Thoughts on Ethnography Articles

At a glance it might have seemed as if the field of Ethnography presented merely as an observational practice, one in which only a dry set of facts was to be presented. It initially appeared to me that the study on different cultures and the intangibility of particular customs and beliefs weren't going to provide much in the way of controversy or discussion, and thus my belief remained until I read the article on "Coming of Age in Samoa".

In it, anthropologist Margaret Mead made a study on adolescent girls and found a staggering conclusion. What seemed to be a culture with extremely strong ties to religious tradition demanding no pre-marital sexual relations actually contained a very large majority of adolescent girls doing just that. These results seemed to cause a very large controversy in the West, where the status quo during that period of time was one leaned far more toward conservatism toward women behavior in society.

I found it fascinating that such a seemingly innocuous study sparked such a large debate in scientific circles. In some ways I think the controversy was sparked mainly because the critics harbored particular biases, and thus attempted to call out Mead on some biases of hers. The fact that such a "shocking" finding that adolescent Samoan girls were sexually active was criticized in the first place, I believe, is due to the Western culture at the time frowning upon that very practice. I believe it's even the only reason why the debate went on as much as it did in the first place, with Derek Freeman going so far as to call Mead's studies fraudulent on the basis of a potential bias of hers.

Ultimately, the irony here is that the studying of the reaction of a certain book on ethnography of a foreign culture can actually give insight to the particular cultural beliefs of the audience reading it. Pretending that the study was done by a slightly different but still very similar culture as that of the Samoan one, with the intention of that culture being the intended audience for the study, yields the pretty obvious fact that none of this would particularly be “surprising”. It might spark a debate among the current keepers of the tradition and the adolescent women, but as a culture nobody was really exposed to anything particularly new.

The Western reaction, by contrast, shows the exact opposite. The fact that there was such a large debate makes it clear that the West disapproves of this at least to some capacity, which in turn actually gives some information about the Western culture as a whole. This means that the capacity for this kind of action was frowned upon by Western culture, and the degree to which it was disapproved of is evident in the amount of controversy that it produced. In essence, we get two different sets of information on ethnographies by observing the audience’s reaction. One is the information provided in the ethnography itself, the other in the audience reception.

The debate that the study spawned also shows a considerable interest in how one’s culture is pervasive enough to be present in many wildly foreign regions. The critics might even be showing a degree of insecurity, given the belief that if Samoan adolescent girls behaved in such a way that the Western society scorns at it, surely it must be false and simply the scientist projecting her own biases. This borderline denial gives us information not only on the beliefs themselves, but the magnitude in which these beliefs exist.