Uneasy in the night, populous with ghosts, they shout lustily to one another as they hasten with their work.” Mead opens her work with a twist: she describes the men of Ta’u hastening to their work, but what she’s really describing is a Morning After scenario, a Walk of No Shame, because these men are returning from al fresco sexual adventures of the night before: “As the dawn begins to fall among the soft brown roofs and the slender palm trees stand out against a colorless, gleaming sea, lovers slip home from trysts beneath the palm trees or in the shadow of beached canoes.” Her titillating glance into the evening habits of her Indigenous subjects provides the material for her first ethnography, written for a general reader, that detailed the sexual habits of adolescent girls in Samoa. The work begins, “The life of the day begins at dawn, or if the moon has shown until daylight, the shouts of the young men may be heard before dawn from the hillside. WITH THE PUBLICATION of Coming of Age in Samoa, Margaret Mead brought to her audience in 1928 a readable vision of adolescent sexuality derived from nine months of fieldwork on the island of Ta’u.
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