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The Fateful Hoaxing Of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis Of Her Samoan Research
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 By examining hitherto unpublished correspondence between Mead, her mentor Franz Boas and others-as well as the sworn testimony of Fa'apua'a Fa'am, one of Mead's traveling companions of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 It is a crucial step toward rethinking the foundations of social science and the overly relativistic worldview of much of the modern world.
304 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1998
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December 9, 2021
While there are some parts of this book that I skimmed (lists of dudes who work different departments in different universities, that sort of thing) it was overall a very eye opening book. I'm a complete layman about anthropology and had never heard of Margaret Mead, but Dr. Freeman's presentation of the facts convinced me that she was a great writer, but a poor scientist. It's amazing how people in a field will resist change despite new data, and allow biases to color their observation. I do wonder, however, how the anthropological field talks about Dr. Mead now, 20 years after this book was published. Mad respect for Dr Freeman. Also, fuck Boas.
May 29, 2024
THE FOLLOW-UP TO HIS EARLIER BOOK, “MARGARET MEAD AND SAMOA”
Author (and New Zealand anthropologist) John Derek Freeman (1916-2001) wrote in the Introduction of this 1999 book, “The scientific status of ‘Coming to Age in Samoa’ has already been discussed in my book of 1983, ‘Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth.’ Since around 1988, I have given my attention to the fieldwork on which Mead’s conclusions rest, and my archival discoveries cast a highly revealing light on Margaret Mead’s Samoan research of 1925-1926. From close examination of a wide range of evidence, it has emerged that her exciting revelations about sexual behavior were in some cases merely the extrapolations of whispered intimacies, whereas those of greatest consequence were the results of a prankish hoax.” (Pg. 1)
He recounts the filmed interview with a woman who had been Mead’s age, during the original research: “although Fa’apua’a had not been one of the adolescents studied by Mead in1925-1926… she had spent much time in Margaret Mead’s company… ‘we said that we were out at nights with boys; she failed to realize that we were just joking and must have been taken in by our pretenses… She must have taken it seriously but I was only joking. As you know, Samoan girls are terrific liars when it comes to joking. But Margaret accepted our trumped up stories as though they were true… we just fibbed and fibbed to her.’” (Pg. 2-3)
He points out, “her fieldwork in Manu’a would last for only five months or so. Most momentous of all, however, was [Franz] Boas’s response to Mead’s letter of January 5, 1926, in which she asked her supervisor: ‘If I simply write conclusions and use my cases as illustrative material will it be acceptable?’… despite the fact that she had made no systematic investigation of the sexual behavior of her adolescent subjects, she wrote to Boas telling him she had decided to cut short her fieldwork in Manu’a and leave Samoa a month sooner than originally planned.” (Pg. 10-11)
He states, “although in 1925 Mead was setting out to do anthropological fieldwork on a most difficult problem that Boas himself … considered to be of ‘very great importance,’ before she left for Samoa, he gave her only ‘a half-hour’s instruction.’ Thus, despite her high academic attainments, when she set out for Samoa in 1925, Mead ‘really did not know much about fieldwork’… as she herself has acknowledged.” (Pg. 63)
He recounts how twenty-two year old Catholic schoolteacher Andrew Napoleon would ‘give [Mead] background material on the attitudes of Samoan young men.’ An indication of the nature of this ‘background material’ is contained in … Mead’s field notebook… Napoleon’s statement that in Manu’a people had intercourse ‘several times in one night’ and that he knew of ‘fifteen times in one night,’ which Mead recorded … [in] her notebook… is the insecure base for her laughable assertion … [in] ‘Coming of Age in Samoa’ that ‘to live as a girl with many lovers for as long as possible’ was one of the ‘uniform and satisfying ambitions’ of adolescent girls.’” (Pg. 126-127) He concludes, “Of one thing there can be no doubt: Samoa was far from being a place where there was ‘free love-making’ before marriage, as Mead mistakenly supposed…” (Pg. 128)
He points out, “when she returned early in March 1926 … where all of the girls she was studying lived, she had made virtually no progress in the collecting of data on her sample of sixty-six girls. Nor… did she ever complete the collection of this information. In particular, she had not yet begun her ‘special investigation’ of the ‘sexual life’ of these girls.” (Pg. 130)
