Reference Information
Title: Coming of Age in Samoa
Author: Margaret Mead
Chapter 1: Introduction
Summary
The author uses this chapter to introduce the purpose of the book: describing a different culture to try to increase understanding of the reader's own culture. Anthropology is described by expressing the need for understanding and explaining an anthropologists's method of observing another, more primitive culture in order to gain better insight into a more complex culture whose parts are harder to distinguish from the whole.
Discussion
Through examples of human development research, the author not only explains, but shows, just why it is necessary to study a primitive culture in order to understand parts of our own culture. By discussing how experiments occur, it is easy to see that the observation must be simplified as much as possible and the culture bases varied in order to obtain a more accurate understanding of human nature.
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