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Margaret Mead and the Heretic: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth
The late renowned anthropologist Margaret Mead's major field-work study COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA became the key text in the nature-nurture controversy and a reference point for the social and sexual revolution of the 1960s. Derek Freeman's book, updated here with a new Foreword, refutes Mead's work, claiming she was misinformed by Samoan natives regarding the sexual proclivities of their culture.
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First published January 1, 1983
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
April 3, 2011
March 20, 2011
I'm now finding Deleuze & Guattari everywhere I turn, even in something so seemingly removed as Margaret Mead:
p 29: In 1896 [Boas] called on anthropologists to "renounce the vain endeavour to construct a uniform systematic history of the evolution of culture," arguing that the changes that occurred in human cultures did not take place in a single line, but in a multiplicity of converging and diverging trends.
Multiplicities again! Argh!!
March 31, 2011
So you take this one, rather unassuming, young, seemingly intelligent woman (Margaret Mead), put her someplace relatively unknown in the South Pacific (Western Samoa), ask her to come back with a little bit of dirt on the inhabitants there, and what happens? That one, rather unassuming, young, seemingly intelligent woman comes back with so much dirt that she helps turn the course of events in anthropology, science, even the sexual revolution in America.
Unfortunately, Margaret Mead was a rotten liar.
But let's be fair. What really happened was she was sent to Samoa to study the inhabitants to see if difficulties adolescents face are a cultural problem or one that is the nature of the beast. The age-old nature/nurture question. She studied the lives of a small amount of people, interviewed some of them, got what she thought was a realistic idea of their lifestyle, culture, beliefs, and attitudes, came home, wrote a book about it (Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation), and blew the top off of the issue. Samoans, she told us, were promiscuous at a young age, but that an adolescent girl in Western Samoa wasn't met with a lot of the same pressures or stresses that confronted American adolescents, so see? Stupid Americans. (In laymen's terms.)
The real issue is, we find out later, the Samoans were feeding Mead a series of untruths for their own shits and giggles. And that's where this author, Derek Freeman, comes in. Margaret Mead and the Heretic was his way of discounting everything Mead had done and said previously. Of course, she was already dead by the time he got around to this, so it's not like she could defend herself. But he talked to some Samoans too, and they were all, "What, she didn't know we were joking?" Whoopsy!
I wanted to read a book about that hoax, like where did it come from, who started it, why did they carry it on so long. One of the biggest hoaxes in scientific history, and that's where my interest really lies. But Freeman barely even touches on it outside of a few random comments, I guess just to tie everything together. He claims this whole book talks about the hoax, but I found very few mentions of it. It seems to me Freeman was more about taking whole sentences from Mead's texts and then saying whether or not he agreed or disagreed with the statement. There were several sentences or words with quotations around them which means to me that very little of the text in this book is actually Freeman's. If I wanted to re-read Coming of Age in Samoa I would have just done that. I wanted to hear a different side of the story, and I hardly even got that. What a disappointment.
I think the title is misleading, and that's the biggest issue. If it was something like Margaret Mead and the Epic Fail in Samoa: How Derek Freeman is a Scientific Bad-Ass then I feel I would have been better prepared for what I was about to read. And the real kicker is that apparently scientists and anthropologists are still sort of defending Mead anyway, saying that most of her work was reliable. Seems to me Freeman has been poo-poohed a bit as well. So I sort of feel like everyone is lying to me right now. Nasty, nasty people, those scientists.
Could Mead have done better research? Most likely. Could she have spent more time in the field? Absolutely. But her work (or lack thereof) helped change the way scientists go about their sciency things; being a woman researcher in the 1920s also says a lot and she helped pave the way for all women researchers to follow, so y'know, props and shit. It's just a shame really. I know how it feels to lost an entire perfectly researched paper for a college course. Seems to me what happened to Mead would take that feeling and blows it to smithereens.
I should just stick with my gal Jane Goodall. She just wants to watch the chimps. I'm pretty sure she doesn't even like people. People are bad. Chimps are good.
I'm now finding Deleuze & Guattari everywhere I turn, even in something so seemingly removed as Margaret Mead:
p 29: In 1896 [Boas] called on anthropologists to "renounce the vain endeavour to construct a uniform systematic history of the evolution of culture," arguing that the changes that occurred in human cultures did not take place in a single line, but in a multiplicity of converging and diverging trends.
