Margaret Mead Coming of Age in Samoa Review
NEW SAMOA BOOK CHALLENGES MARGARET MEAD'Due south CONCLUSIONS
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January 31, 1983
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2 months before its official publication date, a book maintaining that the tardily anthropologist Margaret Mead seriously misrepresented the culture and grapheme of Samoa has ignited heated discussion inside the behaviorial sciences.
The volume is ''Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth'' past Derek Freeman, professor emeritus of anthropology at the Australian National University in Canberra.
On the surface, the book - to be published in April by Harvard Academy Press - is a critical assay of Miss Mead'due south ''Coming of Age in Samoa,'' the best-selling work of anthropology, which on its publication in 1928 established her national reputation.
''On that level, Freeman's book is an extremely important piece of work,'' said Robert C. Hunt, chairman of the department of anthropology at Brandeis University, who evaluated the book for Harvard University Press.
Below the surface, Professor Freeman'southward volume could intensify the frequently bitterly contested ''nurture versus nature'' controversy, the argument over whether human beings are shaped mainly by environment or by heredity. Moreover, the book raises important questions virtually scholarship and ideological commitment.
Miss Mead described the Samoan people every bit gentle, peaceful, free of religious conflicts and devoid of jealousy. They condoned adolescent free love, she said, and as a consequence adolescence in Samoa was without the turmoil or stress that accompanies adolescence in the Us and elsewhere -demonstrating that boyish behavior had to be explained in purely cultural terms. By contrast, Professor Freeman asserts that:
- The Samoan people are intensely competitive.
- They take high rates of homicide and assault, and the incidence of rape in Samoa is among the highest in the globe.
- Samoan children, adolescents and adults live inside an say-so organization that regularly results in psychological disturbances ranging from compulsive behaviors to hysterical illnesses and suicide.
- They are extremely decumbent to fits of jealousy.
- Not just are Samoans not given to coincidental lovemaking, but as well ''the cult of female person virginity is probably carried to a greater extreme than in whatever other civilisation known to anthropology.''
Scholars are already commenting on the book. ''If Freeman is correct, it raises the question of how many other people were collecting incorrect information and putting it out as fact,'' said Sherwood 50. Washburn, a past president of the American Anthropological Association. ''The question his book raises is how one assesses validity in a profession where people's field piece of work and field notes are regarded by about people as unassailable.'' 'Preposterously False'
The Freeman volume contends that many of Miss Mead's assertions almost Samoa ''are fundamentally in error and some of them preposterously imitation.''
This re-evaluation comes 58 years afterwards Miss Mead, then 23 years one-time, embarked in 1925 for the S Pacific to written report adolescence at that place at the proposition of Franz Boas, her professor at Columbia Academy, and 55 years after the publication of the resulting ''Coming of Age in Samoa.''
The book, the first of almost two dozen past Miss Mead, helped turn the tide for the cultural determinists, who believe that culture determines personality, in their boxing with the biological determinists.
The volume as well helped vault the writer to the forefront of her profession, where she remained until her death in 1978. Information technology has sold millions of copies in 16 languages, including Urdu and Serbo-Croatian, and has had impact far beyond academe. Its bulletin has influenced laws, social policy and, said Professor Washburn, ''influenced the way people were brought up in this country.''
''The unabridged bookish establishment and all the encyclopedias and all the textbooks accepted the conclusions in her book, and those conclusions are fundamentally in error,'' the author said in a telephone conversation. ''There isn't another example of such wholesale self-charade in the history of the behaviorial sciences.'' New Book Called 'Masterpiece'
Few other scholars would go that far, but many are convinced that Professor Freeman, a New Zealander with a doctorate from Cambridge University, has written an of import book. Ernst Mayr, professsor emeritus of zoology at Harvard, and a leading behavioral scientist, said the book ''is non only a contribution to cultural anthropology, but it will as well have a major bear on on psychology and other aspects of homo biological science.''
Nikolaas Tinbergen, the behaviorial scientist who won the 1973 Nobel Prize for medicine, said the Freeman volume is ''a masterpiece of modernistic scientific anthropology.''
Defenders of Miss Mead say that many scholars who have lined up behind Professor Freeman are longtime champions of biological determinisism, a doctrine that has gained considerable strength and credence inside the bookish community during the last decade.
The author says that both nature and nurture are always involved in shaping human beliefs, yet he asserts that many anthropologists all the same requite insufficient recognition to the significance of biology. That aside, still, he said that his book is not and then much intended to address that longtime academic dispute every bit to rectify the wrong that has been done to Samoan society.
One of the Freeman book's admirers is Le Tagaloa Leota Pita, dean of evolution at the Academy of Samoa, who said that while the volume does non tell the Samoans anything new most themselves, ''for the first time an outsider writes nigh Samoa as a Samoan would write and describes the reality of his living civilization.'' Samoa Not Idyllic
That reality, according to Professor Freeman, who has spent a full of six years in Samoa since 1940, is wholly at variance with the idyllic picture conveyed past Miss Mead in her book and in subsequent writings about Samoa.
The writer attributes many of Miss Mead's ''errors'' to her unfamiliarity with the linguistic communication, her absenteeism of systematic prior investigation of the society and its values, and to her choosing to live with expatriate Americans rather than in a Samoan household. He writes that Miss Mead'southward depiction of boyish free love is probably the result of the young anthropologist being deliberately misled by her adolescent informants, who wanted to tease her.
