Margaret Mead's Holistic Approach

Margaret Mead, an anthropologist, strive to take a holistic approach to study humanity (Zunner-Keating), had visited the native village in Samoa, a south sea island, in 1928. Mead used the vivid language and thick description to describe the Samoan girls’ life from childhood to adolescent. She lived in the native family to observe their lifestyle, and to learn their language and traditional cultures. Mead compared and contrasted the differences between The holistic approach sees human behavior as a complex set of interacting behaviors and ideas. Samoan and Americans. She especially pointed out the conflict and distress among the Samoan adolescent girls. “The holistic approach sees human behavior as a complex set of interacting behaviors

“I gathered many detailed facts about these girls, the size of their families, the position and wealth of their parents, the number of their brothers and sisters, the amount of sex experience which they had had” (Mead 10). In Samoa, the babies live were so different than ours. They crawled on the soil floor; their mothers feed them milk and papaya, coconut, and sugar cane juices (Mead 21). When girls reached age 5, they had the responsibility to help their mothers to take care of their little sisters and brothers while their parents go fishing. They learned how to make mats, planting, harvesting, preparation of food, and to get the coconuts from the coconut trees (Mead 228). When they reached age16 or 17, they will get married. They dancing, singing, and play games in their leisure times. Their lives were quite simple compare to Americans. They had less conflict during their adolescent age. But American girls have better life and educations than Samoan girls. “Adolescence represented no period of crisis or stress, but was instead an orderly developing of a set of slowly maturing interests and activities. The girls' minds were perplexed by no conflicts, troubled by no philosophical queries, beset by no remote ambitions.” (Mead