Multiplicities again! Argh!!
March 31, 2011
So you take this one, rather unassuming, young, seemingly intelligent woman (Margaret Mead), put her someplace relatively unknown in the South Pacific (Western Samoa), ask her to come back with a little bit of dirt on the inhabitants there, and what happens? That one, rather unassuming, young, seemingly intelligent woman comes back with so much dirt that she helps turn the course of events in anthropology, science, even the sexual revolution in America.
Unfortunately, Margaret Mead was a rotten liar.
But let's be fair. What really happened was she was sent to Samoa to study the inhabitants to see if difficulties adolescents face are a cultural problem or one that is the nature of the beast. The age-old nature/nurture question. She studied the lives of a small amount of people, interviewed some of them, got what she thought was a realistic idea of their lifestyle, culture, beliefs, and attitudes, came home, wrote a book about it (Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation), and blew the top off of the issue. Samoans, she told us, were promiscuous at a young age, but that an adolescent girl in Western Samoa wasn't met with a lot of the same pressures or stresses that confronted American adolescents, so see? Stupid Americans. (In laymen's terms.)
The real issue is, we find out later, the Samoans were feeding Mead a series of untruths for their own shits and giggles. And that's where this author, Derek Freeman, comes in. Margaret Mead and the Heretic was his way of discounting everything Mead had done and said previously. Of course, she was already dead by the time he got around to this, so it's not like she could defend herself. But he talked to some Samoans too, and they were all, "What, she didn't know we were joking?" Whoopsy!
I wanted to read a book about that hoax, like where did it come from, who started it, why did they carry it on so long. One of the biggest hoaxes in scientific history, and that's where my interest really lies. But Freeman barely even touches on it outside of a few random comments, I guess just to tie everything together. He claims this whole book talks about the hoax, but I found very few mentions of it. It seems to me Freeman was more about taking whole sentences from Mead's texts and then saying whether or not he agreed or disagreed with the statement. There were several sentences or words with quotations around them which means to me that very little of the text in this book is actually Freeman's. If I wanted to re-read Coming of Age in Samoa I would have just done that. I wanted to hear a different side of the story, and I hardly even got that. What a disappointment.
I think the title is misleading, and that's the biggest issue. If it was something like Margaret Mead and the Epic Fail in Samoa: How Derek Freeman is a Scientific Bad-Ass then I feel I would have been better prepared for what I was about to read. And the real kicker is that apparently scientists and anthropologists are still sort of defending Mead anyway, saying that most of her work was reliable. Seems to me Freeman has been poo-poohed a bit as well. So I sort of feel like everyone is lying to me right now. Nasty, nasty people, those scientists.
Could Mead have done better research? Most likely. Could she have spent more time in the field? Absolutely. But her work (or lack thereof) helped change the way scientists go about their sciency things; being a woman researcher in the 1920s also says a lot and she helped pave the way for all women researchers to follow, so y'know, props and shit. It's just a shame really. I know how it feels to lost an entire perfectly researched paper for a college course. Seems to me what happened to Mead would take that feeling and blows it to smithereens.
I should just stick with my gal Jane Goodall. She just wants to watch the chimps. I'm pretty sure she doesn't even like people. People are bad. Chimps are good.
December 14, 2016
This is an expose in the truest sense of the word, uncovering and overturning decades of so-called social science cultural anthropology that pretended to be conclusions drawn from objective research but was, in fact, the dream fantasy of a bright but twisted and naive young woman who sought and found an opportunity to justify her own worldview. Such has not proven to be unusual in the 20th century, either in the social science or in the hard sciences. The author's work is intelligent and informed by personal investigation. This is a very good read. So many modern conclusions about family life and personal conduct have been based upon the erroneous conclusions of the scholar who was anything but, Margaret Mead. Sad.
