It also became far more Left-leaning; Boas’s apprentice Margaret Mead had gone to the South Pacific where she found a pre-agricultural society that didn’t have sexual jealousy and everyone just happily shagged each other without it descending into murderous arguments. Mead’s 1928 book Coming of Age in Samoa is viewed as a sea-change in anthropology, but also a pointer to where uptight Western society could do things differently. She had also been elaborately hoaxed by the natives and no such sexual utopia existed; in fact, Samoa had horrific levels of rape, and adultery had been punishable by
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