Margaret Mead gave me a headache, in a good way

So, my elective requires an anthropologist research project, and I chose Margaret Mead probably because her name popped into my mind once when I went down the Franz Boas internet hole a few weeks ago, and it turns out she was a student of his, which I found out myself for a little while before anyone told me, how cute is that?!

Her first big ethnography was about Samoan teenagers in the 1920s, she was looking to see if adolescence was stressful/crazy everywhere or just because Americans raise their children in specific ways and apparently she thought it was the latter and that she actually interviewed a group of samoan girls who did not go through any sort of stressful, difficult phase compared to Americans and that most of the traits we associated with "being a teenager" were actually just "being an American teenager."

It was kinda weird to hear as a actual teenager; part of me felt affirmed that I wasn't broken, that maybe this age was actually supposed to be hellish. And then I found during the course of the research that two decades later, other anthropologist (main one is named Derek Freeman) who went back to Samoa had evidence that Mead might have been mistaken about many things and perhaps it was some of the people she was interviewing misleading her, or maybe it was just her expectations again. That whole controversy apparently isn't resolved to everyone yet.

That part surprised me a lot because I just figured that when you write an anthropology paper in class you read one person who already got their points accepted.

But really you need to understand the controversy surrounding that work and have something interesting to add.

I don’t know if Mead is correct or if Freeman is, neither is the most important part in my eyes. It's all based on that question underneath: how many of the traits and "human nature" aspects in people are just part of that particular culture you were born in, without you even realizing they are culturally bound. I keep finding myself applying this concept to my own life and my own behavior; it is like a constant check-is this "me"? Or is this simply things I’ve just gotten used to as a Bengali home-dweller, or as an American high schooler.

Presentation due in 2 weeks, pretty sure I will be going over the time limit because I have WAY too many thoughts on all of this.