Exactly 100 years ago, in the southern hemisphere summer of 1925–26, a pioneering anthropological project was underway in the Pacific islands of Samoa. Margaret Mead, a 23-year-old graduate student fresh from New York, had begun fieldwork among a society whose culture and behaviour contrasted sharply with those of the United States. Her findings would inform one of the most influential—and most misguided—books of the twentieth century: Coming of Age in Samoa. An international bestseller, Mead’s vivid account of non-Western life and sexuality helped shape modern ideas about human nature, cementing the widespread belief that human behaviour is overwhelmingly determined by environment—by nurture and not nature.

Fifteen years later, in 1940, another young anthropologist arrived in Samoa—also destined for the history books, though this time as a challenger to Mead’s idyllic portrayal of a Pacific paradise. New Zealand-born Derek Freeman was initially convinced by Mead’s claim that culture trumped biology, but his own fieldwork gradually turned him into her fiercest critic. The ensuing Mead–Freeman controversy has become one of the most famous episodes in the seemingly never-ending nature-nurture debate.

Coming of Age in Samoa is an exuberant read. Take Mead’s account of “A Day in Samoa,” which starts at first light:

As the dawn begins to fall among the soft brown roofs and the slender palm trees stand out against a colourless, gleaming sea, lovers slip home from trysts beneath the palm trees or in the shadow of beached canoes, that the light may find each sleeper in his appointed place.

As the day progresses:

Girls stop to giggle over some young ne’er-do-well who escaped during the night from an angry father’s pursuit and to venture a shrewd guess that the daughter knew more about his presence than she told. The boy who is taunted by another, who has succeeded him in his sweetheart’s favour, grapples with his rival, his foot slipping in the wet sand.

And as evening draws in:

Half the village may go fishing by torchlight, and the curving reef will gleam with wavering lights and echo with shouts of triumph or disappointment, teasing words or cries of outraged modesty. Or a group of youths may dance for the pleasure of some visiting maiden. … Sometimes sleep will not descend upon the village until long past midnight; then at last [there is only] the whisper of lovers, as the village rests until dawn.

It is easy to see how Coming of Age in Samoa captivated readers in the industrial West. Such a vision of the “natural” human condition was not, of course, entirely new: it echoed Marx and Engels’ notion of egalitarian “primitive communism” and Rousseau’s romantic ideal of the “noble savage,” uncorrupted by civilisation. What set Mead apart, however, was her claim to have found scientific proof that such a way of life not only could exist but, in Samoa, actually did.

The scientific rationale for Mead’s research is laid out in the book’s introduction. Her focus was adolescence—the period in which, according to prevailing theory, “idealism flowered and rebellion against authority waxed strong … [and] difficulties and conflicts were absolutely inevitable.” She wished to test whether the troubled developmental stage was truly universal and whether the “conflict and distress” observed among teenagers in America was indeed inescapable. Since laboratory-based human experiments were impossible, Mead decided instead to conduct field-based observations “of human beings under different cultural conditions in some other part of the world,” ideally among one of the “primitive groups who have had thousands of years of historical development along completely different lines from our own.” She chose the Polynesian people of the Pacific Islands and “to concentrate upon the adolescent girl in Samoa.”

Mead spent just under nine months in Samoa. Although she had initially assumed she would need at least a year to learn Samoan properly, she spent only eight weeks studying the language on the main island of Tutuila before travelling to the outlying Manu‘a group to conduct her fieldwork. Basing herself at a medical dispensary run by the only Americans on the island of Ta‘ū, Mead “used her room at the back to meet with Samoan girls individually and in small groups as it … opened onto a village.” Preferring “the casual give-and-take of unstructured conversations” with the girls “away from their homes and peer groups,” she aimed to capture the everyday dynamics of adolescence in ways that formal interviews or public settings would not allow. This approach provided the rich detail central to her depiction of Samoan life in Coming of Age in Samoa.