Out for Blood

With so many cherished myths falling by the wayside, being told Margaret Mead was wrong about Samoa doesn't come as that great a surprise. In her 1928 book Coming of Age in Samoa, as well as in later works. Mead has painted the Samoans as a gentle people for whom the seemingly universal pains of adolescence did not exist. Adolescence in Samoa was not filled with tension, delinquency, and misery, but with casual lovemaking and smooth and easy maturation. Mead's report led many to conclude that such a dislocating period in human development must be the result not of innate biological changes, but of the pressures which certain societies put on their members. In other words, Mead's work provided evidence that the time of growing up need not be traumatic, that our society might also allow children to mature peacefully and happily

Alas, this was only a false hope, or so Derek Freeman goes to tremendous lengths to prove in Margaret Mead and Samoa. The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth. The book is surprisingly anti-Mead. Although Freeman claims his book is only a formal refutation of Mead's work, it is unfortunately much more than that. Like far too many social and hard scientists, Freeman has been caught up in and swept away by ideological debates from which he should have been free. The debate, once again, is nature versus nurture. In contrast to Mead's strong concern with cultural forces, Freeman greatly emphasizes the general biological uniformity of all human beings. As he admits, the book is not only about Samoa, but "is also concerned with examining related aspects of the wider myth of absolute cultural determinism, and with arguing that this now antiquated doctrine should be abandoned in favor of a more scientific anthropological paradigm."

In some ways, Freeman's book is a strong and well-researched anthropological work on Samoan society. He provides a valuable chronicle of the scientific and intellectual battles in which Mead could not avoid participating, and traces the development of the opposing views of biological and cultural determinism during the last half of the 19th century and up until 1925 when Mead went to Samoa to do her research. He describes the immense influence of Francis Galton, the late-19th century advocate of eugenics and a staunch believer that heredity is all a man brings with him into the world, that all is already determined at birth. It was against this school of thought, Freeman explains, that the anthropologist Franz Boas and others reacted around the turn of the century when they advanced the doctrine of cultural determinism.

By the time he was Margaret Mead's dissertation advisor in the early 1920s. Boas was the pre-eminent figure in anthropology, a man determined to keep cultural anthropology as a discipline completely separate from biology. Margaret Mead, then, went to Samoa, Freeman says, as Boas' disciple, a believer in the power of environment and thus bound to find evidence supporting that doctrine. Specifically, Boas sent her off to the South Seas to study, in Mead's words, "the relative strength of biological puberty and cultural pattern." There, she carried out most of her research on Samoan female adolescence by regularly seeing, mingling with, and interviewing some 25 girls between the ages of 14 and 20 over a period of several months. Almost entirely from what she learned from these girls, Mead constructed her happy picture of youth in Samoa.

Freeman refutes Mead's findings in Samoa on almost all counts: rank, aggressive behavior, religion and punishment, for instance. Contrary to popular belief, Freeman claims that the Samoans are not an easy going, forgiving, and relatively egalitarian people. Rather, they are aggressive, strict, somewhat pious, and, on occasion, belligerent and violent--not entirely unlike our own culture. More interesting are Freeman's chapters on sexual mores and behavior, and on adolescence. He concludes that the Samoans are in fact as uptight and troubled as adolescent Americans.

But the book, in what it aims for and achieves, is not this simple. It is fraught with shortcomings and problems, many of which arise out of the destructive load of doctrinal baggage which Freeman brings to his book. In a speech at Harvard last month, Freeman told his audience that he was "not attacking her [Margaret Mead] personally," but only doing a service to science by correcting her distorted picture. While he may be doing important work for science by revising our view of Samoa, the rest of his claims are not borne out by the book.