He argues, “Her acceptance of these stories would have been all the readier since a hoax is much more easily perpetuated when it plays to a listener’s preconceptions… By March 14, 1926, she was desperately in need of two things: a convincing solution to the ‘problem’ she had been sent to Samoa to investigate and at the same time a convincing justification for Boas of the great amount of time that she had been giving to ethnological work. These objectives she was able to attain, as though by magic, by her use of the wholly false information she had been given… It should be noted that Mead’s use of the information provided … was perfectly sincere, for a hoaxed individual is quite oblivious of what it is that has happened… They were enjoying themselves at the expense of a visiting American. They had no idea that Mead was an anthropologist, who, having taken their untruths and hyperbole to be facts, would put them in a book… This quite major conclusion of Mead’s rests on the mistaken supposition… that Samoa is a place where ‘the community’ does not attempt to ‘curb’ the sexual activity of adolescents. With this established, so Mead thought, she had successfully identified a fundamental pattern in Samoan culture.” (Pg. 140-142)
He notes, “If only Mead had arranged to live with a Samoan family … as she easily could have done, she would have known form direct observation just how false were the conclusions set out in her letter to Boas.” (Pg. 161) Later, he adds, “If only Boas … had critically appraised her report, he could not but have noticed in table 1… that of the twenty-five girls enumerated… no fewer than … 56 percent, are listed as having had ‘no heterosexual experience,’ an outright contradiction of Mead’s claim that in Samoa ‘sexual life begins with puberty in most cases.’” (Pg. 176-177) He states, “Yet Franz Boas did no such thing in 1927. Instead, despite the blunders, misconceptions, and fallacies Mead’s report contained, he declared himself ‘completely satisfied’ with it.” (Pg. 178)
He reports, “in June 1972, her retort to Samoan university students who… were vociferously insisting that her account was in outright error, was to assert that to revise [her book] ‘would be impossible.’ … with no recognition at all being given to the mounting evidence that … the sexual mores of the Samoans had been fundamentally misreported.” (Pg. 201)
He recalls in the Afterword, “So complete was my acceptance of Dr. Mead’s Samoan writings on my arrival in Upolu that in my early inquiries, I dismissed or ignored all evidence that ran counter to her findings. Indeed, it was not until after I had become fluent in the Samoan language… that I became fully aware of the extent of the discordance between Mead’s account and the realities that I was regularly witnessing. When I left Samoa… after a stay of over three and one-half years, it had become apparent to me… that Mead’s depiction of Samoa was gravely defective in numerous ways and that her account of the sexual mores of the Samoans was in outright error.” (Pg. 204)
He had a meeting with her in 1964, and says, “while continuing confidently to avow these beliefs, she was, at the same time, obviously taken aback by the detailed ethnographic and historical evidence with which I presented her, all of which indicated that the conclusions she had reached… were in error. Indeed, as Lola Romanucci-Ross has recorded, a few days later, when she was alone with Mead… Mead admitted that this evidence ‘had proven her wrong.’” (Pg. 205) He concludes, “Margaret Mead’s Samoan research will go down in the history of the behavioral sciences as an example of the way in which a highly intelligent investigator can be blinded to empirical reality by an uncritical commitment to a scientifically unsound assumption.” (Pg. 212)
If you want a “counterbalancing” opinion, you might read ‘Quest for the Real Samoa: The Mead/Freeman Controversy and Beyond’ by Lowell D. Holmes; “Not Even Wrong: Margaret Mead, Derek Freeman, and the Samoans” by Martin Orans; and/or “The Trashing of Margaret Mead: Anatomy of an Anthropological Controversy” by Paul Shankman.
Author (and New Zealand anthropologist) John Derek Freeman (1916-2001) wrote in the Introduction of this 1999 book, “The scientific status of ‘Coming to Age in Samoa’ has already been discussed in my book of 1983, ‘Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth.’ Since around 1988, I have given my attention to the fieldwork on which Mead’s conclusions rest, and my archival discoveries cast a highly revealing light on Margaret Mead’s Samoan research of 1925-1926. From close examination of a wide range of evidence, it has emerged that her exciting revelations about sexual behavior were in some cases merely the extrapolations of whispered intimacies, whereas those of greatest consequence were the results of a prankish hoax.” (Pg. 1)
He recounts the filmed interview with a woman who had been Mead’s age, during the original research: “although Fa’apua’a had not been one of the adolescents studied by Mead in1925-1926… she had spent much time in Margaret Mead’s company… ‘we said that we were out at nights with boys; she failed to realize that we were just joking and must have been taken in by our pretenses… She must have taken it seriously but I was only joking. As you know, Samoan girls are terrific liars when it comes to joking. But Margaret accepted our trumped up stories as though they were true… we just fibbed and fibbed to her.’” (Pg. 2-3)
He points out, “her fieldwork in Manu’a would last for only five months or so. Most momentous of all, however, was [Franz] Boas’s response to Mead’s letter of January 5, 1926, in which she asked her supervisor: ‘If I simply write conclusions and use my cases as illustrative material will it be acceptable?’… despite the fact that she had made no systematic investigation of the sexual behavior of her adolescent subjects, she wrote to Boas telling him she had decided to cut short her fieldwork in Manu’a and leave Samoa a month sooner than originally planned.” (Pg. 10-11)
