Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation (Perennial Classics) [Paperback]

This is a reference to an abrasive session with students who told her that her description of fa'aSamoa (Samoan custom) was false and insulting. They were miffed by her styling Samoans 'primitives' and her pronouncement that since anthropologists enjoy an 'immense superiority', they can 'master the fundamental structure' [of primitive society] . . . 'in a few months' (p. 8). In keeping with this arrogance, Samoans attending university were told by their instructors that their experience of fa'aSamoa was not valid evidence against Mead's scientific study. And, as we've just seen, Mead refused to revise her book even when she knew that it was mistaken in many particulars.

For Samoans this patronizing manner was the familiar voice of the papalagi (the colonial power). Mead's hosts on her field trip, aware that she enjoyed the protection of the Pacific Fleet admiral and boss of Western Samoa, went to great lengths to provide reliable information. When they learned of what they call her luma fai tele ('shameless defamaton'), they could not comprehend how she could have betrayed their hospitality. They were also aggrieved that she deceived them about her marital status. For she accepted the title taupou (ceremonial virgin) although as a married woman she was ineligible. Then she disgraced the title by carrying on with Aviata, a young man regarded as a rake.

While Samoans long knew the mendacity of this book, its correction in academic circles commenced only with the 1983 publication of Derek Freeman's Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth (Harvard University Press). That event shook anthropology to its boots. Such was Mead's prestige that the popular mind identified her with anthropology. If her credibility was seriously questioned in respect to the most widely believed anthropological study ever published, the credibility of the profession was at risk. That is why Freeman was attacked with great vehemence, even by those who agreed with his critique.

Freeman's book initiated a reappraisal of Coming of Age in Samoa. Martin Orans and Freeman have recently published studies of her Samoa investigations based on her field notes. They confirm that Mead's account of Samoan sexual moeurs is a travesty. But they go beyond that. Mead recorded the accounts given by her informants, but by ignoring key facts, twisting others, and inventing still others, she contrived to represent Samoa as a free love duck pond. She also misrepresented the research she carried out. She was funded to conduct a study of adolescent girls; and she states that she spent 'six months accumulating an intimate and detailed knowledge of all adolescent girls in the community'. Her field notes tell otherwise. She devoted her time to assembling ethnography; the funded study never got off the ground. She states that she conducted 'all' her interviews with these girls in the Samoan language ('I spoke their language and ate their food'). Orans found however that her information on adolescent girls came from 'English-speaking informants using English to communicate'. He notes that 'no conversations in Samoan are recorded in any of the field materials'. This is consistent with Freeman's finding that the study of adolescent girls was not conducted at all.

Mead built her picture of free love by tossing off unsupported one-liners. The 'inept lover is a laughing stock'. There are 'no neurotic pictures, no frigidity' in Samoa. Masturbation 'is a universal habit'. Homosexual activity is 'very prevalent' and is regarded as 'simply play'. '[Samoan] girls' minds were perplexed by no conflicts . . . [to have as] many lovers as possible and then to marry . . . these were uniform and satisfying ambitions'. The field materials do not show that Mead collected any evidence whatever about masturbation, homosexuality, or incidence of neuroticism and frigidity. She had but one informant about intimate sexual practices--an eighteen year old school teacher. In 1981 that person told Freeman that he had an affair with Margaret. Thus Samoa's alleged free love amounts to no more than a loose wife's gullibility to the pillow talk of her teenage lover. Such is the 'science' that made this book famous.

Research on Mead's field notes clarifies a feature of this book that has puzzled many readers. It is the drastic and repeated inconsistency between Mead's descriptions of Samoan vigilance of virginity and punishments of straying girls, and the attribution of a casual attitude toward sexuality. What we now can see is that Mead patched her free love pillow talk into descriptions given to her by her adult informants.

How is that anthropologists for so long were taken in by Mead's yellow anthropology? One part of the answer is that many weren't taken in. The controversy brought to light numerous statements to this effect. Thus Weston LaBarre wrote: "When I was a graduate student in anthropology at Yale in the late '30's, Mead's Sex and Temperament came out. Puzzled that even a big island like New Guinea should have had three tribes waiting to be discovered to prove her point about the non-biological nature of gender, I went to Edward Sapir with my puzzlement. He said laconically, 'She's a pathological liar'. I was startled as much by what he said, as by the fact that an eminent anthropologist and chairman of a department should say this to a mere graduate student. But over the years, I have come to believe that this is literally the case." The next round in the evaluation of Mead's anthropology, we may hope, will collect and critically assess this largely unpublished expert opinion.

Hiram Caton, Editor, The Samoa Reader: Anthropologists Take Stock. University Press of America, 1990.