Violence and Mental Health in Everyday Life: Prevention and Intervention Strategies for children and Adolescents Book

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.