Mageo, Jeannette Marie
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Overview
This collection features scholarly work by Jeannette Marie Mageo, professor in the anthropology department at Washington State University. Mageo is a psychological anthropologist. Her work focuses on dreaming and the self, on child development, and on how subjectivity, identity, and emotion evolve out of cultural and historical experiences. Since 1980, she has been involved in research and publication on Samoan culture, history, and psychology. In 2003, she began studying U.S. culture through dreams. In recent years she has turned to examine the collision of Samoan and European cultures and psychologies in the colonial encounter through performance art, historical photos, and colonial artifacts. Dr. Mageo has also researched and published on gender and sexuality, transvestism, prehistory, folklore, and spirit possession. She consulted for and appeared in a documentary made for Channel 4 in Britain, Paradise Bent: Boys will be Girls in Samoa, which is framed by her historical interpretation of Samoan transvestism. Mageo's research interests include: Psychological anthropology, self, dreams, cultural memory, historical ethnography, child development and attachment, gender and sexuality, art/artifacts and photography, Oceania and the US.
Recent Submissions
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Cultural Psychodynamics: The Audit, the Mirror, and the "American Dream"
(Current Anthropology, 2015)Based on dream and life-history data and research on American families in the US Northwest, this article argues that a contemporary US middle-class model that I call the Close Family prescribes child-rearing practices that ... -
Toward Historicizing Gender in Polynesia: On Vilsoni Hereniko?s Woven Gods and Regional Patterns
(Pacific Studies, 2000)This article considers possible parallels between Rotuman and Samoan gender history through Vilsoni Hereniko's book Woven Gods. Hereniko draws upon the work of Victor Turner to analyze his Rotuman data, arguing that wedding ... -
Hairdos and Don'ts: Hair Symbolism and Sexual History in Samoa
(Man, 1994)Hair is one of the classical foci of scholarly musing about the body, attaining this focal status through the seminal essay of Edmund Leach, "Magical Hair." My intention is to draw the strands of this debate into a coherent ... -
Inhibitions and Compensations: A Study of the Effects of Negative Sanctions in Three Pacific Cultures
(Pacific Studies, 1991)Oedipus is named after his injured feet because he represents that part of ourselves lamed by the social sanctions. The fact that sanctions used to control children have consequences for character is well documented in ... -
Malosi: An Exploration of the Mead/Freeman Controversy and of Samoan Aggression
(Pacific Studies, 1988)This article's intent is to take a step toward clarifying the nature and the place of aggression in Samoan social life. Aggression has always had a focal place in Samoan culture. In pre-Christian times, Nafanua was the ...