Not Even Wrong: Margaret Mead, Derek Freeman, and the Samoans

Not Even Wrong examines the long-running scholarly disagreement between Margaret Mead and Derek Freeman over adolescence and sexuality in Samoa, and asks whether it can be settled on the evidence. Martin Orans, who carried out eighteen months of research in Samoa, obtained permission to work through Mead's own Samoan materials, her personal field notes, letters and diaries, and read them against the intellectual setting of the nineteen twenties, against Freeman's account and against later studies of Samoan culture. His conclusion is that Mead's fieldwork, and the claims she built upon it, are seriously inadequate as evidence, and that on a number of particular points Freeman's reading is correct. The larger argument, and the source of the title, is that the refutation does not settle the question either, because Mead's sweeping claims, that Samoan adolescents came of age without stress and that cultural practice is independent of biological determinants, are framed too vaguely to be tested at all. Assertions of that kind, Orans argues, do not meet the threshold required of scientific claims at all, so neither Mead's global statements nor Freeman's refutation of them can properly be called wrong.

Written from the public record for the book.

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• Derek Freeman
• Margaret Mead
• Martin Orans