Word: samoa
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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 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...
...explanation for this is that Mead's only source was what the teenage girls she was studying told her, and they probably exaggerated and lied to her both to tease her and out of shyness. Freeman also concludes that Mead was mistaken in believing that adolesence in Samoa is without trauma. He cites statistics showing that teenage delinquency in Samoa can run as much as ten times that of some western cultures, the peak year for a youth's first conviction being at 16 years...