Life Cycle: Adolescence

Many social historians have argued that adolescence emerged as a distinct life stage only with the advent of industrialization. Using case studies from regions where the historical record is plentiful, such as France, England, and the United States, scholars contend that prior to the industrial revolution, the physical processes of maturity did not necessarily signal a change in life status for the individual. Rather, adolescence as a distinctive stage in the life course emerges only in societies where certain social characteristics are present. While the processes are complex, in general the characteristics include the formation of an indeterminate period of "dependence" on parents that occurred most often in urbanizing areas where old rules about land inheritance and marriage were obsolete, child labor was unnecessary or of questionable value, and where investing in children's education became profitable. Noting that prior to the mid-nineteenth century there was no word for "adolescence," historians point out that words such as "child" might be used to encompass children as young as eight or as old as nineteen or, in the transition stages prior to industrialization, the word youth often referred to semi-independent unmarried children who were often removed from their parents' homes to work on large estates. While the concept of adolescence first emerged among the middle classes (those who could afford to send children to school and not to the sweat-shop), by the end of the nineteenth century, adolescence had become "democratized" (Gillis) in western societies, and teenagers of all social classes were experiencing this life stage.

Conceptualizing Adolescence

While the necessary link between industrialization and a life stage of adolescence is debatable (see Schlegel below) what is clear is that by the twentieth century the term adolescence and the understanding that it represents a life stage that is distinct from both childhood and adulthood was thoroughly embedded in European and North American thinking. Usually linked to the years just after puberty and before marriage, adolescence was not only seen as a unique and distinctive life stage but it was identified as one that posed particular problems and concerns. In 1904 the psychologist G. Stanley Hall published a two-volume set succinctly titled Adolescence that attempted to set forth current theories about this "vast and complex theme" (Hall, p. xix). While Hall's work on adolescence was nothing if not prodigious, his most controversial claim was essentially that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" or, in other words, that the psychic development of each individual mirrors and recreates the evolutionary stages of the species. If this is true, then the behaviors associated with adolescence, which at the time were often referred to as filled with "storm and stress," were rooted in nature and therefore were assumed to be universal. Hall's theories on adolescence, and in particular his concern for describing it as a universal stage of human development, were inspired in part by popular theories of the age concerning both physical and social evolution. Indeed, Hall claims in the concluding chapter of his second volume that "savages" "in most respects are children, or, because of sexual maturity, more properly, adolescents of adult size" (Hall, vol. 2, p. 649).

For several decades before and after the publication of Hall's Adolescence, social theorists were interested in developing ways to incorporate evolution as a conceptual tool for understanding human behavior and cultural difference. Most of their arguments centered on two interconnecting themes: how cultural and social differences could be explained through an evolutionary model; and how much of human behavior could be explained by evolutionary inheritance, or biology. Both of these themes easily qualify as "racist" by twenty-first-century standards, with their emphasis on white, Western civilization (and behaviors) as the apex of social evolution, while "primitive" societies or "races" were held to represent "earlier" stages along the evolutionary trajectory.

By the early decades of the twentieth century, evolutionary theories dominated the social sciences and influenced social policies through ideas such as eugenics. In anthropology, human societies were described as following "natural" laws and many believed that the "history of mankind is the history of nature" (Stocking, 1968, p. 116). A leading theorist of the time, E. B. Tyler, argued both for delineating how different societies could be understood as models of the different stages of a unilinear evolutionary process, and for the concept of the "psychic unity of mankind" (p. 115), which claimed that humans share an evolutionary history and therefore a uniform "nature." Human nature, therefore, was inextricably linked to biology.

Anthropological Critique

The most important anthropological critique of the social evolutionary model came from Franz Boas, who published The Mind of Primitive Man in 1911. Boas used extensive ethno-graphic data to make an argument for the separation of culture from biological determinism and the importance of diffusion, rather than evolution, in the formation of cultural traits. Boas became best known for the concept of "cultural relativism," which argues against judging a culture by outside standards. As he states in the conclusion of The Mind of Primitive Man, "Then we shall treasure and cultivate the variety of forms that human thought and activity has taken, and abhor, as leading to complete stagnation, all attempts to impress one pattern of thought upon whole nations or even upon the whole world" (1932 ed., p. 272). Over time, Boas attracted a wide range of students who studied with him at Columbia University and by the 1920s his theory that culture is historically created, not evolutionarily structured, became the dominant paradigm in American anthropology.

