Margaret Mead, anthropological hoaxer
Mark Spahn
“The most famous American anthropologist of the mid-20th Century was Margaret Mead, whose celebrated Coming of Age in Samoa was published in 1928.”
Which was later thoroughly refuted by anthropologist Derek Freeman in “Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of Anthropological Myth” (1983). Unlike Mead, Freeman actually spent more than a few months in Samoa, and also learned the Samoan language. During his preliminary studies in the 1960’s on Samoa, Freeman tracked down some of the children, now adults, whom Mead had interviewed in the 1920’s. “Oh, yeah, the white lady who kept asking us about sex!” Was their recollections about Mead, who then went on to explain that they had been pulling her leg and making up stories for her persistent questions regarding pre-pubescent sex in Samoa.
Like Boaz before her, Mead had an agenda for most of her research when writing about various world cultures, including Samoa. Far from being a radical conservative, Derek Freeman considered Margaret Mead a mentor and a main reason for why he selected a career in Anthropology. Before publishing his research, he first confronted Mead shortly before her death in the late ’70’s regarding her less than accurate findings about Samoa. Publicly she attacked his credibility and findings.
But Freeman’s work is the more accurate and solid (he also lived a few years in the 1940’s in Samoa with a native family) research regarding American Samoa.
Also at the time of her book, American Samoa had a heavy Christian missionary presence (going back to the nineteenth century), which Mead conveniently downplayed if not ignored altogether.
Source: A comment following