Customer Reviews

Margaret Mead and Samoa

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The is a most important book because it sets the record straign about Margaret Mead. Her book on Samoa created a false understanding of primitive peoples. She went to Samoa to do her PhD dissertation and came back with a myth that supported the prejudices and biases of her graduate advisor, Franz Boas. She purportedly discovered that the Samoans were the personification of Jean Jacque Roussoue's "Noble Savage." There were unspoiled by the vices of Western Civilization. The biggest vice was supposedly the West's repressive sexuality that gave rise to social aggression of various kinds. Derek Freeman blows all of this out of the water. He points out among other things that Mean did not know the language and stayed there only a few weeks. This does not come up to the standards of methodology that anthropologists have come to accept to accurately understand and describe a culture.

Freeman's classic has revolutionized our conception of anthropology, and thrown this field, and others, into complete confusion on university campuses throughout the world.

Mead had a fantastically large influence on the thought of the 20th century, and it has been horribly misleading. The real origin of this ridiculous view of humanity was written about 1750 by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his most influential "Emile, or on Education". In this absurd invitation to Utopia, Rousseau, father of modern socialist and collectivist idealogy, postulated that "love", or humanistic altuism, is the only natural instinct in the human species. Any other emotional drive is antithetical to social progress, and has been caused by the nefarious influence of "bourgeois" values. (See Bloom's recent translation of Rousseau)

Believe that, and I will sell you a large and famous bridge at an unbelievable price!

God bless Derek Freeman! Maybe some day our world will recover from Mead and from Rousseau!!

Derek Freeman's vicious critique of Mead's book was declared by the American Anthropological Society to be "unprofessional" and simply not a scholarly work. Better to see Shankman's writing on Mead, his articles and books, which offer a more unbiased treatment of the issues.