Growing Up in New Guinea

Now with a new introduction by Howard Gardner, Ph.D., Mead’s second book following her landmark Coming of Age in Samoa, Growing Up in New Guinea established Mead as the first anthropologist to look at human development in a cross-cultural perspective.

Margaret Mead was 23 when she traveled alone to Samoa on her first expedition to the South Seas. Her first book, Coming of Age in Samoa, chronicled that visit and launched her distinguished career. Following her landmark field work focusing on girls in American Samoa, noted anthropologist Margaret Mead found that she needed to study preadolescents in order to understand adolescents. In 1928 she went to Manus Island in New Guinea, where she studied the play and imaginations of younger children and how they were shaped by adult society. Mead and her second husband, Reo Fortune, lived in 24-hour contact with the inhabitants of this fishing village.