that this storm was not inevitable,” she announced.
“If a society could be found in which the growing boys and girls missed out on all this storm and stress, then the anthropologist would know. Miss Mead’s specific goal was to expose a negative instance in adolescent life. In anthropology you only have to show once that it is possible for a culture to make, say, a period of life easy, where it is hard everywhere else, to have made your point. She was looking, writes Freeman, for a single “negative instance”-for A student of Franz Boas, professor at Columbia University and leader of the school of cultural determinism, Miss Mead was in fact searching for proof of so great a variety in human life as to make untenable the notion of a universal human nature.
The ensuing controversy has raised questions not just about the stature of Margaret Mead but about the mission of anthropology and the present-day implications of the debate over “nature versus nurture,” or biology versus culture, that dominated anthropology during the first half of this century.įreeman, professor of anthropology emeritus at the Australian National University, begins by telling the story of a bright young Margaret Mead who traveled to primitive Samoa in 1925 to discern whether Samoans were significantly similar or dissimilar in disposition to Western, “civilized” peoples. Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth.ĭerek Freeman’s refutation of one of the heroes of American academia has incited responses from many angry social scientists.
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