Growing Up in New Guinea by Margaret Mead

Growing Up in New Guinea by Margaret Mead

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.

Margaret M. (Margaret M.) is Caffrey teaches history at Memphis State University as an associate professor.