Coming of Age in Samoa

"Mead is a hugely important figure in American letters. She’s one of these people who has always been an inspiration to me, because she had such wide interests and wrote in so many different places, I’ve never done a book project where she didn’t come up. She wrote so voluminously and so beautifully. She had the kind of influence most academicians can never imagine. Mead was a student of Franz Boas, who’s really the founder of modern anthropology. Boas’s insight was that our differences are not biological, they’re cultural. Boas and Mead worked during the era of Jim Crow and Eugenics, when it was felt that people were inherently different biologically and that they were arrayed on a ladder with some of them being more developed and more superior than others. The great insight of cultural anthropology is that of course we’re different but we’re not different in our ‘blood’, we’re different in our mores, our habits, and our beliefs: in our culture. Mead had grown up in the United States, in very well-to-do circumstances and she became interested in child development. She noticed that fifteen- and sixteen-year-old girls got really bitchy around their mums. She read American psychologists and sociologists saying ‘this is obviously natural: this is what happens to teenagers.’ You can read this today—that teenagers have hormonal surges and they get all surly and they don’t want to be around adults because they’re trying to differentiate themselves from them, find their own identity, etc. etc. Mead is rightly dubious about this and the reason she goes to Samoa is to test whether there is something inherent about adolescents that makes them surly and makes them especially anxious and worried about the subject we’re talking about, namely, sex. In Samoa she finds out that the answer is no, that none of these questions are particularly charged or anxiety-ridden. I should emphasise that since Mead’s time a number of people have gone back and looked at her research and at Samoa itself and have decided that she was wrong about many of the particulars, that she idealised and mythologised some of these people, sometimes caricatured them. There were other parts of her research that were extremely weak, but for me that doesn’t change the radical nature of her insight. I understand that a lot of her scholarship probably wouldn’t pass muster today, but that goes for many people who wrote during her time. I think the larger philosophical manoeuvre was the idea she had of looking outside of ourselves rather than naturalising the way we look at the world and assuming it is the universal way, the normal way. The other reason the book is important is that it begins a trend in the United States among people who are uncomfortable with our sexual order and sexual mores of trying to look outside and finding a place where they do it right. That move often does involve a certain degree of caricature and distortion. I trace an example of that in my book in the way Americans regard Sweden. By the time of the so-called sexual revolution, Sweden has essentially become a rorschach test for Americans. It’s not a place any more, it’s a kind of free-floating signifier that you can read anything onto. In the Left of course it’s this sexual utopia where, instead of worrying about this subject, they address it rationally and people are free, but they’re also safe etc. And of course for Republicans it’s a place of alcoholism and suicide. Both of these are distortions. But I think the Left’s distortion in some way traces back to this search for a sexual alternative that can teach Americans about the irrationality of their own ways. Absolutely. It moves the ball forward in a way. It advances the discussion. I’m old fashioned enough to think anything that does that is salutary."