Word: samoa
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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With so many cherished myths falling by the wayside, being told Margaret Mead was wrong about Samoa doesn't come as that great a surprise. In her 1928 book Coming of Age in Samoa, as well as in later works. Mead has painted the Samoans as a gentle people for whom the seemingly universal pains of adolescence did not exist. Adolescence in Samoa was not filled with tension, delinquency, and misery, but with casual lovemaking and smooth and easy maturation. Mead's report led many to conclude that such a dislocating period in human development must be the result...
Alas, this was only a false hope, or so Derek Freeman goes to tremendous lengths to prove in Margaret Mead and Samoa. The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth. The book is surprisingly anti-Mead. Although Freeman claims his book is only a formal refutation of Mead's work, it is unfortunately much more than that. Like far too many social and hard scientists, Freeman has been caught up in and swept away by ideological debates from which he should have been free. The debate, once again, is nature versus nurture. In contrast to Mead's strong concern with...
...Samoan society. He provides a valuable chronicle of the scientific and intellectual battles in which Mead could not avoid participating, and traces the development of the opposing views of biological and cultural determinism during the last half of the 19th century and up until 1925 when Mead went to Samoa to do her research. He describes the immense influence of Francis Galton, the late-19th century advocate of eugenics and a staunch believer that heredity is all a man brings with him into the world, that all is already determined at birth. It was against this school of thought, Freeman...
...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...
...former Peace Corps volunteer in Western Samoa, I find it as difficult to agree with Derek Freeman's narrow analysis of the Samoan culture as I did with Margaret Mead's. As Anthropologist Bradd Shore accurately pointed out, Samoans can lead contradictory lives. Moreover, they are very adept at telling people what they wish to hear, saying one thing and doing another...