| Margaret Mead must be the only anthropologist who became both a legend and a bestseller in | ||
| her lifetime. From the publication of her first book, Coming of Age in Samoa, at the age of 27 to | ||
| her death in 1978, when she was almost 77, she was a constant commentator on all kinds of | ||
| cultures, especially her own. | ||
| 5 | Her first book was not merely a report about the carefree and permissive puberty of Samoan | |
| girls: by contrasting this with the stresses and alienation of adolescents in Western society, she | ||
| set out to show that these stresses were cultural rather than biological - and by extension that | ||
| societal values, which had long been regarded as changeless, were in fact the products of a | ||
| particular time and place. | ||
| 10 | As time went on, anthropologists developed more demanding and precise standards for field | |
| work. It is an open secret in the profession that Coming of Age in Samoa would never be accepted | ||
| for publication today; consequently professors of anthropology no longer assign it to students | ||
| as a text-book, but merely for historicaI interest or for comparison with later work. | ||
| Margaret Mead was a very young woman when she wrote it. She had no previous experience in | ||
| 15 | primitive societies. She spent only nine months in Samoa. She never learned the language. And she | |
| did not live among the natives, but in a compound with other Westerners. | ||
| Since then other anthropologists have made much longer visits to Samoa, learned the language, | ||
| lived with the people and published far more detailed studies than Margaret Mead ever made. By | ||
| implication, some of them criticized her work. But always gently and with reverence for her | ||
| 20 | stature as a public figure, and for all she had done to put their orphan profession into the public | |
| domain. | ||
| The forthcoming book, Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an | ||
| Anthropological Myth by Oerek Freeman, is, there fore, much more shocking to the general | ||
| public than to anthropologists. To the former, it is like knocking a revered idol from its pedestal. | ||
| 25 | To the latter, it is simply poor taste . Freeman not only comes to entirely different conclusions | |
| from Mead, portraying Samoan society - which she saw as serene and gentle - as a competitive | ||
| and often violent one in which people do suffer psychological disturbances, but also makes | ||
| personal attacks upon her professional competence. | ||
| An expert who has read Freeman's manuscript, Professor Bradd Shore, found it to be 'a | ||
| 30 | brilliant book in certain ways'. He said: 'Freeman knows as much about Samoa as any non-Samoan | |
| in the world, and he has had a 40-year vendetta against Margaret Mead. He is a brilliant man, but | ||
| one wonders about the dark quality, the intensity and the passion behind the book. It seems to go | ||
| beyond any reasonable expectation for scholarly debate.' | ||
| Freeman apparently set out to demonstrate the opposite side of the on-going de bate among | ||
| 35 | anthropologists. 'The feeling you get from his book is that he believes biology to be the most | |
| powerful determinant of behaviour,' Shore commented. 'Like Margaret Mead he has put forward | ||
| a general thesis about human nature and attached it to Samoa. lt attacks her work at a | ||
| fundamentallevel. But I think she can take care of herself, even in death.' | ||
| When the furore has died down, none of this debate over Freeman's book is expected to | ||
| 40 | diminish the science of anthropology or lessen the historical importance of those field studies | |
| done by Margaret Mead in her eager youth. Anthropology can never be a precise science. Like | ||
| journalism it is at best an honest attempt at impartial reporting by trained observers who, no | ||
| matter how hard they try, can never quite clear their minds of cultural prejudice or their hearts | ||
| of emotional reaction . | ||
| Joyce Egginton in The Observer, February 6, 1984 |