The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: An Historical Analysis of Her Samoan Researches

I married a Samoan man and went to live near Leone in his family compound. Having recently studied anthropology at university Margaret Mead's work was of course in my mind. She couldn't have been further off the mark. I lived with Samoans, learned to speak passable Samoan, let my Samoan SILs breastfeed my child while I was out, let them teach my son how to catch taro from the tree outside and made love to a Samoan man almost nightly. If Margaret Mead went to Samoa she was either shamefully fooled by the locals and their irreverent, sly sense of humour or she had an agenda and shamelessly promoted it, dehumanizing a whole peoples with her nasty interpretation. But believe me, first hand, Meggie Mead didn't have a clue about Samoa or Samoans and probably had a typically white, remote holiday there, no mingling with the darkies.
I told me family about this book and my BIL summed it up 'About time! Palagi's will believe anything!'

Was she duped, or did she lie? (14/14 people found this helpful)

When her hosts in Manu'a learned that 'Makelita' had made them world famous as libertines, they were dismayed by what to them was an abominable slander. And they were dumbfounded that, after showing her the utmost hospitality and cooperation, she could have so grossly betrayed them. They hit on the explanation that someone among them fed her a line of bull (tala pepelo lava).

This was a generous if implausible explanation. Generous, because it avoided taxing her with outright fabrication. Implausible, because Mead's depiction of Samoan promiscuity drives whoredom into the core of the social psyche. She claimed that Samoans have no sense of sin despite their regular church attendance and the admonitions of pastors ('They are able to count [sex] at its true value. . . [they recognize] the essential impersonality of sex attraction which we may well envy them']. She reported masturbation, homosexuality, and lesbianism as common practices that were regarded as 'simply play' between casual heterosexual liaisons. In other words, Mead's Samoans, like Mead herself, were bisexual. She attributed the relaxed attitude to pre-marital sex and to adultery to the fact that Samoans have no deep attachments or strong emotional feelings. There is no parent-child bonding for the same reason. These and like claims construct the cultural 'pattern' of a society untroubled by the storm and stress of adolescence. Such thinking was the trendy utopianism of the sexual reformers of her era, but it had nothing to do with Samoa until Mead's arrival from New York.

Freeman's book is a mighty effort to convert the Samoan belief in duping into a well-founded conclusion. He touts two 'smoking guns'. One is the sworn testimony of Mead's dear friend during her field trip, Fa'apu'a Fa'amu, to the effect that she did indeed tell Mead fibs in reply to her questions about her relations with men. The other is correspondence between Mead and the supervisor of her Samoan research, Franz Boas.

The first smoking gun is a dud. Fa'amu testified only that she told Mead that 'We spend nights with boys, yes, with boys!' and similar non-specific allusions. There is no express admission that intercourse occurred. There is no hint whatever of lesbianism. The duping hypothesis predicts that Mead's field notes would record the information given her by Fa'amu. In fact, the notes never attribute any information to her. The natural conclusion is that despite the affection, Mead did not regard her friend as an informant. It is improbable, in any case, that Mead credited Fa'amu's tease, partly because her notes show that she was alert to tall tales and partly because Fa'amu's status as a taupou, or ceremonial virgin, meant that she was never unchaperoned and hence had no opportunity for 'spending nights with boys'. Finally, Fa'amu's non-specific allusions added nothing to what Mead's notes show she already believed she knew about Samoan promiscuity. In sum, the duping episode is irrelevant to understanding how Mead managed get Samoan moeurs so desperately wrong. Since the second smoking gun depends on the first, it too is a dud.

Did she make it up then? Although he repeatedly defends Mead's research integrity, Freeman destroys his noble defense by cataloguing deceit after deceit in things small and great. Mead indeed seems to have been a gamester who got a buzz from pulling the wool over people's eyes. And this was her reputation among her colleagues, who called her 'the lady novelist', a 'mythmaker', given to exaggeration and hyperbole, to sloppy and impressionistic description of no great reliability. The eminent Edward Sapir bluntly called her a 'pathological liar'.

Freeman shows that Mead's fieldwork was premised on two strategic deceits. She concealed from her hosts her married status. By passing herself off as a virgin, she was honored by three villages with title of taupou, which conferred a great advantage-she had, as she said, 'rank to burn' and could 'order people about'. She second strategic deceit was perpetrated on her supervisor, Franz Boas and indirectly on her funding sponsor, the National Research Council. Boas and the Council expected her to research the personality of adolescent girls, to determine the extent to which nature (puberty) or culture influenced adolescent conflict. But Mead wasn't interested in this project. She accepted it because it got he a ticket to the field. Her real interest was ethnography. Unbeknownst to Boas, Mead struck an agreement with the Bishop Museum (Honolulu) to prepare a monograph on Samoa. Freeman shows by a meticulous reconstruction of her activities that she spent no more than four or five weeks on the funded project, hardly time enough for a systematic investigation of this complex and demanding subject. This is confirmed by her sparse field notes on the adolescent project.