By 1924 Boas had successfully argued for the importance of cultural diffusion—the sharing of ideas between cultures—as an important mechanism of culture change, but he was still looking for ethnographic data to demonstrate how culture specifically influences the psychological development of individuals and creates distinctive patterns of behavior. In particular, Boas decided that a study of adolescence would be a useful way to demonstrate how culture, not nature, patterns human behavior. He chose one of his young graduate students, twenty-three-year-old Margaret Mead, to conduct a study in Samoa; her assignment was to determine whether adolescence was filled with the same troubles in the South Seas as it was in America. Mead was trained in psychology and she knew Hall's work well. As she explains in her book Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), she embarked on that research to answer the question: "Are the disturbances which vex our adolescents due to the nature of adolescence itself or to civilization?" In other words, what takes primacy? Nature or nurture?

While Mead did not overly concern herself with defining "adolescence," it is clear from many of her conclusions that she closely associates adolescence with the years directly surrounding puberty; nevertheless, her conclusion that "there are no great differences" between girls in adolescence and those about to enter it or who have just left it, downplays its significance as a Samoan life stage. Noting the general "casual" nature of Samoan society, Mead argued that adolescence is not filled with "storm and stress" but rather this was a period of orderly maturing interests and activities (1961 ed., p. 157). Maturing girls in Samoa had few restrictions placed on their sexual encounters, few judgments passed on the behaviors, and negligent pressure to prepare for an unseen future. This, she argued, created an adolescence that was peaceful and enjoyable. Comparing the United States to Samoa, Mead noted that American youths "grow up in a world of dazzling choices" and that all choices are "the half-ripened fruit of compromise" (p. 205). Addressing educators directly, Mead used her Samoan research to call for changes in the expectations and pressures put on American adolescents.

Mead's book, which was intentionally written for the "educated layman," became a best-seller and positioned Mead to become one of the most important and influential voices in American anthropology, and in American society, for the next five decades. Among Mead's most noteworthy contributions were her works on childhood (Growing Up in New Guinea, 1930) and gender roles (Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, 1935) both of which continued the argument that cultures create patterns of behaviors in consistent and holistic ways.

Mead's conclusions about the role that culture plays in shaping the experience of adolescence were never seriously challenged until 1983 when Derek Freeman, an Australian anthropologist, wrote Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth. Freeman, who studied Samoa, albeit several decades after Mead, argued that Mead was a "cultural determinist," who ignored any ethnographic evidence that did not support her contention that culture (not biology) is primarily responsible for human behavior. Freeman argued that adolescence was in fact stressful in Samoa and defended an "interactionist" perspective that interpreted behavior as a result of the intersection of biology and culture. Freeman's book sparked controversy both in anthropology and outside because it directly attacked Mead's evidence but also because it attempted to reinvigorate the nature/nurture debates that had remained relatively sidelined in cultural anthropology. Mead was dead by the time Freeman's book was published so could not defend her own work. However, her reputation, which was only partially constructed from her early work, was never seriously in jeopardy.

By 2000 the dust had settled, with no one on either side effectively convincing the other of the truth of their sides' claims. Given the importance, or at the very least, the prominence of Margaret Mead in the development of American anthropology, it is paradoxical that the study of adolescence in anthropology did not flourish at all in the second half of the twentieth century. In fact, it stagnated. While the study of childhood was continued in a limited but impressive fashion (most notably at Harvard), and gender studies blossomed after the 1970s, the systematic study of adolescence all but disappeared in anthropology until the 1990s. While mention might be made of youths or adolescents in longer ethnographic studies, there were no titles in anthropology focusing exclusively on adolescents for several decades. Indeed, even Freeman's attack on Mead was directed toward her conclusions about the primacy of culture in human development, and was never intended as a serious contribution to the study of adolescence. The study of adolescents did not disappear from academia, but was continued by psychologists, child development specialists, historians, and sociologists. Two important sociological studies about teens in America that furthered Mead's general sociocultural orientation were Hollingshead's Elmtown Youth, which focused on teenagers in 1942 and 1943, and Growing Up in River City, a longitudinal study of teens in the postwar boom.

