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Geographically, "Somoa" is a small south Pacific archipelago of some dozen inhabited islands, with a human population of some 150,000, located roughly a thousand miles northeast of New Zealand. The westernmost islands compose "Western Samoa", a tiny island state politically "independent" (since 1962 from NZ "trusteeship"). The eastern half of the islands continue as a United States militarily occupied garrison base since the last century. Samoa's population is mainly Polynesian, but with many Chinese, some European and Indian descendents.

This society has became widely known as the site of the anthropological best-seller ever, Margaret Mead's landmark study, Coming of Age in Samoa (New York: William Morrow, 1928). After a short nine-month field trip in the 1920's, Mead described a very easy-going, idyllic and egalitarian society, a South Pacific paradise, free from sexual guilt, violence, and political turmoil, offering a stress-free passage from childhood to adulthood through an adolescence of freedom. Mead's work focussed on a couple of dozen Samoan girls' adolescence, and became a landmark depiction of the importance of cultural (rather than biological) determination of our human lives: Mead concluded that a permissive and (especially sexually) tolerant society made the passage from childhood to adulthood stress-free; it became a beacon for modern child-rearing.

Half a century later, after four decades of on-going research in Samoa, Derek Freeman reluctantly concluded "...Mead's account of Samoan culture and character is fundamentally in error.... I have had to deal realistically with the darker side of Samoan life..., [but] found among contemporary Samoans both a mature appreciation of the need to face these realities and a clear-headed pride in the virtues and strengths of the Samoan way of life." (Margaret Mead and Samoa: the Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth. Harvard: Cambridge and London. 1983, p xii, xvii; see also , L. D. Holmes, Samoan Village, New York: Holt, Rinehart, Winston. 1974.)

Where does this leave anthropology? Or our child-rearing theories?

In 1992, I could not pass up a chance to visit Western Samoa even if only for a couple of weeks, could not resist the personal opportunity to experience, to live with, and to photograph the people contemporarily involved in (surviving?) this social scientific debate. Admittedly, my own visual representations from that short time are superficial, touristic, exploratory, and inconclusive. I have only sought to provide one particular visual basis to encourage on-going discussion when combined with the "classic" texts of Mead and Freeman, and the active lives of the Samoans themselves.

Texts follow images

--but in classical anthropological style, in preserving trust and anonymity, I have altered names, combined texts/interviews, and rendered photographs to offer a composite picture not attributable to any particular persons or places! My thanks to those tolerant of my western inquiries!