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The Fateful Hoaxing Of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis Of Her Samoan Research

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When her hosts in Manu'a learned that 'Makelita' had made them world famous as libertines, they were dismayed by what to them was an abominable slander. And they were dumbfounded that, after showing her the utmost hospitality and cooperation, she could have so grossly betrayed them. They hit on the explanation that someone among them fed her a line of bull (tala pepelo lava).

This was a generous if implausible explanation. Generous, because it avoided taxing her with outright fabrication. Implausible, because Mead's depiction of Samoan promiscuity drives whoredom into the core of the social psyche. She claimed that Samoans have no sense of sin despite their regular church attendance and the admonitions of pastors ('They are able to count [sex] at its true value. . . [they recognize] the essential impersonality of sex attraction which we may well envy them']. She reported masturbation, homosexuality, and lesbianism as common practices that were regarded as 'simply play' between casual heterosexual liaisons. In other words, Mead's Samoans, like Mead herself, were bisexual. She attributed the relaxed attitude to pre-marital sex and to adultery to the fact that Samoans have no deep attachments or strong emotional feelings. There is no parent-child bonding for the same reason. These and like claims construct the cultural 'pattern' of a society untroubled by the storm and stress of adolescence. Such thinking was the trendy utopianism of the sexual reformers of her era, but it had nothing to do with Samoa until Mead's arrival from New York.

Freeman's book is a mighty effort to convert the Samoan belief in duping into a well-founded conclusion. He touts two 'smoking guns'. One is the sworn testimony of Mead's dear friend during her field trip, Fa'apu'a Fa'amu, to the effect that she did indeed tell Mead fibs in reply to her questions about her relations with men. The other is correspondence between Mead and the supervisor of her Samoan research, Franz Boas.

The first smoking gun is a dud. Fa'amu testified only that she told Mead that 'We spend nights with boys, yes, with boys!' and similar non-specific allusions. There is no express admission that intercourse occurred. There is no hint whatever of lesbianism. The duping hypothesis predicts that Mead's field notes would record the information given her by Fa'amu. In fact, the notes never attribute any information to her. The natural conclusion is that despite the affection, Mead did not regard her friend as an informant. It is improbable, in any case, that Mead credited Fa'amu's tease, partly because her notes show that she was alert to tall tales and partly because Fa'amu's status as a taupou, or ceremonial virgin, meant that she was never unchaperoned and hence had no opportunity for 'spending nights with boys'. Finally, Fa'amu's non-specific allusions added nothing to what Mead's notes show she already believed she knew about Samoan promiscuity. In sum, the duping episode is irrelevant to understanding how Mead managed get Samoan moeurs so desperately wrong. Since the second smoking gun depends on the first, it too is a dud.

Did she make it up then? Although he repeatedly defends Mead's research integrity, Freeman destroys his noble defense by cataloguing deceit after deceit in things small and great. Mead indeed seems to have been a gamester who got a buzz from pulling the wool over people's eyes. And this was her reputation among her colleagues, who called her 'the lady novelist', a 'mythmaker', given to exaggeration and hyperbole, to sloppy and impressionistic description of no great reliability. The eminent Edward Sapir bluntly called her a 'pathological liar'.

Freeman shows that Mead's fieldwork was premised on two strategic deceits. She concealed from her hosts her married status. By passing herself off as a virgin, she was honored by three villages with title of taupou, which conferred a great advantage-she had, as she said, 'rank to burn' and could 'order people about'. She second strategic deceit was perpetrated on her supervisor, Franz Boas and indirectly on her funding sponsor, the National Research Council. Boas and the Council expected her to research the personality of adolescent girls, to determine the extent to which nature (puberty) or culture influenced adolescent conflict. But Mead wasn't interested in this project. She accepted it because it got he a ticket to the field. Her real interest was ethnography. Unbeknownst to Boas, Mead struck an agreement with the Bishop Museum (Honolulu) to prepare a monograph on Samoa. Freeman shows by a meticulous reconstruction of her activities that she spent no more than four or five weeks on the funded project, hardly time enough for a systematic investigation of this complex and demanding subject. This is confirmed by her sparse field notes on the adolescent project.

Her strategic impostures led to the massive fraud that made her famous. Having little data, she just made it up and pretended, in the appendices of Coming of Age, to have found it. Mead seems to have delighted in slipping mickies as a kind of sport. She says, for example, that Samoa was untroubled by natural disasters. Yet it's common knowledge that no island is spared the ravages of storm, flood and occasional tsunamis. In fact, a hurricane devastated Manu'a in January of the year of her visit. She says that Samoan children alternately crawl or walk until the age of 'three or four'. Every caregiver knows that once the child learns to walk, next it runs and never returns to crawling. She seems to have been supremely confident that no one would call her hand on such whoppers. Deception was so habitual that she lied gratuitously. Thus she told Boas that she was seasick for six weeks (!!) on her return voyage, while in fact she was romancing a new beau-love sick, not seasick. It's not surprising that her epistemological mottoes were: 'The truth isn't out there, you know' and 'If it isn't [true], it ought to be'.

