coming of age in samoa criticism

275 UCB, Boulder, CO 80309Email the magazineCollege of Arts & Sciences main website, University of Colorado Boulder© Regents of the University of Colorado “It’s almost as if people listen only to the stories they want to hear,” says Shankman, whose article, “The Public Anthropology of Margaret Mead: Redbook, Women’s Issues, and the 1960s,” will soon appear in the journal Current Anthropology. Some background: In her popular 1928 book, How painful that their reputations have both had to face Rarely do science and literature come together in the same book. The current New York Times Magazine article, which alludes to Freeman's claims as if they stand, focuses not on the trashing of Margaret Mead but Freeman For example, she urged young women not to engage in premarital sex. An iconic account of adolescence is pure social science fiction. This interview, conducted in 1987, allegedly bolstered Freeman's contention that Mead had based her He constructed a narrative about Mead's hoaxing and After spending about nine months observing and interviewing Samoans, as well as administering psychological tests, Mead concluded that adolescen… significance than the detailed information she had collected throughout her fieldwork.". "You can't make this stuff up," people often say when they read astonishing claims about a major scholar's supposed transgressions. Economic inequality is a hot topic in a presidential election year. Shankman also found that Mead’s high profile was not always appreciated by her colleagues. authors who wove not only false stories about them, but false stories so well supplied with pseudo-documentation that reasonable people believed them. at night, all night, every night," with unmarried men. In a careful review of her magazine articles, Shankman found that the way people view Mead depended on their prior views about the 1960s. “She was also an oracle, somebody that people turned to for opinions on everything from marijuana to nuclear war, sex to civil rights.”. While many in the American Anthropological Association (AAA) rose to defend Mead “Redbook was Mead’s major public platform during that period,” Shankman comments. asks us to imagine that the joking of two women, pinching each other as they put Mead on about their sexuality and that of adolescents, was of more But Shankman's new analysis -- following his excellent 2009 book, I spent about a year researching the Chagnon-Tierney controversy, so I know from “Most people don’t have the time to take a look at what Mead actually said.”. Mead’s views did evolve in the late ‘60s and into the ‘70s, but “her columns belie the idea that she was in the vanguard of the sexual revolution,” Shankman says, adding: “Like many anthropologists, my initial impression (before I read the Redbook columns) was that Mead would have been supportive of the sexual revolution, would have been against discrimination, would have been for careers for mothers with kids, and would have been part of the feminist movement. “The fallout from Freeman’s criticism still haunts Margaret Mead,” Shankman says. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. carried out by Fofoa's son, a Samoan Christian of high rank who was convinced that Mead had besmirched the reputation of Samoans by portraying his mother, carefully culled her testimony for evidence to support it.". But Shankman shows that the interview was conducted and then represented in deeply problematic ways. Margaret Mead saw in Samoa the possibility of loosening social strictures on sexuality -- something she suggested could lead to more pleasure, and less pain and suffering. Scientists can be climate advocates without tarring reputations, CU Boulder researchers contend. Most people don’t have the time to take a look at what Mead actually said.”. She sought to discover whether adolescence was a universally traumatic and stressful time due to biological factors or whether the experience of adolescence depended on one's cultural upbringing. It’s hard to overstate the reputation of Margaret Mead as both a public intellectual in post-World War II America and as the public face of anthropology. Shankman concludes, "It seems that Fa'apua'a had become a medium for Freeman's own views about Mead. The U.S. decision to leave the Paris climate agreement provided some interesting data for scholars who study trends in the negotiations. to more pleasure, and less pain and suffering. Now Shankman has delved even deeper into the sources; in 2011, he obtained from Freeman's archives the first key interview with one of the supposed Margaret Mead, shown here around 1950, has been wrongly characterized by some as having been a feminist icon or a "cause" of moral degradation, Paul Shankman contends. interviews with Samoan men and women. over Margaret Mead's Samoan fieldwork. All Rights Reserved. Brazilian journalist, photographer and filmmaker. Indeed, just this week, a New York Times Magazine Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation (Perennial Classics) [Mead, Margaret] on Amazon.com. [, The Trashing of Margaret Mead: Anatomy of an Anthropological Controversy, Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth, Not Even Wrong: Margaret Mead, Derek Freeman, and the Samoans. To better understand Mead’s views about sex and the 1960s, Shankman began examining the long series of monthly columns that Mead wrote for Redbook in the 1960s and ‘70s. cultural portrait from a couple of informants' sexual fish tales. In 1983, Freeman published Dr. Margaret Mead, anthropologist, visits with friends on a field trip to Bali, Indonesia, in 1957. “But anthropologists had very mixed feelings about her.”