Word: freeman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...time he was Margaret Mead's dissertation advisor in the early 1920s. Boas was the pre-eminent figure in anthropology, a man determined to keep cultural anthropology as a discipline completely separate from biology. Margaret Mead, then, went to Samoa, Freeman says, as Boas' disciple, a believer in the power of environment and thus bound to find evidence supporting that doctrine. Specifically, Boas sent her off to the South Seas to study, in Mead's words, "the relative strength of biological puberty and cultural pattern." There, she carried out most of her research on Samoan female adolescence by regularly seeing...
...Freeman refutes Mead's findings in Samoa on almost all counts: rank, aggressive behavior, religion and punishment, for instance. Contrary to popular belief, Freeman claims that the Samoans are not an easy going, forgiving, and relatively egalitarian people. Rather, they are aggressive, strict, somewhat pious, and, on occasion, belligerent and violent--not entirely unlike our own culture. More interesting are Freeman's chapters on sexual mores and behavior, and on adolescence. He concludes that the Samoans are in fact as uptight and troubled as adolescent Americans...
...book, in what it aims for and achieves, is not this simple. It is fraught with shortcomings and problems, many of which arise out of the destructive load of doctrinal baggage which Freeman brings to his book. In a speech at Harvard last month, Freeman told his audience that he was "not attacking her [Margaret Mead] personally," but only doing a service to science by correcting her distorted picture. While he may be doing important work for science by revising our view of Samoa, the rest of his claims are not borne out by the book...
...detriment, Margaret Mead and Samoa is concerned with the same debate about environment and heredity which has been raging for a century, and Freeman's leanings throughout the book are just as clear as Mead's. He paints Boas and Mead as not only convinced of the importance of culture, but as all but conspiring to produce anthropological evidence supporting their view. Boas, Freeman says, not only sent Mead off to Samoa to study adolescence, but "devised" her research so that it would produce the corrects results. Often, Freeman portrays Mead Mead as merely a mindless extension of Boas--something...
...Freeman also portrays himself as " in an exceptionally favorable position to pursue my researchers into the realities of Samoan life" and as infinitely more qualified than Mead was. Indeed, Freeman has spent a total of six years in Samoa since he first went there in 1940 and may well know the culture far between than Mead. ever did. In 1942, a Samoan chief adopted Freeman as his son when his own son died, and Freeman was later given a title which allowed him to attend the chiefly assemblies which were hidden from Mead. Unfortunately, because of this unique exposure, Freeman...