Margaret Mead & her depiction of Samoan girls
“[A Samoan girl] sat cross- legged on the ground, and to sit upon a chair made her stiff and miserable. She ate with her fingers from a woven plate; she slept upon the floor. Her house was a mere circle of pillars, roofed by a cone of thatch, carpeted with water- worn coral fragments.” - Margaret Mead in Coming of Age in Samoa, p. 7
As an outsider looking in, Mead reinforced her imagined community of Indo- European culture and created an imagined nation-ness of Samoan girls. During her fieldwork, Mead recorded the Samoan culture and took photos, all of which strengthen this former idea of defining national identity.