Her strategic impostures led to the massive fraud that made her famous. Having little data, she just made it up and pretended, in the appendices of Coming of Age, to have found it. Mead seems to have delighted in slipping mickies as a kind of sport. She says, for example, that Samoa was untroubled by natural disasters. Yet it's common knowledge that no island is spared the ravages of storm, flood and occasional tsunamis. In fact, a hurricane devastated Manu'a in January of the year of her visit. She says that Samoan children alternately crawl or walk until the age of 'three or four'. Every caregiver knows that once the child learns to walk, next it runs and never returns to crawling. She seems to have been supremely confident that no one would call her hand on such whoppers. Deception was so habitual that she lied gratuitously. Thus she told Boas that she was seasick for six weeks (!!) on her return voyage, while in fact she was romancing a new beau-love sick, not seasick. It's not surprising that her epistemological mottoes were: 'The truth isn't out there, you know' and 'If it isn't [true], it ought to be'.

Freeman's claim that the hoax 'effectively solve[s] the 'enigma of Margaret Mead's research' unfortunately follows the fashion of substituting victimhood for active will. He would have us see her as the unwitting pawn of a mythopoetic fate. Fiddlesticks! Mead's behavior in Manu'a was a disgrace to herself and to her profession. Such conduct had no logical relation to Boasian anthropology. It was entirely her doing. Having deceived her hosts, she disgraced the sacrosanct taupou title by having affairs. That too was her personal choice. She went on to invent a salacious bisexual Samoa as a preamble to the part of Coming of Age that made her famous--her advocacy of educational, family, and sexual reform in America.

Mead's research presents no enigma. She always went to the field to find what she wanted to find-an uplifting story to boost a current social reform. As for those 'primitives' who served as fodder, well, they were expendable in the great struggle to reform the world.

Hiram Caton Editor, The Samoa Reader: Anthropologists Take Stock. University Press of America, 1990.

The book rings true because it accords with prior evidence. (3/3 people found this helpful)

Derek Freeman's book caught my eye because I had been told similar things about Margaret Mead's research by a trusted Samoan friend several years ago. He told me that he once had a radio talk show in American Samoa and he was able to interview several of the women who, as young girls, had served as the source for Mead's information. As I recall it, they told him that they had noticed that Mead seemed to want to hear stories of their loose sexual behavior, and they simply gave her lots of what she wanted. Putting this story over on Mead, he said, seemed to be a great source of merriment to the girls.

I don't think the Samoan friend is putting one over on me. Should any serious researchers want to interview him (He lives in the Washington, DC, area), I would be glad to arrange the contact.

A model of scholarship and objective research (4/4 people found this helpful)

Compared with Mead's slap-dash 5 months in Samoa, Derek Freeman spent (I estimate) 4-5 years in studying Samoa, and an equivalent amount of time in studying Mead's own notes and documentation. The woman who hoaxed Mead demanded that her story be videotaped, and swore on the Bible that it was the truth (Samoans take such oaths very seriously indeed). What Freeman documents:

1. She spent a total of five months in Samoa. This is NOT enough time to learn the language, even with "total immersion."

2. She did not live with Samoans but with other Americans. Therefore she avoided "total immersion" and learned even less of the language.

3. She did not carry out the work assigned to her by her employers (a study of adolescent girls).

4. She assumed, not once but three times, the role of a ceremonial virgin in Samoa, even though she was a married woman. (Her husband was not in Samoa at the time.) This was a very serious betrayal of the trust the Samoans placed in her, and could have destroyed all of her friendships with Samoans had it been discovered through some mishap.

5. That she would act so carelessly in hoaxing the Samoans may be explained by her reference to them as "alien, primitive, and economically backward."

6. She was particularly allergic to taro, the staple of the Samoan diet. This was one of the reasons she refused to live with Samoans. But it seems to me that she could easily have perpetrated a minor hoax (perhaps with the collusion of her doctor friends), simply letting it be known that she was "allergic to taro" and that it would poison her. This would have obliged her Samoan hosts to provide other food for her, a great inconvenience, but it might well have worked.

In summary, then, she was arrogant and foolish while she was in Samoa. That being the case, she deserved everything she got.

Don't shoot the messenger (2/2 people found this helpful)

It's hard to accept that an cultural icon was once a brilliant yet gullible young woman or that a vaunted paradigm of Anthropology is fatally flawed. This book contrary to ad hominem attackers of Freeman tells the story with a compelling and accurate history of Mead' researches. You won't be able to put it down (literaly or figuratively) or stop thinking of its implications.

The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: An Historical Analysis of Her Samoan Researches

Derek Freeman

Reader Reviews:

Finally! (1/1 people found this helpful)

Was she duped, or did she lie? (14/14 people found this helpful)

The book rings true because it accords with prior evidence. (3/3 people found this helpful)

A model of scholarship and objective research (4/4 people found this helpful)

Don't shoot the messenger (2/2 people found this helpful)

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