His major accusation, nevertheless, is that Miss Mead's professional person shortcomings derived from her doctrinal luggage. There is the clearest evidence, he writes, that ''it was her securely convinced belief in the doctrine of extreme cultural determinism, for which she was prepared to fight with the whole bombardment at her command, that led her to construct an account of Samoa that appeared to substantiate this very doctrine.''
''I think Margaret may have gone to Samoa with a cultural bias,'' said Theodore Schwartz, professor of anthropology at the Univesity of California, San Diego. ''She always had a theme; she addressed current preoccupations and brought back from the field something that would reverberate in society. And I don't doubt that Margaret knew very little of the linguistic communication and didn't have the total immersion one would desire.''
Professor Schwartz, who was a field assistant for Miss Mead in New Guinea in the 1950's, has not read the Freeman book. But he said that even if Miss Mead fabricated errors in Samoa, ''I would observe it difficult to believe that she was 180 degrees wrong.''
He said that she fabricated some errors about the Manua people, the bailiwick of ''Growing Up in New Guinea,'' her second book, ''but overall, she was brilliant and perceptive.'' Miss Mead'south Defenders
Miss Mead was a curator at the American Museum of Natural History for more than 50 years. David Hurst Thomas, chairman of the museum's deparment of anthropology, said: ''It would bother me if aspersions were cast on her integrity or honesty, only it doesn't bother me that her enquiry findings may have been superseded. I am an archeologist, and we acquire that dealing with a civilisation ten,000 years onetime in 1983, it is non the aforementioned x,000-year-onetime culture studied in 1923. Information technology doesn't mean that the research is any less valid.''
Several of Professor Freeman's professional colleagues note that his own personality has complicated the dispute. For case, Professor Washburn, a former chairman of the anthropolgy department at the Academy of California, Berkeley, said: ''He is, unfortunately, a difficult person and he's using this anti-Mead data to attack Boas.'' (Miss Mead's late mentor, Professor Boas, was the intellectual leader of American anthropology. He wrote the foreword to ''Coming of Historic period in Samoa.'')
''People who piece of work on Samoa know Margaret Mead was wrong, and Freeman's book shows that beyond uncertainty,'' said Bradd Shore, professor of anthropology at Emory University and author of the recent book ''Sala'ilua: A Samoan Mystery'' (Columbia University Press). ''Just if she suppressed the night elements, Freeman painted all those dark elements in his book. She generated a myth out of opposition to eugenics, he generated a distorted picture out of opposition to Margaret Mead. Only on the whole, his book is bright.'' 'Goddess of Anthropology'
Professor Freeman acknowledges his unpopularity within the profession, but he attributes much of it to the hostility of colleagues who resent the mere proffer that anyone would take issue with a virtual ''goddess of anthropology,'' whom he describes as ''a very remarkable woman of quite considerable achievement.''
When he decided to return to Samoa in 1965, he said, ''I was refused inquiry funds past my own department head on grounds that I shouldn't effort to go against Margaret Mead.'' Moreover, he asserts in his book that so ascendant were Miss Mead's position and reputation that anthropologists who later went to Samoa and institute errors in her inquiry not only did non question her findings but, because of the prevailing intellectual climate, actually praised their ''remarkably high'' reliability.
Professor Freeman as well denies conducting a vendetta. His book is a necessary cosmetic, he said, because Miss Mead ''never revised in any manner'' the original text of ''Coming of Historic period in Samoa,'' despite its inaccurate motion picture of the Samoan ethos, and its conclusions continue to exist regarded by anthropologists and others ''as though they were eternal verities.''
''What's involved hither are two things - Freeman's agruments most Margaret Mead and Samoa in the 1920'due south, and Freeman's position on the relative strengths of nature-nurture,'' said Professor Hunt of Brandeis.
''You could write a book on either bailiwick,'' he said, ''without more than a paragraph or two referring to the other. His position on Margaret Mead is an endeavor at intellecutal history, to put into context events in academe. If that is controversial, it will be controversial not equally a question of faith only of accuracy and interpretation. His position on nature-nurture amounts to a matter of faith. That he has put the two together volition misfile the interpretation of both, but information technology's his book.'' Volition Upset Older Scholars
Professor Washburn said that few anthropologists under l volition be bothered by the Freeman book, because their theories are built on information in addition to Miss Mead'south, but many older scholars will be upset considering ''her book said what liberals wanted to believe at that time.''
He added that while discussing the Freeman thesis last jump with an influential anthropologist: ''He said that even if everything Freeman says is truthful, the Mead volume was very influential for anthropology. But that's a disturbing attitude, considering it means you can but make upwards a myth, and if it'due south one everybody agrees with, you're a great person.'' Still, he is critical of Professor Freeman for not publishing his findings while Miss Mead was alive.
''I had a coming together with her in 1964 in Australia and laid my cards on the tabular array at that time,'' said the author, who describes himself as having been a strong laic in Miss Mead's findings when he offset went to Samoa. ''I was in correspondence with her since, and when I finished a preliminary draft in August 1978, I wrote and warned her that it was highly critical, request if she would like to see a copy. I did not get a answer, and she died that November.''
Although he published a number of papers almost Samoa on technical subjects, Professor Freeman said, not until 1981 was he finally granted access to the athenaeum of the High Court of American Samoa. ''I had tried in the 1960's but was refused, and when I was finally allowed in, the evidence was conclusive,'' he said, referring to the statistics about rape, assail and other crimes that appear in both the text and in the book'southward 55 pages of notes.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1983/01/31/books/new-samoa-book-challenges-margaret-mead-s-conclusions.html
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