Growing Up in New Guinea: A Comparative Study of Primitive Education – Pioneering Anthropology of Childhood in a South Seas Community (Perennial Classics) - Softcover

Mead, Margaret

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0688178111 ISBN 13: 9780688178116

Publisher: Mariner Books, 2001

Synopsis

Now with a new introduction by Howard Gardner, Ph.D., Mead's second book following her landmark Coming of Age in Samoa, Growing Up in New Guinea established Mead as the first anthropologist to look at human development in a cross-cultural perspective.

Margaret Mead was 23 when she traveled alone to Samoa on her first expedition to the South Seas. Her first book, Coming of Age in Samoa, chronicled that visit and launched her distinguished career. Following her landmark field work focusing on girls in American Samoa, noted anthropologist Margaret Mead found that she needed to study preadolescents in order to understand adolescents. In 1928 she went to Manus Island in New Guinea, where she studied the play and imaginations of younger children and how they were shaped by adult society. Mead and her second husband, Reo Fortune, lived in 24-hour contact with the inhabitants of this fishing village.

What did she discover about the nature of childhood, education, and the powerful influence of culture?

• A Groundbreaking Look at Child Development: Go inside the world of the Manus children of New Guinea to see how their society shapes them into physically competent, but unimaginative, individuals.
• Classic Cross-Cultural Study: Discover Mead’s pioneering fieldwork, where she lived in 24-hour contact with a lagoon-dwelling fishing village to understand their lives from the inside.
• Social Psychology in a Primitive Society: Explore the stark contrast between the carefree, undisciplined world of Manus children and the rigid, property-obsessed world of the adults they will become.
• Foundational Education Theory: A powerful comparison that challenges Western assumptions about education, discipline, and what it means to grow up, as relevant today as when it was first written.

About this title

About the Author

Margaret Mead (1901-1978) began her remarkable career when she visited Samoa at the age of twenty-three, which led to her first book, Coming of Age in Samoa. She went on to become one of the most influential women of our time, publishing some forty works and serving as Curator of Ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History as well as president of major scientific associations. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom following her death in 1978.

From the Back Cover

Following the sensational success of her first book, Coming of Age in Samoa, Margaret Mead continued her brilliant work in Growing Up in New Guinea, detailing her study of the Manus, a New Guinea people still untouched by the outside world when she visited them in 1928. She lived in their noisy fishing village at a pivotal time -- after warfare had vanished but before missions and global commerce had begun to change their lives. She developed fascinating insights into their family lives, exploring their attitudes toward sex, marriage, the rearing of children, and the supernatural, which led her to see intriguing parallels with modern Western society. Reissued for the centennial of her birth and featuring introductions by Howard Gardner and Mead's daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson, this book offers important anthropological insights into human societies and vividly captures a vanished way of life.

Reviews

Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) launched Mead's career as an anthropologist, which was reaffirmed with the 1930 publication of New Guinea. In both volumes she theorizes that culture is a leading influence on psychosexual development. She also surmises that the so-called civilized world could learn a lot from so-called primitives. Essential volumes for academics.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0688178111
• ISBN 13: 9780688178116
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320