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When did Derek Freeman write Margaret Mead in Samoa?
1983 ‘High on the Gift List: Margaret Mead in Samoa by Derek Freeman,’ Harvard University Press, December, p. 114. Shore, Bradd 1983 ‘Parado Regained: Freeman’s Margaret Mead and Samoa,’ In Speaking in the Name of the Real:Freeman and Mead on Samoa.
What is Derek Freeman best known for?
Derek Freeman. John Derek Freeman (15 August 1916 – 6 July 2001) was a New Zealand anthropologist known for his criticism of Margaret Mead's work on Samoan society, as described in her 1928 ethnography Coming of Age in Samoa. His attack "ignited controversy of a scale, visibility, and ferocity never before seen in anthropology.".
Where did Freeman conduct his research in Samoa?
Freeman then selected a field site in Western Samoa and conducted ethnographic research until November, 1943, when he left Samoa. The village he did field work in was founded in ancient times by migrants from the main site of Mead’s research (Freeman 1983a:xv).
Are Samoans free from sexual problems?
Thus Mead argued, Samoans were entirely free of the sexual problems found in Western civilization (see Freeman 1983a:227). 2 Freeman points out that there is in Samoa the institution of ceremonial virgin, the taupou, who occupied a position of great social significance.
Did Derek Freeman go to Samoa?
Dr. Freeman did two years of graduate study on Samoa at London University, working with missionary archives. He then spent three years among the Iban of Borneo, a people noted for their communal life and head-hunting traditions.
What did Derek Freeman discover?
While in the islands, Freeman stated that he discovered that Mead was wrong about Samoan culture and felt responsible for refuting her work, thus establishing a linear progression in his critique of Mead from his own first trip to the islands to the eventual publication, some four decades later, of Margaret Mead and ...
Why was Coming of Age in Samoa controversial?
Many American readers felt shocked by her observation that young Samoan women deferred marriage for many years while enjoying casual sex before eventually choosing a husband. As a landmark study regarding sexual mores, the book was highly controversial and frequently came under attack on ideological grounds.
How long did Margaret Mead spend in Samoa?
about nine monthsAfter spending about nine months observing and interviewing Samoans, as well as administering psychological tests, Mead concluded that adolescence was not a stressful time for girls in Samoa because Samoan cultural patterns were very different from those in the United States.
What was Margaret Mead famous for?
Margaret Mead was an American anthropologist best known for her studies of the peoples of Oceania. She also commented on a wide array of societal issues, such as women's rights, nuclear proliferation, race relations, environmental pollution, and world hunger.
What was Margaret Mead's theory?
Mead's famous theory of imprinting found that children learn by watching adult behavior. A decade later, Mead qualified her nature vs. nurture stance somewhat in Male and Female (1949), in which she analyzed the ways in which motherhood serves to reinforce male and female roles in all societies.
What is the Samoan culture?
The traditional culture of Samoa is a communal way of life based on Fa'a Samoa, the unique socio-political culture. In Samoan culture, most activities are done together. The traditional living quarters, or fale (houses), contain no walls and up to 20 people may sleep on the ground in the same fale.
Why did Gregory Bateson leave Mead?
Separated by different responsibilities during the war, they were reunited for an Indian summer of happiness in 1946, after which Bateson left the family for an affair with a dancer on Staten Island. In 1949 he moved to San Fancisco, divorcing Mead the following year.
Who wrote Coming of Age in Samoa?
Margaret MeadComing of Age in Samoa / AuthorMargaret Mead wrote more than 20 books. Her first book, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928; new ed., 2001) was a best seller.
Why is Coming of Age in Samoa important?
A person coming of age is very vital to how they develop their personal characteristics. In opposition to the Samoan transition, the process of becoming a woman in Western society is marked by responsibilities and social pressure, usually meaning that it is quite a turbulent period for a girl to go through.
Who is the most famous anthropologist?
Margaret Mead, 1901-1978: One of the Most Famous Anthropologists in the World.
Why is Coming of Age in Samoa important?
A person coming of age is very vital to how they develop their personal characteristics. In opposition to the Samoan transition, the process of becoming a woman in Western society is marked by responsibilities and social pressure, usually meaning that it is quite a turbulent period for a girl to go through.
Which statement best describes White's opinion of the great man theory of history?
Which statement best describes White's view of the "great man theory of history"? Cultural processes were more important than individuals in shaping history.
Who created the culture concept for cultural anthropology?
anthropologist Edward TylorThe first anthropological definition of culture comes from 19th-century British anthropologist Edward Tylor: Culture…is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society (Tylor 1920 [1871]: 1).
