Chapter 9: The Attitude Towards Personality
Coming of Age in Samoa
Margaret Mead
Summary: In this chapter Mead introduces a few specific characteristics and words that describe the personality of Samoans. She opens the chapter by describing the musu attitude and a peculiar answer to questions that want to be avoided Ta ilo. Mead also explains the lack of privacy, and how this leads to much secrecy; she discusses how attitudes are describe by Samoans (very differently from Americans) and how are judgments made about people with different titles.
Discussion: It is almost expected to try to have some secrecy in a place where almost every aspect and action of an individual is public. I wonder if the size of the community would have something to do with that. I'm from a small town in Mexico, and I know what it is for a whole community to know and gossip about an individual's actions. However, by Mead's discussion, I get the feeling that their custom of knowing about everybody went much further than that of my home town's community.
In Mead's discussion about their choice of language when describing or judging attitudes, I get the feeling that their language skills were not very refined, or maybe some details got lost in the translation or interpretation, and that was the best way Mead was able to interpret her results.
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