So when I read Coming of Age in Samoa my senior year in college, I was, to put it mildly, receptive. Anthropology, by refuting any one culture's claims to absolute authority, offers a permanent critique. Anarchism, I read once, is an ideology of permanent rebellion. Calling myself gay, which I had done tentatively and with self-loathing at sixteen, moved opposition to a higher level. Having these thoughts was, however inchoately, a critique. I was looking for any way out, some Mad Hatter to lead me down a rabbit hole into a world where I didn't have to carry a clutch purse and want to be dominated by some guy with a crew cut and no neck. And I was attracted - in some sweaty way that had at first no name - to girls and women.Ĭollege in Ann Arbor was better, but still found me unhappily struggling to fit into a slightly more sophisticated workup of American womanhood.
Neither girls' clothes nor girlish attitudes felt "right" to me. I was athletic, hated dating boys, and resented pretending I was less of everything than they were. I was a scholarly minded half-Jew from New York (where I had spent my childhood) and a red diaper baby. Her voice had reached into my teenage hell, to whisper my comforting first mantra, "Everything is relative everything is relative," meaning: There are other worlds, possibilities than suburban California in the 1950s. Before 1961, when I read Coming of Age in an Introduction to Anthropology course at the University of Michigan, Mead had already done a great deal to popularize the concept of cultural relativity. Reading Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa was my introduction, not only to the concept of culture, but to the critique of culture - ours. *Reprinted with the permission of Duke University Press.
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