Growing Up in New Guinea

by Margaret Mead

A Comparative Study of Primitive Education

Genres: Anthropology, Nonfiction, History, Biography, Psychology, Science, Travel

280 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1930

About the author

Margaret Mead was an American cultural anthropologist who was frequently a featured writer and speaker in the mass media throughout the '60s and '70s as a popularizer of the insights of anthropology into modern American and western life but also a respected, if controversial, academic anthropologist.

Her reports as to the purportedly healthy attitude towards sex in South Pacific and Southeast Asian traditional cultures amply informed the '60s "sexual revolution" and it was only at the end of her life and career that her propositions were – albeit controversially – challenged by a maverick fellow anthropologist and literate members of societies she had long before studied and reported on. Mead was a champion of broadened sexual mores within a context of traditional western religious life.

Excerpted from Wikipedia.

Reviews

[Bob Newman · Rating 4 out of 5]

“look out, kid, it’s somethin’ thatcha did”

Margaret Mead somehow takes center stage in any of the books she writes. Not because, Miss Piggy-style, “it’s all about little moi”, but because the strength of her questions and intelligence of her answers outstrips the persuasiveness of her data. In “Coming of Age in Samoa” written at a young age, she investigated youthful sexuality and personality with an eye to making conclusions she’d already formulated. In terms of her career, it certainly worked and over the years sparked several other books that either praised or trashed her research. The work for this volume, done in 1928, was again done in a short time, but probably at a hectic pace. How well she understood the Manus society of the Admiralty Islands, north of the main island of New Guinea, is open to question. WW II and Christian missionaries had a heavy impact on the local culture in the next 15 years, changing it so much that even Mead wrote a second book called “New Lives for Old”. Her New Zealander husband at the time (1928), Reo Fortune, wrote an ethnography of Manus, but I have never seen it. Due to the war and perhaps their other interests, it was never possible for another anthropologist to wade in the same waters, so there are no contradictory books here.

GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA really carries two themes. One is an investigation into child-rearing and the acculturation process in a Manus village at a time when outside influences were only just beginning. The other is a lot of very insightful observation into white American children and how they are acculturated i.e. how they become members of the same culture as their parents. Given Mead’s previous proclivities for fast work with a high level of self-confidence and low level of language, I was certainly interested in what she has to say about carefree kids in Manus and their eventual metamorphosis into serious adults of another stripe altogether, but tended to take everything with a few grains of salt. Her take on American children and adults of the 1920s and ‘30s was spot on, so much so, that I think a lot of it is still relevant today.

She noted (p.115) that the result of the carefree life of Manus children was that they were “attractive, self-sufficient children, without feelings of inferiority, afraid of nothing, abashed by nothing.” She hired a group of them to run her household. [Is this the best way to study children?] She noted that they had no experience of regular work and had not had to be punctual ever, yet they were successful and capable in everything she asked them to do. Still, she says, “In a few years their culture will have claimed them, turned their minds to commerce, tangled up their emotions in a web of shame and hostility. The roots of their future were already laid in their lack of affection for anyone, their prudery, their awed respect for property….”. These comments, to my mind, reflect Mead’s concerns and criticisms of American culture as much as they represent the essence of Manus culture. If reading such an interesting cross-mixture tempts you, give this book about a now-transformed culture a try. Her descriptions are very vivid, even if she made the strange choice of having the Manus speak with Biblical “thou” and “thy”.

Her conclusion (very briefly) is that (p.196) “the forces of imitation are so much more potent than any adult technique for exploiting them: the child’s receptivity to its surroundings is so much more important than any methods of stimulation, that as long as every adult with whom he [sic] comes in contact is saturated with tradition, he cannot escape a similar saturation.” And she meant both in Manus and in America.

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Published in 1930, this is an ethnography of the Manus people of Papua New Guinea from one of Margaret Mead's first research trips in the 1920s, after writing Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation. After studying the adolescents of one culture, she wanted to focus more narrowly on children in a society - how they are educated, how they develop personality, how the beliefs and customs of the society effect them before puberty.