June 5, 2024
THE CONTROVERSIAL REJECTION OF THE QUALITY OF MEAD’S SAMOA RESEARCH
Anthropologist Derek Freeman wrote in the Preface to this 1983 book, “[Franz] Boas sent the 23-year-old Mead to Samoa to study adolescence, and she returned with a startling conclusion. Adolescence was known in America and Europe as a time of emotional stresses and conflicts. If, as Mead argued, these problems were caused by the biological processes of maturation, then they would necessarily be found in all human societies. But in Samoa, she reported… adolescence was the easiest and most pleasant time of life… When [Mead’s] ‘Coming of Age in Samoa’ was published in 1928 it attracted immense attention, and its apparently conclusive findings swiftly entered anthropological lore as a jewel of a case… It is with the critical examination of this very widely accepted conclusion that I am concerned in this book.. In this book I adduce detailed empirical evidence to demonstrate that Mead’s account of Samoan culture and character is fundamentally in error… the depictions on which Mead based this assertion are, in varying degree, mistaken.” (Pg. xi-xiii)
He acknowledges, “my refutation of Mead’s depiction of Samoa appears some years after her death. In November 1964, however, when Dr. Mead visited the Australian National University, I informed her very fully, during a long private conversation, of the empirical basis of my disagreement with her depiction of Samoa. From that time onward we were in correspondence, and in August 1978… I offered to send her an early draft of my refutation of the conclusions she had reached … I received no reply to this offer before Dr. Mead’s death in November of that year.” (Pg. xvi)
He points out, “During her stay in Manu’a, Mead did not have ‘any political participation in village life,’ as there was in Manu’a in the 1920s a strict prohibition against any woman participating in any of the chiefly assemblies in which decisions were made… Faced by these severe disadvantages, Mead was compelled, in her study of many of the fundamental aspects of Samoan life, to ‘completely rely on informants.’” (Pg. 71)
He asserts, “This study … was… an impossibly difficult problem to foist upon a graduate student as sparsely experienced as was the twenty-three-year-old Margaret Mead… For one thing… Mead lacked any systematic training in biology, and was thus by no means scientifically equipped to investigate the subtle and complex interaction, in Samoan behavior, of biological and cultural variables… Indeed, a critical reading of Mead’s writings on Samoa reveals that she did not, at any time… carry out any systematic comparison of hereditary and environmental conditions. Thus… she was in no position to analyze the nature of the interaction between genetic and exogenetic variables in the behavior of Samoan adolescents.” (Pg. 75-76)
He states, “It was Mead’s view in 1925 that a trained student could ‘master the fundamental structure of a primitive society in a few months’… she had no compunction despite the cursoriness of her inquiries, in constructing her own picture of Samoan culture and character. It is with the scientific adequacy of Mead’s picture of Samoan society that I shall be concerned from now on, for to the extent that this picture is defective, Samoa ceases to be a negative instance and Mead’s central conclusion that culture, or nurture, is all-important in the determination of adolescent and other aspects of human behavior is revealed as ungrounded and invalid.” (Pg. 83)
He notes, “Mead’s statements that there were no temples and no religious festivals in pagan Samoa are directly contradicted by the historical evidence… The ancient Samoans… quite contrary to Mead’s assertions, were a highly religious people with a system of religion which was… essentially similar to that of pagan Tikpoia.” (Pg. 179) Later, he adds, “Mead… was plainly in error in generalizing that in Manu’a in 1925-1926 ‘no one’ became ‘a church member until after marriage’; nor is there any substantive evidence for her assertion that premarital promiscuity on the part of female adolescents was passively accepted by the ‘religious authorities’ in Manu’a. Rather… the female adolescents … lived in a moralistic society that specifically interdicted premarital sexual intercourse.” (Pg. 186)
He comments, “It is understandable, then, why Samoans are perturbed by Mead’s depiction of them as a people for whom free lovemaking is ‘expected’ among adolescent girls, so that the Samoans have come to be classed in the literature of anthropology as ‘one of the best known cases of institutionalized premarital sexuality.’ This conclusion is indeed … preposterously at variance with the realities of Samoan life…” (Pg. 240)
Ultimately, he suggests, “The explanation most consistently advanced by the Samoans themselves for the magnitude of the errors in her depiction of their culture in and particular of their sexual morality is… ‘that Mead’s informants must have been telling lies to tease her.’” (Pg. 289-290) [Freeman, of course, advances this position in his follow-up book, ‘The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis of Her Samoan Research.’]
Obviously a controversial book, it should probably be read in conjunction with contrary views (e.g., Paul Shankman’s ‘The Trashing of Margaret Mead’). Nevertheless, this provocative book will be “must reading” for those interested in this controversy.
