“To them [Samoans], birth and sex and death are the natural, inevitable structure of existence, of an existence in which they expect their youngest children to share. Our so often repeated comment that, ‘it’s not natural’ for children to be permitted to encounter death would seem as incongruous to them as if we were to say it was not natural for children to see other people eat or sleep. And this calm, matter-of-fact acceptance of their children’s presence envelops the children in a protective atmosphere, saves them from shock and binds them closer to the common emotion which is so dignified permitted to them” (Mead 1961/1928: 220).
Margaret Mead’s classic Coming of Age in Samoa is so powerful because it clearly knows its core audience: American parents, teachers, and anybody else that is part of the child rearing process. By comparing and contrasting practices in the US versus Samoa (remember, however, that this research took place in the early 1920’s), Mead asks adults to rethink the ways children – especially girls in this case – are led to understand the world around them. One such topic she briefly discusses is death. For Mead, American children are maladjusted to the situation of death. “Our children, confined within one family circle […] often owe their only experience with birth or death to the birth of a younger brother or sister or the death of a parent or grandparent” (Mead 1961/1928: 217). This, Mead explains, can lead to placing heavy emotional understanding on a singular experience. Whereas in Samoa, where children are enveloped in a larger community “in a civilization which suspects privacy” (Mead 1961/1928: 219), children have multiple experiences with death which help inform them how to behave. “One impression corrects an earlier one until they are able, as adolescents, to think about life and death and emotion without undue preoccupation with the purely physical details” (Mead 1961/1928: 220). In Mead’s analysis (pertinent to the time she was writing it, but also still holding relevance today in some aspects) Samoan children were socialized to see death as a natural occurring process in which they are included, whereas American children were sequestered away from the happening, shielded, and only brought to encounter death a few times in their young lives.
Mead’s book is a classic read that illustrates the multitude of possibilities in which people live. People in Samoa today may or may not continue along these same lines of practice (if anybody has any modern day sources on this topic, articles, or books, feel free to post in comments), but what is important is understanding that there are plenty of ways to approach death, and as humans and as societies we must make sure we are approaching it in healthy and beneficial ways for everybody.
The Edited Jottings of an Amateur Anthropologist 