TEENography: Ethnography on Teenagers, by Teenagers

But something I want to come back to, which I think it's very interesting, is that what you were saying about the 100 years of the invasion of the teenager.

And I think it's very interesting to talk more about the role of anthropology And of course, the early anthropology, that started to be very interesting in that.

Yeah, so we talk a lot in our anthropology class about Margaret Mead and her study of adolescents, especially teenage girls in Samoa.

And just to provide a little background, she decided to research whether stress in adolescence was an inherently American idea or concept.

So she went to Samoa to investigate the stressors that teenage girls face there.

And she found that in general, it was an American thing to narrow it down a lot.

She found that Samoan girls faced a lot less stress than American teenagers.

So she wanted to investigate what's causing this stress.

And one of the solutions she found was that it was the over-sexualization of American teenagers, but also the need for these teenagers to come off as non-sexual and the stigma around sexualization.

And I think studies like this kind of open up the world of anthropology to teenagers because you don't see a lot of research about teenagers.

And this comes back to what I was saying before about research being done on teenagers, not by them, because this talks about stressors, And it finds one main cause of the stressor, but this cause is coming from an adult.

It's not coming from teenagers.

Teenagers, I feel, could speak more to what's causing this stress and what other aspects of societal pressures the Samoan teenagers are missing.

And that's another one of our goals is to promote these studies among teenagers and to promote teenagers to really ask themselves the hard-hitting questions so that adults can understand better.

Yeah, Margaret Mead's study happened in the 20s right around when the term teenager was coined which came with the invention of the car, the use of pocket money, A couple other things that contributed to an actual American teen culture.

And Margaret Mead's study itself was, I think, a very important point in what led to what Rona was just talking about.

how the culture around studying teenagers has evolved to an adult singular perspective rather than coming from both sides, a sort of collaborative effort.

Yes, because of the laws, but also because of the lack of teens actually caring enough to represent themselves in a way that doesn't quote unquote to adults come off as like complaining or just talking about what's wrong rather than like coming from like an advocacy perspective.

One of the things in anthropology which is a no-no is to over exoticize the other? I

mean

hasn't that happened with teenagers? Haven't they been fetishized over and over again?

Yeah.

How do you fight that?

I think the only way to really fight it is to show our perspective and not make it so polarized and so othering towards us because if we talk about oh adults are depicting us wrong or the adults are saying that teenagers are complaining too much for speaking out, I feel like we kind of need to exhibit our own viewpoints and exhibit the problems that we're facing by conducting these studies ourselves or becoming more passionate

Yeah, and something that, everything that you're saying is very interesting because I feel that when we're talking about teenagers, everyone says like, oh no, I don't want to be a teenager again, right? Like that was a hard time that, you know, like people remember those days of being a teenager, even thinking of like being with teenagers.