Anthropologist Derek Freeman wrote in the Preface to this 1983 book, “[Franz] Boas sent the 23-year-old Mead to Samoa to study adolescence, and she returned with a startling conclusion. Adolescence was known in America and Europe as a time of emotional stresses and conflicts. If, as Mead argued, these problems were caused by the biological processes of maturation, then they would necessarily be found in all human societies. But in Samoa, she reported… adolescence was the easiest and most pleasant time of life… When [Mead’s] ‘Coming of Age in Samoa’ was published in 1928 it attracted immense attention, and its apparently conclusive findings swiftly entered anthropological lore as a jewel of a case… It is with the critical examination of this very widely accepted conclusion that I am concerned in this book.. In this book I adduce detailed empirical evidence to demonstrate that Mead’s account of Samoan culture and character is fundamentally in error… the depictions on which Mead based this assertion are, in varying degree, mistaken.” (Pg. xi-xiii)
He acknowledges, “my refutation of Mead’s depiction of Samoa appears some years after her death. In November 1964, however, when Dr. Mead visited the Australian National University, I informed her very fully, during a long private conversation, of the empirical basis of my disagreement with her depiction of Samoa. From that time onward we were in correspondence, and in August 1978… I offered to send her an early draft of my refutation of the conclusions she had reached … I received no reply to this offer before Dr. Mead’s death in November of that year.” (Pg. xvi)
He points out, “During her stay in Manu’a, Mead did not have ‘any political participation in village life,’ as there was in Manu’a in the 1920s a strict prohibition against any woman participating in any of the chiefly assemblies in which decisions were made… Faced by these severe disadvantages, Mead was compelled, in her study of many of the fundamental aspects of Samoan life, to ‘completely rely on informants.’” (Pg. 71)
He asserts, “This study … was… an impossibly difficult problem to foist upon a graduate student as sparsely experienced as was the twenty-three-year-old Margaret Mead… For one thing… Mead lacked any systematic training in biology, and was thus by no means scientifically equipped to investigate the subtle and complex interaction, in Samoan behavior, of biological and cultural variables… Indeed, a critical reading of Mead’s writings on Samoa reveals that she did not, at any time… carry out any systematic comparison of hereditary and environmental conditions. Thus… she was in no position to analyze the nature of the interaction between genetic and exogenetic variables in the behavior of Samoan adolescents.” (Pg. 75-76)
He states, “It was Mead’s view in 1925 that a trained student could ‘master the fundamental structure of a primitive society in a few months’… she had no compunction despite the cursoriness of her inquiries, in constructing her own picture of Samoan culture and character. It is with the scientific adequacy of Mead’s picture of Samoan society that I shall be concerned from now on, for to the extent that this picture is defective, Samoa ceases to be a negative instance and Mead’s central conclusion that culture, or nurture, is all-important in the determination of adolescent and other aspects of human behavior is revealed as ungrounded and invalid.” (Pg. 83)
He notes, “Mead’s statements that there were no temples and no religious festivals in pagan Samoa are directly contradicted by the historical evidence… The ancient Samoans… quite contrary to Mead’s assertions, were a highly religious people with a system of religion which was… essentially similar to that of pagan Tikpoia.” (Pg. 179) Later, he adds, “Mead… was plainly in error in generalizing that in Manu’a in 1925-1926 ‘no one’ became ‘a church member until after marriage’; nor is there any substantive evidence for her assertion that premarital promiscuity on the part of female adolescents was passively accepted by the ‘religious authorities’ in Manu’a. Rather… the female adolescents … lived in a moralistic society that specifically interdicted premarital sexual intercourse.” (Pg. 186)
He comments, “It is understandable, then, why Samoans are perturbed by Mead’s depiction of them as a people for whom free lovemaking is ‘expected’ among adolescent girls, so that the Samoans have come to be classed in the literature of anthropology as ‘one of the best known cases of institutionalized premarital sexuality.’ This conclusion is indeed … preposterously at variance with the realities of Samoan life…” (Pg. 240)
Ultimately, he suggests, “The explanation most consistently advanced by the Samoans themselves for the magnitude of the errors in her depiction of their culture in and particular of their sexual morality is… ‘that Mead’s informants must have been telling lies to tease her.’” (Pg. 289-290) [Freeman, of course, advances this position in his follow-up book, ‘The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis of Her Samoan Research.’]
