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 lie strictly in culture rather than in interactions between culture and biology. In attempting to dismantle Mead’s legacy, Freeman has displayed an unusual sense of urgency, as if anthropology in general and South Pacific ethnology in particular would lie sprawling before this obstacle unless it were demolished at once. From a historical perspective, however, the sense of urgency appears decidedly narrow. The controversy over the nature of Polynesian societies has, in fact, been going on since Europeans first reported contact with them. Are Polynesians (and Samoans in particular) a peaceful, harmonious people who avoid the psychological turmoil of adolescence and the guilt of sex, or are they a hostile, violent people who repress the guilt and mask the turmoil? From the earliest extensive reports of European discoverers, the same questions echo across time, and the Meads and Freemans are there to answer, usually armed with philosophical templates on which to analyze the subject.