The Manus people live on one of the Admiralty Islands, north of the larger island of New Guinea. There are similarities between them and other groups I knew more about (the Kaluli, Asmat, Dani) but also some big differences. It's hard to know if the difference of forty or even ninety years between books written about different groups there have been severely impacted by trade and other groups, or if they would still be as different. There seemed to be a greater emphasis on social code and taboos among the Manus, unless this is just what Mead zeroed in on or interpreted. That's the thing about ethnography, you never know if what the scholar sees is what is there or if it what they see through the lens they have.

And Mead at least acknowledges her bias and filter. She is working under the assumptions of specific works on childhood and society, and trying to determine if the findings are universal or not. One theory she attempts to debunk is the connection between freedom and creativity - Manus children live freely but don't seem to bloom outside of what the children of other cultures do (of course her criteria for that may come from that same filter!); there is a peak of role expectation that all must eventually conform to or be ostracized.

Honestly, I was more interested in the detailed descriptions she gives of puberty rites for boys and girls, because she is describing rather than interpreting. I felt less interested in her view of how things worked. Some of her statements about how men interacted with one another could have been observed by her partner but she would not have been there, and she was equally banned from being a participant in any births or birth cermonies, not having had children herself.

Still, I try to remember how early her work was, how important it was to the field of anthropology, and how tough she must have been to spend so much time there!

This is the last book I'm going to read in my two-month spree on New Guinea. In many ways I feel I should have started here, and gone from first to last.

[Hilary · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book, and "Coming of Age in Samoa", were startling finds on my parents' bookshelves during my pre-teen years, and started me on my journey towards a degree in anthropology.

[Gerald Knight · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was published in 1930 and dedicated to Reo Fortune, Mead’s second husband. In many ways, it portrays a Melanesian culture that contrasts sharply with the harmonious, carefree Polynesian societies of Samoa, the topic of her first book. Surprisingly, this book — about a small group of people living off the coast of a faraway, never-heard-of island called Manus — became quite popular as well. On her title, Mead would later remark, “Americans were so little interested in that part of the world that I had to call my book Growing Up in New Guinea (using the name for the Territory), and then include a bit of Australia in the map so that those Americans who thought New Guinea was in either Africa or South America could orient themselves.”1

The “landless” Manus

The Manus claimed possession of thirty-two sand spits and tiny islets along the south coast of what they now call the island of Manus. The people called their village on the reef “Peri” and had clan members who likewise lived off the coast of other Admiralty Islands. They lived in stilt pole houses built over lagoons between the barrier reefs and their sago palm swamps, which bordered the shore in places. These pole houses, made of thatch, had slat floors made of the slender trunks of split betel palms.

Trading was not only a central endeavor of their daily lives. It formed the very basis of their cultural identity. The Manus traded fish and other marine resources for the bananas, taro, coconuts — and even precious betel nut — they needed. Their main trading partners were the Usiai, who populated the hills and valleys of the adjacent island. By the 1930s, the Manus no longer sailed hundreds of miles to Rabaul or to mainland New Guinea to trade. Such long voyages were no longer condoned by their territorial administrators. However, they still had their sailing canoes, and they traded locally within their local Admiralty archipelago.

Materialism

Trade was the most important activity of a Manus man. He would trade with men in the next village, with his in-laws and with his other relatives too. When speaking of his wife, he was likely to mention his betrothal payment. And when speaking of his father, he would perchance mention the huge burial payment he had made for him. He thought of life events such as pregnancy, birth, puberty, betrothal, marriage and death in terms of the dog-tooth necklaces, shell money, pigs, coconut oil and sago needed to pay for them. He would use these items, the fruits of his trade, to make reciprocal payments to other society members on most of these occasions. The larger these payments were, the more prestige he would garner.

Puberty

Puberty, for instance, was an event requiring a series of festivals that demanded food distributions and reciprocal payments. Mead found that most girls were betrothed long before puberty, so a future wife’s first menstruation became an occasion for reciprocal payments between the families of the betrothed. Upon its occurrence, the girl’s eldest male relative, who would finance her family’s marriage obligations, would initiate the series by throwing bunches of coconuts into the sea. All the neighboring children in the village would leap in after them. The girl would then sit on mats in the middle of her father’s house for five days. That night and for the next four nights, all the village girls would sleep by her side. Each day her family members would sail or paddle tall pots of bulukol, a coconut soup, to the future husband’s village, and his family would bring fish to hers.
The men of his family would ask every inland trade partner to make sago. They would also work their coastal sago plantations, limited in number, by day and fish by night to pay these partners for the sago. At the end of five days, male relatives would hold the first of several feasts. That evening the men would light great quantities of bamboo torches and deliver large lumps of raw sago to the other houses of the village.