Which anthropologist was primarily interested in studying symbols and rituals to understand cultures?
Which anthropologist was primarily interested in studying symbols and rituals to understand cultures? Marvin Harris proposed a theory in which all cultures can be analyzed as having three layers.
Who led the Samoan study?
Dr. Mead's Samoan study was central to the theories of the school of American cultural anthropologists, led by Prof. Franz Boas of Columbia University, who had been Dr. Mead's supervisor.
Who challenged Margaret Mead's account of adolescent sexuality in Samoa?
Prof. Derek Freeman, who challenged Margaret Mead's famous account of adolescent sexuality in Samoa, provoking a fierce anthropological controversy, died July 6 in Canberra, Australia. He was 84.
What did Freeman say about Mead?
Two of her informants, Fa’apaua’a Fa’ama and Fafoa, while accompanying Mead on a trip had become embarrassed by Mead’s questions. In a fashion well understood by Samoans, they told Mead what they thought she wanted to hear: They had lovers when, in fact, they did not. According to Freeman, Mead, having gathered her only explicit statements from young Samoans about their sexual experiences, then wrote Boas, claiming to have gathered information supportive of culturalist arguments.
What was Freeman's role in the Mead-Freeman debate?
For Freeman, this debate, at heart, concerned evolution . Freeman had become interested in the subject in the mid-1960s, not long before he returned to Samoa to undertake fieldwork. His later, more developed, position held that humanity’s evolutionary history had produced a creature capable of making choices but nonetheless one whose capacities for responding to the world were embedded in biology, hence derived from the evolutionary past. Freeman considered that most modern anthropology had abandoned a concern with evolution and with human biology. He understood his part of the debate as both an exploration of anthropology’s history and a correction of anthropological theory.
Was Fa'apaua Fa'ama a hoax?
Some have contended that Fa’apaua’a Fa’ama may have been hoa xing Freeman or, more important, that she may not have been and likely was not, given Mead’s text, Mead’s sole source.
Was Samoa more violent than Mead allowed?
Freeman presented a range of materials designed to show that Samoa was considerably more violent than Mead allowed and that female chastity prior to marriage was highly prized. Under the traditional system, some daughters of high-ranking men, identified as taupou, had been publicly deflowered by members of the groom’s family as part of their wedding ceremonies. While Christian missionaries had inveighed against the taupou system, their influence contributed to a subsequent general prudishness. Freeman mentioned briefly that most Samoan women eloped (avaga), asserting that such elopements established the women’s previous virginity.
Margaret Mead and Samoa, by Derek Freeman
Derek Freeman's refutation of one of the heroes of American academia has incited responses from many angry social scientists. The…
The Commentary Magazine Podcast is Coming to Palm Beach
After depicting Margaret Mead’s Samoa, Freeman, who spent time in Western Samoa as a graduate student in the 1940’s and again years later, proceeds to erase her negative instance from the anthropological ledger.
Where did Freeman study?
Freeman arrived in Western Samoa in April 1940. ‘After two years of study, during which I came to know all the islands of Western Samoa,’ he writes (1983a:xiii), ‘I could speak Samoan well enough to converse in the company of chiefs...’ Freeman then selected a field site in Western Samoa and conducted ethnographic research until November, 1943, when he left Samoa. The village he did field work in was founded in ancient times by migrants from the main site of Mead’s research (Freeman 1983a:xv). Freeman then returned and conducted further ethnographic research from 1965-1968 and again in 1981. His refutation is thus based on six years of investigation in Samoa and research in archives and libraries that extended on and off over some 40 years.
Who presented the Samoan myth?
Freeman concludes this section with a discussion of the development of the myth of Samoan culture as presented by Mead and the impact that this had on American intellectual life at the time it was published.
What did Mead claim about Samoan people?
Freeman then reviews Mead’s assertions on Samoan character. Mead claimed (see Freeman 1983a:213-225) that the Samoans had no strong passions; that love, hate, jealousy and revenge, sorrow, and bereavement are short lived, all a matter of weeks; there are no deeply channeled emotions in the patterning of social relationships; that there was a lack of deep feeling; and there were no psychological maladjustments. Freeman, using some of Mead’s own evidence, as well as other evidence, including that from his own field work, shows that on the contrary the Samoans are characterized by strong passions, bouts of extreme stubbornness, which has institutionalized methods of expression, outbursts of uncontrollable anger, high rates of aggression, suicides, including suicides as a result of shame over illicit sexual liaisons, and hysterical illnesses that are endemic.
What did Mead argue about Samoan childrearing?