He states, “although in 1925 Mead was setting out to do anthropological fieldwork on a most difficult problem that Boas himself … considered to be of ‘very great importance,’ before she left for Samoa, he gave her only ‘a half-hour’s instruction.’ Thus, despite her high academic attainments, when she set out for Samoa in 1925, Mead ‘really did not know much about fieldwork’… as she herself has acknowledged.” (Pg. 63)
He recounts how twenty-two year old Catholic schoolteacher Andrew Napoleon would ‘give [Mead] background material on the attitudes of Samoan young men.’ An indication of the nature of this ‘background material’ is contained in … Mead’s field notebook… Napoleon’s statement that in Manu’a people had intercourse ‘several times in one night’ and that he knew of ‘fifteen times in one night,’ which Mead recorded … [in] her notebook… is the insecure base for her laughable assertion … [in] ‘Coming of Age in Samoa’ that ‘to live as a girl with many lovers for as long as possible’ was one of the ‘uniform and satisfying ambitions’ of adolescent girls.’” (Pg. 126-127) He concludes, “Of one thing there can be no doubt: Samoa was far from being a place where there was ‘free love-making’ before marriage, as Mead mistakenly supposed…” (Pg. 128)
He points out, “when she returned early in March 1926 … where all of the girls she was studying lived, she had made virtually no progress in the collecting of data on her sample of sixty-six girls. Nor… did she ever complete the collection of this information. In particular, she had not yet begun her ‘special investigation’ of the ‘sexual life’ of these girls.” (Pg. 130)
He argues, “Her acceptance of these stories would have been all the readier since a hoax is much more easily perpetuated when it plays to a listener’s preconceptions… By March 14, 1926, she was desperately in need of two things: a convincing solution to the ‘problem’ she had been sent to Samoa to investigate and at the same time a convincing justification for Boas of the great amount of time that she had been giving to ethnological work. These objectives she was able to attain, as though by magic, by her use of the wholly false information she had been given… It should be noted that Mead’s use of the information provided … was perfectly sincere, for a hoaxed individual is quite oblivious of what it is that has happened… They were enjoying themselves at the expense of a visiting American. They had no idea that Mead was an anthropologist, who, having taken their untruths and hyperbole to be facts, would put them in a book… This quite major conclusion of Mead’s rests on the mistaken supposition… that Samoa is a place where ‘the community’ does not attempt to ‘curb’ the sexual activity of adolescents. With this established, so Mead thought, she had successfully identified a fundamental pattern in Samoan culture.” (Pg. 140-142)
He notes, “If only Mead had arranged to live with a Samoan family … as she easily could have done, she would have known form direct observation just how false were the conclusions set out in her letter to Boas.” (Pg. 161) Later, he adds, “If only Boas … had critically appraised her report, he could not but have noticed in table 1… that of the twenty-five girls enumerated… no fewer than … 56 percent, are listed as having had ‘no heterosexual experience,’ an outright contradiction of Mead’s claim that in Samoa ‘sexual life begins with puberty in most cases.’” (Pg. 176-177) He states, “Yet Franz Boas did no such thing in 1927. Instead, despite the blunders, misconceptions, and fallacies Mead’s report contained, he declared himself ‘completely satisfied’ with it.” (Pg. 178)
He reports, “in June 1972, her retort to Samoan university students who… were vociferously insisting that her account was in outright error, was to assert that to revise [her book] ‘would be impossible.’ … with no recognition at all being given to the mounting evidence that … the sexual mores of the Samoans had been fundamentally misreported.” (Pg. 201)
He recalls in the Afterword, “So complete was my acceptance of Dr. Mead’s Samoan writings on my arrival in Upolu that in my early inquiries, I dismissed or ignored all evidence that ran counter to her findings. Indeed, it was not until after I had become fluent in the Samoan language… that I became fully aware of the extent of the discordance between Mead’s account and the realities that I was regularly witnessing. When I left Samoa… after a stay of over three and one-half years, it had become apparent to me… that Mead’s depiction of Samoa was gravely defective in numerous ways and that her account of the sexual mores of the Samoans was in outright error.” (Pg. 204)
He had a meeting with her in 1964, and says, “while continuing confidently to avow these beliefs, she was, at the same time, obviously taken aback by the detailed ethnographic and historical evidence with which I presented her, all of which indicated that the conclusions she had reached… were in error. Indeed, as Lola Romanucci-Ross has recorded, a few days later, when she was alone with Mead… Mead admitted that this evidence ‘had proven her wrong.’” (Pg. 205) He concludes, “Margaret Mead’s Samoan research will go down in the history of the behavioral sciences as an example of the way in which a highly intelligent investigator can be blinded to empirical reality by an uncritical commitment to a scientifically unsound assumption.” (Pg. 212)
If you want a “counterbalancing” opinion, you might read ‘Quest for the Real Samoa: The Mead/Freeman Controversy and Beyond’ by Lowell D. Holmes; “Not Even Wrong: Margaret Mead, Derek Freeman, and the Samoans” by Martin Orans; and/or “The Trashing of Margaret Mead: Anatomy of an Anthropological Controversy” by Paul Shankman.