Seven days later, the women of the village would hold a second feast. Taro, sago cakes, coconut, and puddings of taro and grated coconut would be prepared and placed in wooden bowls. These women, expecting a bead belt as return payment for each bowl of food, would then take them to the house of the future mother-in-law. Five days later, they would hold a third feast. This one was just for fun — with no reciprocal payments — and just for women. This festival would be attended by the girl and all her sisters-in-law, as well as her mother and her mother’s sisters-in-law.

Strict monogamy

Unlike the Polynesians of Samoa that Mead had studied, these Melanesians were strictly monogamistic. They not only prohibited sex before marriage but also prevented a betrothed couple from even looking upon one another or saying each other’s names.
Once married to this woman — whom the husband had neither chosen nor even seen before their marriage — he would have to work for years for those who had paid for his wedding. He would move his wife into the back of his marriage backer’s home and would fish incessantly to support his backer’s family.

His wife’s place, much more so than in Samoa, was in the home. In Manus this home would be isolated. It would be surrounded by water and cut off from the company of others, prohibiting any chance of nightly trysts beneath the coconut palms. His wife, betrothed at such an early age, would never have seen him before their marriage either. If she did not conceive quickly, she could possibly ask a visiting relative to paddle her back to her village down the reef — the ultimate embarrassment at this stage of the man’s marriage..

Birth

When the wife became pregnant, custom forbade her from telling her husband. Such intimacy between the two would take years to develop. Might he hear word of the economic preparations his brothers-in-law were making in her home village? If not, he would be surprised by the first conception feast, when canoes laden with sago came to his door.

As the months passed, there would be other periodic feasts for which he must make repayment. He would have to beg for bead strings at his sisters’ houses. He would be constantly worried that his repayments were less than enough. From the moment his wife’s labor began, by custom he would have to leave the house. He could only bring fish to the home’s landing platform. For a whole month after birth, he would have to wander about, sleeping at one sister’s and then another’s.
The festival marking her husband’s return would give the wife little pleasure. She was only a pawn in the elaborate game being played. Her family would prepare much food and deliver it to all houses in the husband’s village.

The role of fathers

Mead discussed the differences between the Manus and the Samoans in terms of growing up. The family man in Samoa would rarely interact with his young children. The Samoan household consisted of a number of children, each child dependent upon the next older. In the Manus family, each child would center their attention on the father and only secondarily on the mother. It was easy for the father to woo his baby away from his wife. He would return to the house after having gone fishing before the dawn, pole-punted his canoe across the shallow lagoon to the market and traded his fish — for perhaps taro, betel nut and taro leaves. Then he would be free for the better part of the day, to play with the baby as the mother cooked, cleaned and went about her daily chores.

Children would learn to take advantage of this situation. Obviously the most important person in the home, the father was also more indulgent than the mother. The baby would run to the mother to nurse, but then it was back to the father, who was still the center of interest. He was never too busy to play, unlike the mother, who was always busy and stayed in the smoky interior of the house. The father would stay outside on the more exciting veranda over the water, often in the middle of village activity. Thus, among the Manus, the father had an opportunity to impress his personality upon his children and absorb nearly all their love and respect.

The role of spirits

What drove the Manus father’s materialism? Events in his family would demand economic obligations, for one. Unlike the Polynesians, there were no chiefs among the Melanesians but only “big men.” They attracted followers, successfully and repeatedly fulfilled their obligations, and proved themselves to be astute traders. This success was what brought men respect and prestige.

Their fishing skills would prove to be useful, but more than this, the spirits would begin to play a role in the lives of young men soon after they married. They believed that the spirits of their dead fathers caused all sickness of whatever kind as punishment for laxity in their economic affairs. The Manus believed that the strongest spirits were those of the most recently dead males of the family. These spirits became not only the family’s guardians and protectors but also its censors, punishing the family for any economic procrastination.

