Margaret Mead, Derek Freeman a Samoa

MARGARET MEAD Selection from Coming of Age in Samoa

The most obvious function performed by social scientists in modern America has been a cognitive one: the advancement of knowledge about society. Another, more subtle function has been a moral one: the articulation and criticism of standards for conduct. The role of the public moralist had long been performed by the clergy and by men and women of letters, but in the twentieth century this role i...

Pacific Studies

Derek Freeman’s Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth (1983) attacked both the conclusions and methodology of Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa (1928). Freeman set out to refute Mead’s interpretation of a peaceful, sexually permissive Samoan society and, equally important, to discredit Mead’s cultural determinism, the assumption that the roots of human behavior...

PAUL ROSCOE Exchange across Difference

In Sex and Temperament, Margaret Mead depicted the Mountain Arapesh of New Guinea as a gentle, nurturant people among whom warfare was "practically unknown." A few years later, however, Reo Fortune, her husband and cofieldworker, was to claim that warfare was "good Arapesh custom." This article reexamines this disagreement, addressing two issues: Did the Arapesh have a tradition of warfare?, an...

Derek J

Derek J Roberts ([email protected]) Simon Leigh-Smith ([email protected]) Peter D Faris ([email protected]) Chad G Ball ([email protected]) Helen Lee Robertson ([email protected]) Christopher Blackmore ([email protected]) Elijah Dixon ([email protected]) Andrew W Kirkpatrick (Andrew.Kirkpatrick@a...

Freeman, J