Margaret Mead is perhaps the world’s most famous anthropologist. In 1925, when it was unthinkable that a twenty-three-year-old woman would make such a distant field trip, Margaret Mead sailed from the US to Samoa in the South Sea Islands. Her purpose was to study the adolescent girl, specifically to test the extent to which the troubles of adolescence depend on the attitudes of a particular culture, and the extent to which they are inherent in the development of all human being. From this field trio came the now-classic study Coming of Age in Samoa (1928). Mead returned to the South Seas on other ethnological expeditions (expeditions set up to analyze and compare cultures). The article reprinted here explains the process of how she set up and carried out fieldwork among the Manus Island people of Melanesia (Warriner cs: 1994: 181).