Freeman's claim that the hoax 'effectively solve[s] the 'enigma of Margaret Mead's research' unfortunately follows the fashion of substituting victimhood for active will. He would have us see her as the unwitting pawn of a mythopoetic fate. Fiddlesticks! Mead's behavior in Manu'a was a disgrace to herself and to her profession. Such conduct had no logical relation to Boasian anthropology. It was entirely her doing. Having deceived her hosts, she disgraced the sacrosanct taupou title by having affairs. That too was her personal choice. She went on to invent a salacious bisexual Samoa as a preamble to the part of Coming of Age that made her famous--her advocacy of educational, family, and sexual reform in America.

Mead's research presents no enigma. She always went to the field to find what she wanted to find-an uplifting story to boost a current social reform. As for those 'primitives' who served as fodder, well, they were expendable in the great struggle to reform the world.

Hiram Caton Editor, The Samoa Reader: Anthropologists Take Stock. University Press of America, 1990.

Although this book smacks of comeuppance in the nature/nurture wars,with Freeman somewhat preditorily showing an excessive ... factor with his prey, it is interesting reading nonetheless, as it shows indirectly the whole dilemma of fieldwork, with its question mark, how observe another culture at all. The account of the genesis of Coming of Age in Samoa is convincing, although the issue of the hoaxing of Mead as to the actual facts of this coming of age remains slightly ambiguous. But the overall account suggests that the entire project was a bit thin in substance, of excessively short duration, and a prime example of prior assumptions influencing results. It is also a story of how our theories end up influencing our present, which is a challenge to our claims on science. The influence of this book on general culture is therefore a considerable irony. I think Freeman is on guard, hence his account stands up fairly well, but I would also check the challengers here, to this, and to the previous work on this subject by the author. In fact, what is the basis for any claim to observe another culture? Not via tourist photography, in any case.

It's hard to accept that an cultural icon was once a brilliant yet gullible young woman or that a vaunted paradigm of Anthropology is fatally flawed. This book contrary to ad hominem attackers of Freeman tells the story with a compelling and accurate history of Mead' researches. You won't be able to put it down (literaly or figuratively) or stop thinking of its implications.

One doesn't have to like Freeman to acknowledge that he's made his case and it holds up. It's wickedly ironic that Meade's shoddy reasearch (I don't think she was dishonest) was embraced as truth for fifty years. Anthropologists are supposed to explain myths, not create them. In a way it doesn't matter. The subject is old and Meade's reputation as a popularizer isn't changed one whit (but then the same could be said for Kinsey and Dr. Joyce Brothers). If Freeman had started his career with this book he would be justly regarded as a giant killer. As he's ending with this one he deserves his day. Well done.

Derek Freeman's book caught my eye because I had been told similar things about Margaret Mead's research by a trusted Samoan friend several years ago. He told me that he once had a radio talk show in American Samoa and he was able to interview several of the women who, as young girls, had served as the source for Mead's information. As I recall it, they told him that they had noticed that Mead seemed to want to hear stories of their loose sexual behavior, and they simply gave her lots of what she wanted. Putting this story over on Mead, he said, seemed to be a great source of merriment to the girls.

I don't think the Samoan friend is putting one over on me. Should any serious researchers want to interview him (He lives in the Washington, DC, area), I would be glad to arrange the contact.

When her hosts in Manu'a learned that `Makelita' had made them world famous as libertines, they were dismayed by what to them was an abominable slander. And they were dumbfounded that, after showing her the utmost hospitality and cooperation, she could have so grossly betrayed them. They hit on the explanation that someone among them fed her a line of bull (tala pepelo lava).

This was a generous if implausible explanation. Generous, because it avoided taxing her with outright fabrication. Implausible, because Mead's depiction of Samoan promiscuity drives whoredom into the core of the social psyche. She claimed that Samoans have no sense of sin despite their regular church attendance and the admonitions of pastors (`They are able to count [sex] at its true value. . . [they recognize] the essential impersonality of sex attraction which we may well envy them']. She reported masturbation, homosexuality, and lesbianism as common practices that were regarded as `simply play' between casual heterosexual liaisons. In other words, Mead's Samoans, like Mead herself, were bisexual. She attributed the relaxed attitude to pre-marital sex and to adultery to the fact that Samoans have no deep attachments or strong emotional feelings. There is no parent-child bonding for the same reason. These and like claims construct the cultural `pattern' of a society untroubled by the storm and stress of adolescence. Such thinking was the trendy utopianism of the sexual reformers of her era, but it had nothing to do with Samoa until Mead's arrival from New York.

