Margaret Mead vs. Derek Freeman

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

its your choose

[Torie]

The vote I cast was on the part of my Samoan partner who knows this topic well. Mead actually stayed for a month in his paternal great aunt Helen's Victorian house. Mead thought Helen charged her too much rent and was frustrated that Helen herself was not a suitable subject for study as being too Westernized,  having gone to the elite Punahou school, and ditto her children. That is the family history that they recall.*

Dan agrees that Mead was right that Samoan youth had more sexual experiences at the time than Western youth (Mead was not fooled), but having such experiences does not preclude having a coming of age crisis. Dan does not appreciate however Mead's homophobic texts.

So Dan's vote is a highly reluctant and ambivalent one for Freeman.

*Then Mead went to a remote Samoan island (Ta'ū) where Dan's maternal grandfather grew up (a fire and brimstone Congregationalist minister, the text of  one of whose sermons in Samoan of fire and hell and heat and pain (Dan translated for me) he has which I examined in the preacher's cramped handwriting style), whose influence still holds sway with his fundamentalist Christian descendants other than the gay apostate Dan). Anyway, it was on that island that Mead found the suitably unWesternized subjects on which her writings are based. Many of those study subjects were the relatives of Dan's minister grandfather.

Dan just told me that he was a roving art teacher for the school district on the little island for a few years in the late 1990's, and that gave him exposure to his relatives who were still there who all had their Mead stories.

[Statilius the Epicurean]

My only real knowledge of the controversy was from recently reading this interesting article that surveyed anthropologists on a range of disputes in the field. It seems like most anthropologists agreed that Mead was ideologically-motivated and romanticised her Samoans, but there was a mixed response along biological v cultural lines to whether Freedman's critique was convincing or if Mead was actively duped.

[If my soul was made of stone]

broke: mead was a neocolonialist exerting her white rousseauian gaze
woke: mead was a girlboss building her empire

[afleitch]

The vote I cast was on the part of my Samoan partner who knows this topic well. Mead actually stayed for a month in his paternal great aunt Helen's Victorian house. Mead thought Helen charged her too much rent and was frustrated that Helen herself was not a suitable subject for study as being too Westernized,  having gone to the elite Punahou school, and ditto her children. That is the family history that they recall.*

Dan agrees that Mead was right that Samoan youth had more sexual experiences at the time than Western youth (Mead was not fooled), but having such experiences does not preclude having a coming of age crisis. Dan does not appreciate however Mead's homophobic texts.

So Dan's vote is a highly reluctant and ambivalent one for Freeman.

*Then Mead went to a remote Samoan island (Ta'ū) where Dan's maternal grandfather grew up (a fire and brimstone Congregationalist minister, the text of  one of whose sermons in Samoan of fire and hell and heat and pain (Dan translated for me) he has which I examined in the preacher's cramped handwriting style), whose influence still holds sway with his fundamentalist Christian descendants other than the gay apostate Dan). Anyway, it was on that island that Mead found the suitably unWesternized subjects on which her writings are based. Many of those study subjects were the relatives of Dan's minister grandfather.

Dan just told me that he was a roving art teacher for the school district on the little island for a few years in the late 1990's, and that gave him exposure to his relatives who were still there who all had their Mead stories.

This was an amazing story Thanks for sharing

I'm not up to speed, but my understanding is that Meads research (as she left it) is generally understood to have been 'correct' (though perhaps not in interpretation) and that Freeman was a bit of a weasel.