The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead

Derek Freeman offers a historical analysis of Margaret Mead's Samoan fieldwork and of the training she received in New York from Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict. He sets out the standing of Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa, whose account of female adolescent sexuality helped establish an anthropological paradigm in which culture is taken to be the overwhelming determinant of human behaviour, and which made Mead one of the most publicly celebrated scientists in America. Against that background Freeman argues that the Samoan research did not address the problem Mead had been sent to investigate, and that late in her stay she relied on the testimony of two young Samoan travelling companions who, he contends, were joking with her about the sexual behaviour of Samoan girls. On Freeman's reading, one of the most influential anthropological studies of the twentieth century rested unwittingly on that mischievous joking. He presents the book as more than the correction of a particular scientific error, treating it as a step towards rethinking the foundations of social science and the strongly relativistic view of culture that he considers to have followed from Mead's account.

Written from the publisher description, Westview Press.

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• Derek Freeman
• Margaret Mead