Freeman's book is a mighty effort to convert the Samoan belief in duping into a well-founded conclusion. He touts two `smoking guns'. One is the sworn testimony of Mead's dear friend during her field trip, Fa'apu'a Fa'amu, to the effect that she did indeed tell Mead fibs in reply to her questions about her relations with men. The other is correspondence between Mead and the supervisor of her Samoan research, Franz Boas.

The first smoking gun is a dud. Fa'amu testified only that she told Mead that `We spend nights with boys, yes, with boys!' and similar non-specific allusions. There is no express admission that intercourse occurred. There is no hint whatever of lesbianism. The duping hypothesis predicts that Mead's field notes would record the information given her by Fa'amu. In fact, the notes never attribute any information to her. The natural conclusion is that despite the affection, Mead did not regard her friend as an informant. It is improbable, in any case, that Mead credited Fa'amu's tease, partly because her notes show that she was alert to tall tales and partly because Fa'amu's status as a taupou, or ceremonial virgin, meant that she was never unchaperoned and hence had no opportunity for `spending nights with boys'. Finally, Fa'amu's non-specific allusions added nothing to what Mead's notes show she already believed she knew about Samoan promiscuity. In sum, the duping episode is irrelevant to understanding how Mead managed get Samoan moeurs so desperately wrong. Since the second smoking gun depends on the first, it too is a dud.

Did she make it up then? Although he repeatedly defends Mead's research integrity, Freeman destroys his noble defense by cataloguing deceit after deceit in things small and great. Mead indeed seems to have been a gamester who got a buzz from pulling the wool over people's eyes. And this was her reputation among her colleagues, who called her `the lady novelist', a `mythmaker', given to exaggeration and hyperbole, to sloppy and impressionistic description of no great reliability. The eminent Edward Sapir bluntly called her a `pathological liar'.

Freeman shows that Mead's fieldwork was premised on two strategic deceits. She concealed from her hosts her married status. By passing herself off as a virgin, she was honored by three villages with title of taupou, which conferred a great advantage-she had, as she said, `rank to burn' and could `order people about'. She second strategic deceit was perpetrated on her supervisor, Franz Boas and indirectly on her funding sponsor, the National Research Council. Boas and the Council expected her to research the personality of adolescent girls, to determine the extent to which nature (puberty) or culture influenced adolescent conflict. But Mead wasn't interested in this project. She accepted it because it got her a ticket to the field. Her real interest was ethnography. Unbeknownst to Boas, Mead struck an agreement with the Bishop Museum (Honolulu) to prepare a monograph on Samoa. Freeman shows by a meticulous reconstruction of her activities that she spent no more than four or five weeks on the funded project, hardly time enough for a systematic investigation of this complex and demanding subject. This is confirmed by her sparse field notes on the adolescent project.

Her strategic impostures led to the massive fraud that made her famous. Having little data, she just made it up and pretended, in the appendices of Coming of Age, to have found it. Mead seems to have delighted in slipping mickies as a kind of sport. She says, for example, that Samoa was untroubled by natural disasters. Yet it's common knowledge that no island is spared the ravages of storm, flood and occasional tsunamis. In fact, a hurricane devastated Manu'a in January of the year of her visit. She says that Samoan children alternately crawl or walk until the age of `three or four'. Every caregiver knows that once the child learns to walk, next it runs and never returns to crawling. She seems to have been supremely confident that no one would call her hand on such whoppers. Deception was so habitual that she lied gratuitously. Thus she told Boas that she was seasick for six weeks (!!) on her return voyage, while in fact she was romancing a new beau-love sick, not seasick. It's not surprising that her epistemological mottoes were: `The truth isn't out there, you know' and `If it isn't [true], it ought to be'.

Freeman's claim that the hoax `effectively solve[s] the enigma of Margaret Mead's research' unfortunately follows the fashion of substituting victimhood for active will. He would have us see her as the unwitting pawn of a mythopoetic fate. Fiddlesticks! Mead's behavior in Manu'a was a disgrace to herself and to her profession. Such conduct had no logical relation to Boasian anthropology. It was entirely her doing. Having deceived her hosts, she disgraced the sacrosanct taupou title by having affairs. That too was her personal choice. She went on to invent a salacious bisexual Samoa as a preamble to the part of Coming of Age that made her famous--her advocacy of educational, family, and sexual reform in America.

Mead's research presents no enigma. She always went to the field to find what she wanted to find-an uplifting story to boost a current social reform. As for those `primitives' who served as fodder, well, they were expendable in the great struggle to reform the world.

