes the various and fairly complex status relations which are a combination of factors such as role in the household, the household's status within the village, the age of the individual, etc. There are also many rules of etiquette for requesting and granting favors.
caption: Three Samoan women preparing to make kava (c. 1890)
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