April 8, 2018
I had to speed-read through this one, and it should be a third of its size. It's incredibly repetitive. Presumably he was trying to very carefully build the argument needed to debunk Mead's research, and he's definitely convincing. It's just that he repeats a lot of that evidence over and over and over...
November 28, 2023
There is literally NO NEED for a man to dedicate his whole life to proving someone wrong. Get a life pal
January 12, 2017
Derek Freeman is qualified by his academic training and his research experience to unmask the tragedy that is Margaret Mead's influence on Western civilization through her naive and obviously unscientific career that was marked by her publication of "Coming Of Age In Samoa." Sadly, no one in the West paid any attention to the howls of protest that arose from Samoans as they came to understand Mead's tragic misrepresentation of their culture. But it is the sorry state of cultural anthropology that what Mead wanted to believe she found "evidence" to support in what proved to be the hoaxing of her by two teenagers sensitive to give to the American what she wanted to hear. Though the author is too much the honest researcher to draw such a conclusion, I am persuaded that Margaret Mead was driven by the desire to not only prove her mentor right but also to substantiate the claim of Jean Jacque Rousseau that the natural man unrestricted by structure and society can fornicate and adulterate without consequences to his heart's content. The sexual revolution in the West in the late 1960s and early 1970s was in all probability given intellectual support by Mead's work with disastrous results still be reaped. Only now, three-fourths of a century too late, Mead and her fellow travelers are shown to be wrong, terribly and tragically wrong.
December 7, 2012
Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa is a kind of prequel to the current global warming "science" controversy. The young Mead goes to Samoa to search for anthropological truth as preached by her mentor, Franz Boas, and finds exactly what she had set out to find. And all before computer modeling, too. Anthropology as an aspiring science hasn't been the same since.
May 27, 2018
I didn’t finish this book mostly because it was repetitive. It’s like he had 100 pages of material and felt a need to fill 250. He could have filled it with anthropological details, which I would have enjoyed. He could also have elaborated on this “nature vs nurture” debate that I never really understood (how does one society being sexually open prove anything?) Instead, he repeated his thesis and his backup arguments so many times, I just got bored.
For what it’s worth, I buy his argument. I admit to having been a little skeptical when I read MM’s book (she wasn’t even there for the length of a single pregnancy!), so I wasn’t a hard sell on her info being inaccurate. I just didn’t need to be battered over the head with it over and over again.
For what it’s worth, I buy his argument. I admit to having been a little skeptical when I read MM’s book (she wasn’t even there for the length of a single pregnancy!), so I wasn’t a hard sell on her info being inaccurate. I just didn’t need to be battered over the head with it over and over again.
September 9, 2021
The story of Mead's research and time in Samoa that Freeman details is very interesting. However, his prose is extremely dry, which makes this a bit of a difficult read
December 23, 2011
The story behind the "Coming of Age in Samoa." Details of how Mead set out to do the research with the preconception that it is nurture not nature that dictates our behaviour. She was heavily influenced by Frank Dooz, her supervisor, who was one of the founders of anthropology in the US. Because of decisions made regarding other research that she wanted but was not supposed to do, she had insufficient time to conduct adequate research on her original project. Therefore when she questioned two Samoan 20-year-olds and was told a story (their way of telling her to mind her own business), she was ready to believe it, even though it contradicted other data, since it "proved" what she wanted to prove.
February 23, 2010
I never reached a true conclusion as to whose accounts were more likely to be accurate. I suspect the answer is "a little of both".
MM was one of the first contacts with her studied peoples, and as a woman had access to a whole other side that DF could never have reached. (The same is also true in reverse.) Separated by gender, fame and time, it's no wonder that they had different results.
MM was one of the first contacts with her studied peoples, and as a woman had access to a whole other side that DF could never have reached. (The same is also true in reverse.) Separated by gender, fame and time, it's no wonder that they had different results.
October 13, 2015
Es una crítica al analisis de Mead, cuestionando sus hallazgos y método.
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