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The Fateful Hoaxing Of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis Of Her Samoan Research Paperback – October 8, 1999

by Derek Freeman (Author)

15 customer reviews

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For most of the twentieth century, Margaret Mead's renowned book Coming of Age in Samoa has validated an antievolutionary anthropological paradigm that assumes that culture is the overwhelming determinant of human behavior. Her account of female adolescent sexuality in Samoa initiated a career that led to Margaret Mead becoming ”indisputably the most publicly celebrated scientist in America.” But what if her study wasn't all it appeared to be? What if, having neglected the problem she had been sent to investigate, she relied at the last moment on the tales of two traveling companions who jokingly misled her about the sexual behavior of Samoan girls? What if her famous study was based on a hoax?In The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead, Derek Freeman addresses these issues in a detailed historical analysis of Margaret Mead's Samoan researches and of her training in New York by Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict. By examining hitherto unpublished correspondence between Mead, her mentor Franz Boas and others—as well as the sworn testimony of Fa'apua'a Fa'am, one of Mead's traveling companions of 1926—Freeman provides compelling evidence that one of the most influential anthropological studies of the twentieth century was unwittingly based on the mischievous joking of the investigator's informants.But The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead goes beyond a historical account of how the hoax took place; it is an examination of how Mead's Boasian training set her up to be hoaxed—and set others up to accept her conclusions. The book is more than a correction of scientific error: It is a crucial step toward rethinking the foundations of social science and the overly relativistic worldview of much of the modern world.

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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Derek Freeman is a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia. For over forty years he has been either a professoral fellow or a professor in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies in the Institute of Advanced Studies at the Australian National University. He has made a lifelong study of the people of Samoa and, during recent years, has done major historical research in Samoa, the Library of Congress, and elsewhere on Margaret Mead's Samoan fieldwork of 1925-1926.

Product details

Paperback: 304 pages
Publisher: Basic Books (October 8, 1999)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0813336937
ISBN-13: 978-0813336930
Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.7 x 9 inches
Shipping Weight: 15.8 ounces
Average Customer Review: 15 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,774,447 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #832 in Books > History > Australia & Oceania > Oceania
- #8578 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Anthropology > General
- #19801 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Anthropology > Cultural

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Amazon Customer

great book, good condition

May 5, 2016

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

great book, good condition. Learned a lot about Margaret Mead romanticism was a problem on the human behavior of defining Samoans.

One person found this helpful

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Mike

An important book in understanding the culture wars

October 28, 2011

Format: Paperback

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.

7 people found this helpful8 people found this helpful

tensacross

One Star

April 12, 2018

Freeman has since been debunked.

One person found this helpful2 people found this helpful

John C. Landon

Innings in the nature/nurture debate

February 21, 2003

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.

19 people found this helpful20 people found this helpful

Hiram Caton

Was Mead Duped? Or Did She Lie?

February 9, 2006

Format: Hardcover

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.

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