Margaret Mead

&her

depiction of

Samoan girls

“[A Samoan girl] sat cross-legged on the ground, and to sit upon a chair made her stiff and miserable. She ate with her fingers from a woven plate; she slept upon the floor. Her house was a mere circle of pillars, roofed by a cone of thatch, carpeted with water-worn coral fragments.”

- Margaret Mead in Coming of Age in Samoa, p. 7

As an outsider looking in, Mead reinforced her imagined community of Indo-

European culture and created an imagined nation-ness of Samoan girls.

During her fieldwork, Mead recorded the Samoan culture and took photos, all of which strengthen this former idea of defining national identity.