Contemporary Perspectives

While the approaches to certain questions had been significantly refined by the 1980s and 1990s when anthropologists once again began to study adolescence, these studies can still generally be separated into those that seek to find some universals across cultures in the adolescent experience, and those studies that attempt to provide in-depth context for "youth" culture in specific places. In the first case, biology or evolution (understood broadly) is assumed to play some role in the experience of adolescence, while in the other, situating cultural contexts is of exclusive concern.

The two dominant voices for the first perspective are Alice Schlegel and Herbert Barry III. Schlegel (an anthropologist) and Barry (a psychologist) published Adolescence: An Anthropological Inquiry in 1991. Arguing for an ethological perspective, in their case reflecting upon observations of primate groups to inform questions and buttress conclusions, Schlegel and Barry assume that adolescent behaviors are both "antecedent," that is, linked to earlier socialization and development and "situational"—influenced by the particular conditions of adolescence. Moreover, Schlegel and Barry argue that reproduction, in particular the (often extended) gap between sexual maturity and social adulthood, is a "key issue" in understanding how adolescence is managed and understood cross-culturally. In this view, biology (in the form of sexual maturity and the necessities of reproduction) and culture (which rarely allows for the full assumption of adult roles at puberty) intersect, literally creating this life stage. In their thinking, neither biology nor culture should be given explanatory primacy.

Schlegel and Barry's methodology consists primarily of reviewing existing cross-cultural ethnographic works that discuss adolescence—if only briefly—and coding for a select number of variables. Their statistical analysis of 173 societies for boys and 175 for girls points to both regularities and differences in adolescence across cultures. For example, the authors argue for the universality of the life stage of adolescence and refute the contention that it is linked exclusively to industrialization. They also point out the ways in which adolescence differs for boys and girls within a culture, and the variable degrees of discord in the adolescent period that can exist between them.

The 1990s also saw the emergence of a number of journal articles, edited volumes, and book length ethnographies that focused on adolescence, or "youth culture." The shift in terminology from adolescence to youth culture is not arbitrary but reflects the growing emphasis on seeing adolescents as producers of culture, not just as individuals awkwardly situated between culturally sanctioned life stages. The term youth culture itself is not new and comes from the sociologist Talcott Parsons who argued in 1942 that middle-class American teens lived in a distinctive cultural world. In today's usage, youth culture has come to mean that teens are viewed as social agents who impact their cultures in meaningful ways (Wulff).

Studies of youth culture are diverse and cover a wide range of topics, but they reflect some of the larger concerns of late twentieth and early twenty-first century anthropology. First, they reflect the shift away from viewing culture as holistic and consistent as described by Mead and others, toward an understanding of culture as "contested" and represented by multiple perspectives and voices. Women, minorities, and even youths are fully part of cultures, yet they may have distinctive interpretations and perspectives on that culture, and act upon that culture accordingly. Second, studies of youth culture reflect a concern for the ways power impacts social organization and cultural expression. Youth are not only influenced by larger societal power structures such as race, class, or gender; they produce, respond to, and manipulate power in different ways (Caputo; Sharp). Finally, youth culture studies are also influenced by anthropology's increasing interests in the processes of globalization and transnationalism (see Kathleen Hall). Teens are often the first to embrace media and technology, they may be the only ones in their migrant families to speak the dominant language or, because of transnational migration, they may find a stunning disjuncture between their experiences as adolescents and the experiences of their parents. "Youth culture" is now seen as responsive and dynamic and worthy of study in its own right.

The study of adolescence in anthropology has been one in which the disciplinary debates between nature and nurture have played out with intense fervor, but also one that represents the fruit of disciplinary cross-fertilization. From the outset, anthropological studies of adolescence have built upon and contributed to debates in multiple disciplines, most especially sociology, psychology, history, and more recently cultural studies. Beginning with Mead, some anthropological work has contributed to public policy debates, most especially in education. While the study of adolescence lay relatively dormant in anthropology for many decades, the resurgence of studies on adolescence such as Schlegel and Barry's signal an attempt to unite divergent perspectives while those on "youth culture" seek to bring the study of young people back to the center of anthropological theorizing.

See also Diffusion, Cultural ; Evolution ; Gender .

bibliography

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Ann Miles