Obviously a controversial book, it should probably be read in conjunction with contrary views (e.g., Paul Shankman’s ‘The Trashing of Margaret Mead’). Nevertheless, this provocative book will be “must reading” for those interested in this controversy.
July 14, 2009
Extraordinary and well-researched story of how Margaret Meade faked her breakthrough "research" and the resulting book that made her famous.
October 14, 2015
Only read b/c Euphoria is loosely based on her. So glad i picked it up. Nature over nurture every time. What do you think?
August 22, 2025
Almost the entirety of Margaret Mead and the Heretic could be summed up in a single paragraph, but instead Freeman uses pages and pages to repeat his dogma of dissing Mead's early research methods. He has valid points - grasping all there is to a culture within a few months is not really practical, and that seeing a round peg and a round hole can lead to intuitive leaps that don't necessarily fit on closer inspection. However, the way he chooses to present these points, unsurprisingly, didn't win him too many friends and wasn't particularly constructive - or engaging to read.
Freeman rallies against Boas and Mead (and others) seeking, and then essentially fabricating (Freeman argues unwittingly) concrete evidence to not only support their ideology but also reject and fully refute all claims of nature over nurture. However, Freeman has at times done exactly that in presenting such a one-sided, hand-picked, anything-you-have-to-say-on-this-matter-is-utter-trash manner that precisely resembles what he describes as the unsupportable and tunnel-visioned attitude of the cultural determinists in the 1920s. This, more than anything else, seems to get Mead's dedicated supporters so immediately off-side and undermines Freeman's overarching message. Obviously, with someone as prominent as Margaret Mead, Freeman needed to come to the table with some hefty game to challenge such a popular and pivotal piece of research. However, he seems to have gone a bit overboard, at times bringing in questionable evidence and picking apart quite trivial elements of Mead's research. This doesn't support his arguments and instead gives those who would seek to discredit him ample ammunition.
I would have preferred Margaret Mead and the Heretic if it had been much less a direct refutation of Mead's research and instead more a clearly articulated and researched alternative description of the elements of Samoan culture that Mead portrayed in her various research products of the 1920s and 30s - precisely what Freeman rules out in his foreword. No matter how much of the foreword he chooses to dedicate to insisting that he is not attacking Margaret Mead personally but rather her research practices, it remains the case that any idiot (especially a cultural anthropologist) would see an entire book dedicated to refuting someone else's book by trying to prove they were so naïve that they neglected basic research elements, as well as highlighting every single false statement that someone has made throughout their lives on a certain topic, is at the very least pragmatically a personal attack if not overtly a personal attack.
Freeman rallies against Boas and Mead (and others) seeking, and then essentially fabricating (Freeman argues unwittingly) concrete evidence to not only support their ideology but also reject and fully refute all claims of nature over nurture. However, Freeman has at times done exactly that in presenting such a one-sided, hand-picked, anything-you-have-to-say-on-this-matter-is-utter-trash manner that precisely resembles what he describes as the unsupportable and tunnel-visioned attitude of the cultural determinists in the 1920s. This, more than anything else, seems to get Mead's dedicated supporters so immediately off-side and undermines Freeman's overarching message. Obviously, with someone as prominent as Margaret Mead, Freeman needed to come to the table with some hefty game to challenge such a popular and pivotal piece of research. However, he seems to have gone a bit overboard, at times bringing in questionable evidence and picking apart quite trivial elements of Mead's research. This doesn't support his arguments and instead gives those who would seek to discredit him ample ammunition.
I would have preferred Margaret Mead and the Heretic if it had been much less a direct refutation of Mead's research and instead more a clearly articulated and researched alternative description of the elements of Samoan culture that Mead portrayed in her various research products of the 1920s and 30s - precisely what Freeman rules out in his foreword. No matter how much of the foreword he chooses to dedicate to insisting that he is not attacking Margaret Mead personally but rather her research practices, it remains the case that any idiot (especially a cultural anthropologist) would see an entire book dedicated to refuting someone else's book by trying to prove they were so naïve that they neglected basic research elements, as well as highlighting every single false statement that someone has made throughout their lives on a certain topic, is at the very least pragmatically a personal attack if not overtly a personal attack.
March 23, 2025
I agree he made his case about Margaret Mead and as she I dunno made this "free love" idea into a romantic notion it is hard to believe her "skills" were that professional, dunno. But after about 40 pages, as I said he made the case, enough already.
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