From the house rafters, the Manus would suspend a carved bowl containing the skull and finger bones of the most recently deceased male. They believed that actions or inactions — such as the failure to pay debts, the careless manipulation of family property or the unfair allotment of funds among the needs of several relatives — would bring sickness to a man’s family. For instance, if he used all his wealth to make spectacular payments for his wife but did not make betrothal payments for his younger brothers, someone in the family would be sure to fall ill.

Women and girls had no personal guardians and were, therefore, spiritually unequipped to venture into dangerous places. But little boys, from the time they were four or five, had guardian spirits who accompanied them everywhere.

The sad thing was that, amid all this give and take, miscalculations would inevitably take place. The result was constant bickering between families, often to the point of expressing rage over debt repayments. For Mead, Manus society did not seem happy. In contrast, strife and jealousy, if it existed, seldom breached the surface of Samoan culture.
________________________________________
Note:
1. Mead, Margaret, New Lives for Old: Cultural Transformation—Manus, 1928–1953 (New York: Harper Perennial, 2001).

[Julia Wiener · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first ethnography. Fascinating. I wonder about the relationship between the Peri role as intertribal traders and the enormous cultural emphasis on economic exchange.

[P K · Rating 1 out of 5]

The premise of the book is really interesting. This rush to get to isolated tribes at a time when the Western world knows about them but before extensive contact from Christian missionaries lends an infectious excitement to this period in anthropology. There are so many interesting questions to ask: which of the cultural norms we’re familiar with are present in these more isolated cultures, for example. The answer could hint at whether these traits have a biological origin. Additionally, Mead’s desire to discover other ways of doing things, possibly more beneficial ways, to create a utopic modern society is so appealing. Mead’s adventures, especially as a woman at that time, seem so intrepid. Unfortunately, this book was so much worse than I thought it would be. I have never read Mead’s original writings before, and I was really surprised by the lack of organization and the very heavy hand of interpretation present throughout. The book consists of a string of anecdotes loosely grouped into thematic chapters. The anecdotes are long, wandering, and not written very interestingly. It reads like there was no editing at all, like Mead just wrote down her field notes into sentences but made no effort to cut out redundant portions, or build up to something. Additionally, it’s really unscientific. She makes so many broad generalizations about the Manus people and provides a story to illustrate her claim, rather than explaining how often she observed this situation and how often it occurred the way her theory indicates. Maybe this book was ground breaking at the time and is of historical importance now, but approaching it for the first time in 2020 makes it seem very outdated in the scientific methods employed as well as the organization of the writing.

[Claudia Vieira · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this book fascinating. Somehow I had never read it, even though I visited islands nearby the place where Mead did her research back in 1982, while sailing through. The later chapters where she is comparing the Manus culture and child rearing practices to those in the U.S. were dense for me. I assume this is due to my lack of familiarity with the assumptions of her times.

[Greg Robinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

fascinating anthropology from a very substantial person; some would regard as a bit outdated now but there is plenty to help understand human nature and education in the region but everywhere as well; weighty contribution

[Graham Bear · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this at University many years ago.

[Sue Danskin · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am probably not the person to review this- I thought it was really dry and repetitive

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really like Margaret Mead's writing, and this is no exception. Despite the age of this book (last updated in 1968), it is an interesting anthropology and sociology lesson of another culture.

[Jack · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting case study but not clearly reliable.

[Missmath144 · Rating 3 out of 5]

At this point in time, New Guinea was a society of trade. Even first marriages were trades between tribes. Their society stressed truth, and nothing but the truth -- no embellishments, no metaphors, no similes. Because of this, the children were not imaginative. Mead saw that nurture was much more important than nature within this culture. Adoptive children would take on the traits of their adoptive parents rather than their biological parents, even if they were adolescents when adopted.

As an aside, Mead said something that my mother used to tell us: "Time turns most of us into caricatures of our early selves."

[Shannon · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first read Margaret Mead in high school and it opened up me eyes to the world of anthropology. She is a great role model for women and her books are a must read for anyone interested in the topic.

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was interesting as both an ethnography about Manus as well as being a kind of historical record as an "old school" kind of ethnography.

[Thom Dunn]

1975 paperback edition with a new introduction by Margaret Mead. This was her second book.