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The Fateful Hoaxing Of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis Of Her Samoan Research
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Product Description：
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 By examining hitherto unpublished correspondence between Mead, her mentor Franz Boas and others—as well as the sworn testimony of Fa’apua’a Fa’am, one of Mead’s traveling companions of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. 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 |
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