The Samoa Reader: Last Word or Lost Horizon?The Samoa Reader: Anthropologists Take Stock.Hiram Caton

Abstract

In I925, 23-year-old American anthropologist Margaret Mead arrived on island of Ta'u, in American Samoa, to start her first fieldwork. Her ambitious project was to decide if the disturbances which vex our adolescents [are] due to nature of adolescence itself or to civilisation (Mead I973 [i9281:6). She spent nine months with a study group of about 68 young Samoan girls. Recognizing scientific control difficulties inherent in such studies and thereby reserving some rights of ceteris paribus, she concluded Samoan youth faced nearly none of disorientations and disruptions to life and psyche vexed American youth in their comings of age; this was largely to be explained by Samoans' relaxed attitudes toward adolescent sexual exploration and intercourse; differences between two societies were testimony to remarkable plasticity of human behavior; and plasticity was testimony to triumph of culture over nature. Cultural anthropology, psychology, and Westem educational systems were put on notice to revise their theories and change their practices: biology was not destiny; racist theories of behavior could be abandoned; educational systems could be revised to accord with newfound facts of this anthropological psychology; and nature of adolescent turmoil was really culture of adolescent turmoil set against a biological problem and therefore learned and shared behavior could be unlearned, revised, channeled, and managed. Mead published results of this study in i928 as Coming of Age in Samoa (see also Mead I969 [I930]). For reasons having to do less with scientific community's satisfaction with her research than with public flash of science in paradise,2 this book became a best seller and launched her on her career as a popular author and lecturer. In I983, Derek Freeman, an Australian anthropologist who has worked in another part of Samoa (the island of Savai'i, Westem Samoa) periodically since I943, published a substantive and theoretical challenge to Mead's thesis called Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth. Although Mead had been dead for five years, her enormous popularity had kept her work in public view. In anthropology, her Samoan research was still respected for its pioneering impact on concept of culture and education and for its sharpening of values field still holds today conceming culture and racism. It was also recognized as inadequate on several counts (she exaggerated simplicity of Samoan society, for example, and her delivery of what she called controlled comparison science was in best estimate weak) and had been relegated largely to discussions of disciplinary history by time Freeman published his critique. So, contrary to Freeman (I984:I0I, I03, I05, II5), few anthropologists who knew Mead's Coming of Age were surprised when he claimed it had greatly underestimated complexity of culture, society, history, and psychology of Samoan people (p. 285 ).3 Whether or not it was completely wrong about Samoan adolescence was not easily established, but various critics began to draw line when it was perceived Freeman's criticism was itself overdrawn and, despite his disclaimers, a personal attack on Mead. Freeman found many of Mead's assertions on Samoan character, family values, and sexual behavior preposterously false (p. 288). He claimed her zealous adherence to procedural rule that one should never look