. with Mead and with what he saw as her dangerous stories about the flexibility of human cultures. But it turns out you can -- so long as you convincingly pose as a great scholar yourself. He saw himself as a brave "heretic," a man saving true on the trashing of another anthropologist, Napoleon Chagnon, by the self-styled journalist-activist Patrick Tierney. investigating the smearing of Margaret Mead by the anthropologist Derek Freeman. She wrote that college wasn’t necessary for young women and that motherhood should be considered a “career.” And, though she edited  American Women (1965), a landmark work on the status of women in the 1960s, she did not write about discrimination against women, did not consider herself a feminist and “railed against the radical feminists,” Shankman found. In upset response to these misrepresentations, Fa'apua'a, a devout Christian, branded Mead a liar and a woman who had mistakenly interpreted innocent jokes "You can't make this stuff up," people often say when they read astonishing claims about a major scholar's supposed transgressions. Just as Freeman's wild The Global climate-change pacts moving toward market-based approaches, scholar finds, Reticent experts still have climate advocacy choices, scholars say. Nevertheless, the notion that Mead and her work on Samoa were somehow “tarnished” remains imprinted on the minds of many Americans, from public intellectuals to laypersons. Although Freeman gave great weight to the alleged tales told to Mead by Fa'apua'a and Fofoa in his portrayal of Mead as a dupe, Shankman notes that, in none-the-wiser Margaret Mead. Freeman also argued that Mead’s permissive view of Samoa in the 1920s had negative consequences for American society decades later, inspiring the 1960s and the sexual revolution. Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth As late as 2001, The Wall Street Journal was using her image in ads to promote its online service. The fallout from Freeman’s criticism still haunts Margaret Mead. fact, "there is no information on the sex from these two women in Mead's field notes." “When Margaret Mead was a great public figure in the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s, people loved her,” he says. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com. We want to hear what you think about this article. In 1925, Margaret Mead journeyed to the South Pacific territory of American Samoa. with Harvard University Press, a book quickly celebrated in the mainstream press. Today, he says, many anthropologists regret the loss of exposure that Mead once brought for the field and wish there were someone of her stature to help the public understand the importance of anthropology and give the field a public voice. As Shankman writes in his latest piece, "Freeman's flawed caricature of Mead and her Samoan fieldwork has become conventional wisdom in many circles and, Economists, politicians and journalists are all weighing in — but what, exactly, can an archaeologist bring to the discussion? One of those researchers is David Ciplet at CU Boulder. -- shows that Freeman manipulated "data" in ways so egregious that it might be time for Freeman's publishers to issue formal retractions. Why? Coming of Age in Samoa, Mead presented Samoan culture as a social system that, without much fuss, allowed many adolescents to fool around before marriage. to attempts to ban a session on sociobiology at the AAA meeting that Chagnon had organized. in leftist anthropology of Mead's story -- more about the happy importance of nurture -- than Chagnon's -- more about unhappy persistence of nature. Margaret Mead wrote a long-running column in Redbook magazine. The question-and-answer format addressed almost every imaginable topic (with some noteworthy exceptions, including the war in Vietnam). Witness a new analysis from Paul Shankman in this month's Current Anthropology of the controversy At the time of her death in 1978, she was one of the most widely known women in the United States. An analysis of the Mead/Freeman controversy for scholars of adolescence and human development | … my conversations with Chagnon that, on more than one occasion, Mead rose to personally help Chagnon in his work -- most notably when she vocally objected Shankman, a professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado-Boulder, has for several years been doggedly Privacy • Legal & Trademarks • Campus Map. ", As early as 1996, in his book “The fallout from Freeman’s criticism still haunts Margaret Mead,” Shankman says. Fofoa's son also told Fa'apua'a -- falsely -- that Mead had reported in her work that, as young women, Fa'apua'a and Fofoa had been "out In Freeman's words, "Never can giggly fibs have had such far-reaching consequences in the groves of Academe. A backpack, a plane ticket and a computer — that’s all I need. showing that Mead was just too gullible to realize that two supposedly "key informants" were pulling her leg about teenage sexual antics -- kidding the According to Mead, Samoa was sexually permissive; but Freeman claimed that Samoa was among the most sexually restrictive cultures known to anthropology. The 1987 interview with Fa'apua'a was arranged and This paper presents an analysis of the Mead/Freeman controversy with a focus on Mead's claim that “coming of age” in 1920s Samoa was accomp Was Mead wrong about coming of age in Samoa?

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