Mead claimed that the whole system of childrearing produced individuals who never learned the meaning of strong attachment to one person, and since there were no violent feelings learned during childhood there were no such feelings to be rediscovered during adolescence. Samoans, she argued, do not form strong affectional ties with parents as their filial affection is diffused among a large group of relatives (see Freeman 1983a:201). Freeman, on the basis of his own research, concludes on the contrary that the primary bond between mother and child is very much a part of Samoan society. He also demonstrates that ‘Samoan social organization, then, is markedly authoritarian and depends directly on a system of severe discipline that is visited on children from an early age’ (Freeman 1983a:209-210). As a result of the primary bonding and severe, physical punishment, Freeman writes (1983a:210), ‘The mother is thus experienced as alternately caring and punishing. This means that she comes to be feared and hated as well as loved and longed for, a combination of emotions that, in addition to producing ambivalence, significantly intensifies the feelings of an infant for the individual to whom it is bonded.’
What did Mead find about Samoa?
He provides a brief summary of her findings and her development of the method of the ‘negative instance.’ Mead found that coming of age in Samoa was largely without trial and tribulation. And she argued that ‘If it is proved that adolescence is not necessarily a specifically difficult period in a girl’s life — and proved it is if we can find any society in which that is so — then what accounts for the presence of storm and stress in American adolescents? First, we may say quite simply that there must be something in the two civilizations to account for the difference’ (quoted in Freeman 1983a:77).
Why did Boas send Mead to Samoa?
In the mid 1920s, Freeman recounts (1983a:75), Boas’s needed to confirm his position on cultural determinism by ‘a scientific and detailed investigation of hereditary and environmental conditions,’ and his specific reason for sending Mead to Samoa was that he needed ‘a study to see how much adolescent behavior is physiologically determined and how much culturally determined’.
How many sections are there in Freeman's refutation?
Freeman’s refutation is divided into four sections. The first section plots the history of ‘The Emergence of Cultural Determinism’ as the major paradigm of anthropological inquiry. The second section discusses the background to Mead’s Samoan research, summarizes how she carried it out, and places her results within the intellectual currents of the times. The formal refutation of Mead’s assertions on Samoan culture forms the third section. The final section contains Freeman’s explanation for Mead’s errors and posits a new paradigm for anthropological inquiry.
What is the coming of age in Samoa?
Coming of Age in Samoa was a sensation—not an overnight one, but it crept up on and conquered American hearts... A lot of Americans read it as a straightforward utopia, encouraged in doing so by a long tradition of viewing Polynesian islanders as happy, uncomplicated, semi-naked sensualists, as well as by William Morrow’s dust-jacket depicting Polynesian lovers holding hands under a palm tree (left), and by Mead’s unusually lyrical prose. Some anthropologists read it the same way, disapprovingly. E. E. Evans-Pritchard spoke dismissively of the new “wind-rustling-in-the-palm-trees” school of anthropology. His older colleague, A. C. Haddon grumbled at the substitution of the “lady novelist” for the professional ethnographer.
Who was the author who portrayed Samoa as one of the most amiable, least contentious, and?
His older colleague, A. C. Haddon grumbled at the substitution of the “lady novelist” for the professional ethnographer. Mead portrayed the Samoans as “one of the most amiable, least contentious, and most peaceful peoples in the world,” adding that “In Samoa love between the sexes is a light and pleasant dance,” and that male sexuality “is ...
What did Freeman prove about Margaret Mead?
Eventually, Freeman obtained a sworn confession from one of Mead’s informants and proved that, as I for one had always suspected, it was all too good to be true. Margaret Mead had been told what she wanted to hear by her less than trustworthy Samoan informants, who were embarrassed by her leading questions about topics never normally mentioned by young girls—least of all to important American ladies. He devastatingly demonstrated that Margaret Mead had not written an ethnographic account, but had published a work of social science fiction, albeit one that became enormously influential in modern American culture:
Why was Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa so popular?
Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa purported to provide ethnographic proof that nurture was the dominant factor in child development and adolescence . Subtitled A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization, Mead’s book was widely read, in part perhaps because it is written, according to one commentator, “in ridiculously heightened prose, more like a Cosmopolitan article than an essay.” According to a recent account:
Did Mead ever interview a boy?
On the basis of a few dozen interviews with 25 adolescent girls carried out in the back room of a US Navy dispensary—there is no evidence she ever interviewed a boy—and a few touristic excursions around the islands, Mead purported to give an authoritative account of a complete culture, which she described as "a precious permanent possession of mankind… Forever true because no truer picture could be made," adding portentously, "true to the state of human behavior as it was in the mid 1920s; true to our hopes and fears for the future of the world."