We are so constituted that we believe the most incredible things and, once they are engraved upon the memory, woe to him. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Mead's study of free-loving primitive societies where Western sexual taboo's were unheard of was shocking in its day and inspired several generations of college students to reexamine what we know about how cultures behave. Coming of Age in Samoa is the vanguard work of the "blank slate" thinkers. It demonstrated the concept that there is no such thing as innate human nature regarding social organization and biology had nothing to do with how societies behave with respect to gender identity, sexual morality, hierarchical traditions or status. All these concepts are artificial constructs.

The implications of Mead's research are profound. Individuals who already rejected Western moral ethics were eager to have their beliefs confirmed. If man's nature is completely elastic and shaped only by our beliefs, anything is possible. It was argued that Western Judeo-Christian philosophy brings nothing to our society except for strife, internal conflict, and division when a completely egalitarian society free from the traditional moral hang-ups is completing achievable. Not only is this achievable but as the Mead's Samoans demonstrate, it is much healthier for society.

Its easy to see how first generation feminists and other counterculture types ate this up. It confirmed everything they wanted to believe about Western society and provided an alternative to it. Not just any old alternative, but one grounded in science, incontrovertible by its very nature.

But what if it wasn't true? What if Mead, either through poor scholarship or willful fraud, penned one of the most fraudulent pieces of anthropological work ever known?

Derek Freeman, professor of anthropology emeritus at the Australian National University, spent over six years in Samoa researching Mead's work and concluded that "Coming of Age in Samoa" was a work of "self deception". Unlike Mead, Freeman spoke the Samoan language dissected "Coming of Age" piece by piece. He utilized firsthand accounts of the individuals Mead spoke with, documentary evidence, as well as information on the violent side of Samoan culture including warfare and cannibalism that Mead neglected to mention in "Coming of Age".

Not surprisingly the cultural and academic elites savaged Freeman for his work and his exile from the academic circles lasted until his death. Several papers and books were angrily penned attacking not only his work, but his motives and personal character as well. Not all disagreed with Freeman though, Martin Orans, another anthropologist who specialized in Samoa and at one time made Mead's work required reading for all his students, said that "occasionally a message carried by the media finds an audience so eager to receive it that it is willing to suspend all critical judgment and adopt the message as its own. So it was with Margaret Mead's celebrated 'Coming of Age in Samoa'."

Regardless of your thoughts on Mead, Freeman or Samoa, no one should read "Coming of Age" without reading Freeman as an essential companion.

Being a researcher myself, I really appeciate this book by Freeman. Though I know little about anthropology, it is not difficult to be convinced that Mead's work in Samoa was deeply flawed. We all make mistakes. It's just Mead became quite famous, seemly benefiting rather than paying for the mistake. On the hand, I trust that Mead knew the problem in her research at least to some extent and must had suffered from this knowledge.

Did you know that in 1983, the American Anthropological Association declared Freeman's "Margaret Mead" to be "poorly written, unscientific, irresponsible and misleading"? Better to read Paul Shankman's work, and pick up a copy of his "The Trashing of Margaret Mead." Shankman's work is more balanced and scholarly.

This is a very readable book. Freeman has combed the sources and put together the `biography' of Margaret Mead's first field trip. The story's all about how Mead got Samoa so wrong. He says that he was `totally mystified' by it. What's the problem? Didn't Mead just grab the tropical island paradise yarn off the shelf, add her personal touch, and use it to draw liberating lessons for sexually up-tight America? That's the conclusion I draw from his own story, because he shows that she got the template of the legend from John Handy on her stop in Honolulu, and that her field notes contain very little information about the girls she described in detail in her book. So she must have made it up. According to Freeman, that's not right. He says that Mead's companions told her fibs one evening around the campfire. What did they tell her? He's pretty closed-mouth on this one. As best I can tell, they only said that they secretly slept around. So what? Freeman admits that she'd already heard that from other informants. What's so special about it? He goes into a very complicated speculations about Mead's thought processes to reach his conclusion that what the girls told him was a hoax. He seems to be saying that the fibs gave Mead the `pattern' of recreational sex that she needed to make her supervisor happy. But didn't she already have the pattern from Handy? Why not argue that she was hoaxed by Handy before she ever set foot in Samoa. Besides, isn't the real issue where she got the information she used to fill in the lines between the dots? I tested this question by assuming that what the girls told her around the camp fire was true. You're still left with a huge information gap that Mead closed somehow. It wasn't just information about sex, but about rank, the intimate psychology of Samoans, and so on. The girls didn't give her any information about these things. So it's a bogus explanation. The hoax idea gets completely out of hand when Freeman uses it to explain Mead's book as the core of anthropology's belief system. He seems to be saying that Mead passed on the hoax to anthropology and to generations of Americans! This isn't even in the right ball park as an explanation of Mead's influence.