To its detriment, Margaret Mead and Samoa is concerned with the same debate about environment and heredity which has been raging for a century, and Freeman's leanings throughout the book are just as clear as Mead's. He paints Boas and Mead as not only convinced of the importance of culture, but as all but conspiring to produce anthropological evidence supporting their view. Boas, Freeman says, not only sent Mead off to Samoa to study adolescence, but "devised" her research so that it would produce the corrects results. Often, Freeman portrays Mead Mead as merely a mindless extension of Boas--something her work in the fifty years after she was in Samoa probes wrong Moreover, Mcad if cast as a through incompetent anthropologist. By her own admission, she was not an experienced fieldworker when she went to the South Seas in 1925, but she was not untrained; it is worth remembering tht she was working at a time when scientific research and experimentation was far least empirical, codified, or extensive than it is today.

Freeman also portrays himself as " in an exceptionally favorable position to pursue my researchers into the realities of Samoan life" and as infinitely more qualified than Mead was. Indeed, Freeman has spent a total of six years in Samoa since he first went there in 1940 and may well know the culture far between than Mead. ever did. In 1942, a Samoan chief adopted Freeman as his son when his own son died, and Freeman was later given a title which allowed him to attend the chiefly assemblies which were hidden from Mead. Unfortunately, because of this unique exposure, Freeman tends, as one critic has already pointed out, to assume that what he saw of upper-class Samoan life held true for all of Samoan society. This comes through, for instance, in his analysis of the importance of virginity in Samoan culture. Mead had noted that some of the girls from families of high status were ceremonial virgins or laupou. These girls, Mead said, would be deflowered publically, and the onus for the chastity of the whole community was on their shoulders--thus freeing other young girls to indulge in casual lovemaking. Freeman, studying mainly upper-class girls, concluded that far more Samoan girls remained virgins until marriage. Indeed, he concludes that, "It should now be apparent that Samoa, where the cult of female virginity is probably carried to a greater extreme than in any other culture known to anthropology, was scarcely the place to situate a paradise of adolescent free love."

Yet Freeman is most likely right that Mead portrayed young Samoans as far more permissive than they actually are. His explanation for this is that Mead's only source was what the teenage girls she was studying told her, and they probably exaggerated and lied to her both to tease her and out of shyness. Freeman also concludes that Mead was mistaken in believing that adolesence in Samoa is without trauma. He cites statistics showing that teenage delinquency in Samoa can run as much as ten times that of some western cultures, the peak year for a youth's first conviction being at 16 years of age.

What is so disturbing about the book is that it is clearly not just an anthropological work: Freeman is determined to prove that "Mead's presentation of Samoa as proving the insignificance of biology in the etiology of adolescent behavior is revealed as a false case." The book suffers from this pre-occupation; it would be a far stronger work if Freeman had simply concentrated on the Samoans as they are.

Yet the news that Samoan society is not as peaceful and permissive as once thought is probably inevitable. Anthropologists once thought the! Kung San Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert were a people for whom war and violence were unknown, but recent studies have revealed that they have a crime and suicide rate as high as that of many western countries. Moreover, several previous studies including at least one by an amateur anthropologist had concluded that Mead's picture was a little too rosy.

Freeman concludes his book asserting that the case of Samoa shows that neither biological nor cultural determinism is unacceptable on its own and that both must be considered in accounting for human behavior. He advocates the currently popular "view of human evolution in which the genetic and exogenetic are distinct but interacting parts of a single system." Freeman seems to believe that the old nature-nurture debate is over, but he is unfortunately mistaken. The opinion that the genes dictate and determine all continues to be expressed in psychology, evolutionary biology, and anthropology.

Freeman himself should be wary, for he continues to subscribe to the belief that the human brain and body at birth are analogous to a computer fully equipped with programs and waiting only for experience to supply them with variables. In fact, recent studies have shown that the structure and development of both the brain and body are significantly affected by post-natal experience.

Unfortunately, the real loser in this book is neither biological nor cultural determinism, but Margaret Mead herself. Freeman ignores the fact that, to some degree, she and Boas were more interested in studying cultural variations themselves than deciding whether such variations meant that men were not bound by their genes. Worse, Freeman portrays Mead as a possessed and ignorant follower of Boas who was duped by her Samoan informants. When he spoke last month, Freeman voiced the opinion that, because of her involvement with Boas, Margaret Mead was "more sinned against that sinning." Freeman's own book, important as it may be, makes his own words all the more true.On location in Samoa.