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The Fateful Hoaxing Of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis Of Her Samoan Research Hardcover – October 29, 1998

by Derek Freeman (Author)
4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 19 ratings
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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 By examining hitherto unpublished correspondence between Mead, her mentor Franz Boas and others—as well as the sworn testimony of Fa'apua'a Fa'am, one of Mead's traveling companions of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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  1. Print length
    304 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Basic Books
  4. Publication date
    October 29, 1998
  5. Dimensions
    6.75 x 1.25 x 9.5 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    0813335604
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0813335605
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Margaret Mead's 1928 Coming of Age in Samoa, a report of her anthropological study of adolescent girls and a triumph of cultural relativism, firmly established her as a guiding voice of anthropology. Her work was mostly unquestioned during her lifetime, but in 1983 anthropologist Derek Freeman released a critical review of her work, showing that her assertion that adolescence in Samoa is easier because of free sexuality (upon which she based her nurture-over-nature theories) is in conflict with the facts of Samoan life and even with her own field notes. He suffered insult and approbation from nearly every member of the scientific establishment, to whom Mead was a hero and a saint, but he has rejoined the fray, perhaps to finish it, with The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead.

This scholarly review examines all of the primary sources related to Mead's fieldwork and the important 1987 recanting of one of her informers. Forcefully written and carefully constructed, Freeman's book shows that Mead's stay in Samoa was too brief and too consumed with a much larger ethnographic project to have accumulated much data on adolescent sexuality. Her need to finish the project and her fervent belief in culturalism then led her to accept the joking references of her two closest informers about free sex as truth. Careful to make it clear that his focus is on Mead's science, Freeman shows that it is extremely unlikely that Mead deliberately falsified her report, simply that her preconceptions blinded her to inconvenient facts. Given the impressive evidence arrayed here, it's hard to see how Mead's work in Samoa can be now viewed as anything but a pretty fable. --Rob Lightner

From Publishers Weekly

Australian anthropologist Freeman set off a firestorm of controversy with his 1983 book, Margaret Mead and Samoa, which presented Mead's 1928 bestseller, Coming of Age in Samoa, as wildly inaccurate and based on slipshod research. Now Freeman goes even further, using a wealth of new evidence to argue not only that Mead was the victim of her own predisposition to reach conclusions acceptable to her mentor, the cultural determinist Franz Boas, but also that she had the wool pulled over her eyes by some canny Samoans. In 1987, Freeman interviewed Fa'apua'a Fa'amu, who was a 24-year-old ceremonial virgin in 1925-26 when, as one of Mead's principal informants, she claimed that she and other young women regularly spent nights with members of the opposite sex. But in 1987 (and in a 1989 videotaped interview), Fa'apua'a stated that her youthful boasts of premarital promiscuity were a mischievous prank, an outright fabrication made in response to Mead's insistent questions. Moreover, "recreational lying" is a widespread practice in Samoa, Freeman reports. Freeman draws on his own fieldwork in Samoa, on Mead's Samoan field notes (which he pried loose from the Library of Congress) and on newly unearthed correspondence between Mead and Boas in which Mead admits that she made no systematic investigation of Samoan sexual behavior. His painstaking detective work is convincing and leaves the woman known as the "Mother-Goddess of American Anthropology" teetering precariously on her pedestal. Photos.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Basic Books; First Edition (October 29, 1998)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 304 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0813335604
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0813335605
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.3 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.75 x 1.25 x 9.5 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 19 ratings

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4.3 out of 5 stars
19 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Drew Hunkins
5.0 out of 5 stars Mead was bamboozled or perhaps outright lied
Reviewed in the United States on June 11, 2024
Freeman meticulously documents, complete with the letters going back and forth between Mead and Boas, that Mead was most definitely hoodwinked by the hyperbole, joking and kidding of Faapua'a and Fofoa. (Maybe Mead wasn't fooled but outright lied?)

That Mead was so ready, almost eager, to be hoaxed is obvious given her preconceived notions that the culture of Samoan teen girls just had to be rife with sexual promiscuity. She and Boas were fairly intent on proving this point before she ever set sail to Samoa; Mead delivered what Boas wanted to hear. They much desired cultural determinism to rule the day, and, shocker, that's what Mead came up with.

Mead was pressed for time and kept putting off her study on adolescent teen gals in favor of an ethnology project she was keen on carrying out simultaneously, it was a side hustle she picked up with the Bishop Museum, unbeknownst to Boas. The ethno project took up most of her time and when she finally came under a draconian time crunch, she swallowed all of F&F's whoppers and fabrications whole hog.

Culture was to reign supreme for Boas and Mead. Students and researchers in anthropology must come to terms with the fact that "Coming of Age in Samoa" is Boas biased and its shoddiness almost discredits genuine scholarship that does indeed demonstrate how culture can have an overriding impact and be a major determining factor on how societies and communities are structured, how adolescents behave and experience life, and how towns and villages set norms and mores.

Whether Mead knew all along that she was concocting findings based on flimsy nonsense is hard to know. One thing we do know for sure based on Freeman's outstanding book is that her findings are not grounded in reality.

It bears repeating that the tragedy of all this is that it almost disparages good solid works that prove culture does have a major impact on group dynamics and societal organization (in Mead and Boas' particular case here, of course, the "study" looked at adolescent behavior and problems adolescents experience).
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Hiram Caton
4.0 out of 5 stars Was Mead Duped? Or Did She Lie?
Reviewed in the United States on February 10, 2006
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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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars great book, good condition
Reviewed in the United States on May 5, 2016
Verified Purchase
great book, good condition. Learned a lot about Margaret Mead romanticism was a problem on the human behavior of defining Samoans.
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