She was a world-famous scientist loved by the American nation. Her importance within American anthropology was huge. She was one of the people who helped to create it.
She made sure that when she was in a room you knew she was there and who she was. There was never a topic in which she wasn't willing to say a few words on education, on family life, on sexuality. She was an oracle. She had something to say about absolutely everything. He was the Australian loner, forever walking in her shadow.
In his childhood he'd been brought up in a messiah cult, by his mother to think he would be the next messiah. He seemed to know everything. and made you feel like you didn't know everything. He was scary. He was a scary person to sit next to.
You were either his friend or you were his enemy. For almost 20 years, these two people supporters would be locked together in the most vitriolic of struggles. A battle for the very heart and soul of anthropology. The public likes to see... their giants fall.
They love to see that. It's a little bit like the assassination of John Lennon. When you have achieved that kind of recognition, there's going to be someone that wants to smash it. This is the story of anthropologists Margaret Mead and Derek Freeman and the crucial role they played in perhaps the biggest debate in all of science, the question of whether humans are the products of nature or nurture. In November 1987, two Australians, one an anthropologist, the other a documentary filmmaker, found themselves on a tiny island in the South Pacific, listening to the 60-year-old story of a woman called Fa'apua.
When I met this woman and she told the story, it didn't sink into me immediately. I was just concentrating on getting that story on film. It wasn't until the old lady had finished her tale that the two men realized just what they'd witnessed After we've done the interview with the lady It sank in that evening as to what we've got in my map in my mind. I knew what we had then and now important it might be because if what far poor had told them was true then the reputation of probably the most famous anthropologist in the world was based on a lie and if this was the case then the entire school of anthropology she'd done so much to establish was also nothing more than a fantasy The woman whose reputation was under threat was none other than Margaret Mead, known to millions of Americans from her countless books, magazine articles, and television appearances.
At the time of her death, she was America's first woman of science and among the three best-known women in the United States. Born on December the 16th, 1901, into a middle-class family from Philadelphia, the young Margaret Mead grew up in an atmosphere of academic inquiry. As a child, I knew, of course, that women used... brains and did things because my mother and my grandmother had done so and i knew that marriage and children and using your brains weren't incompatible she grew up in in a family of intellectuals who were concerned about social justice her father was an economist her mother was a sociologist and they read, they commented, and they were involved.
But Meade's left-leaning upbringing contrasted sharply with the politics of the country into which she'd been born. A hundred years ago, the United States was well on the way to becoming the world's first superpower. Millions of immigrants from across the globe have provided America with an almost limitless supply of cheap labor, eager to sign up to the American dream. But while this migrant tide brought America enormous wealth, it also gave rise to something else.
Well, in the 1920s, there was a strong undercurrent of racism in American society. There was a belief that cultural differences derived from innate biological genetic components. And this was manifested in policies that restricted severely certain groups of people on the grounds that they were genetically and biologically and socially and intellectually and morally inferior. And there was no greater sign. of this genetic inferiority than the color of one's skin.
This racism even had its supporters in the world of science, in particular, the field of anthropology. Because for as long as anthropologists had been studying other societies, many of them had come to associate dark skin with savagery. There'd always been a racist wing of anthropology, and this reached it.
culmination in the eugenics movement some of whom were geneticists within anthropology who endorsed this hereditary position back then the concept of nurture was barely developed and what was important was the concept of nature but nature didn't mean human nature nature meant race and racial variation In other words, there was a powerful branch of anthropology that endorsed the belief, widely held in American society back then, that being white made you superior to everybody else on the planet. And since being white was all down to one's genes, there was nothing anyone not white could do to change this. But not everyone shared this view. Since 1899, the Anthropology Department at New York's prestigious Columbia University had been run by a man called Franz Boas, himself an immigrant to the United States. Franz Boas was responsible for...
an enormous shift in anthropological thinking away from nature towards nurture the idea that human capabilities were formed as much by society and history and culture as they were by genetic inheritance one aspect of human development that particularly interested Boaz was adolescence In the 20s, adolescence was seen as they were in the 60s and other decades as a problem. And Boas wanted to show that adolescence was a cultural construct. It was something that varied according to the society and the family life in which the adolescent grew up.
Boas argued that if the storm and stress experienced by adolescence was purely down to nature, then it should be found in all teenagers across the globe. But if there existed just one society where adolescence was stress-free, then it would prove that nurture also had a role to play. To find such a society, Boaz turned to one of his students, a promising 23-year-old post-grad, Margaret Mead. Boaz was extraordinary in his era in the support that he gave to talented women.
I think he noticed that the anthropology done by men who were fascinated with chiefs and warfare and titles and things like that missed a great deal that was going on. He chose Mead to do this study because she was virtually an adolescent herself. She was in her early 20s, she was small, she was very slim at the time, she looked girlish, and he thought that she could carry off a study. anthropologically in a radically different part of the world.
The only question was exactly which part of the world. Franz Boas had the perfect location in mind. The place Boas chose to send me was Samoa.
A small cluster of Polynesian islands in the South Pacific, some 1600 miles north of the Pacific. It's the flame of southern skies. I'm gonna stake me on a claim in paradise.
Cause I'd like to see Samoa, oh Samoa. Polynesia has long been a place where the best parts of human nature might be realized. Since the 19th century, Americans had come to think of the South Pacific as paradise.
And this image was reinforced by photographs by... books by people like Robert Louis Stevenson. People generalized really from the beautiful environment of the South Seas and from the beautiful physical presence of Polynesians who were beautiful people to a kind of an image of the best that people could be. In August 1925, Margaret Mead arrived in Pongo Pongo, on the Samoan island of Tutuila, only to find that her island paradise wasn't exactly what she'd been expecting.
She arrived in Pango, went out to some of the other villages to scout around, but she was struck by the degree of westernization of Pango Pango. American Samoa was a colonial backwater. The American naval government ran American Samoa, and the main island of Tutuila was fairly Americanized. Mead was looking for something a little less civilized. But if Pongo Pongo wasn't the ideal place to discover just how un-American Samoan adolescence was, it still required Mead.
to get to grips with a local tongue. Utu niya, to be hated. Utu maona. to have an abundance of food.
The first thing I had to do was to learn the language. Now, this was new. Anthropologists were not required to learn the language in those days. They were required to learn about the language, to learn the grammar, to take down very careful texts, but not to use it in everyday life.
For the next six weeks, Mead stuck doggedly to her task. But why, though? But why, though? My mother was determined to be able to do her work in Samoan, to get rid of the interpreter and deal directly. And she worked around the clock, really.
Dear Dr. Boaz, I have now a vocabulary of about 500 words. I can express any type of idea, except some so-called subjunctive expressions, with very little difficulty. I have talked to 10 year old children for 15 and 20 minutes and made myself understood. I am quite confident now that I will be able to handle the language well enough for the requirements of my problem.
By now, Meade had decided to relocate. Armed with her 500 words of Samoan, she set sail for the remote island of Ta'u, about a hundred miles from Pongo Pongo. But Meade soon discovered that remoteness had its drawbacks. The two biggest problems of field work.
One is loneliness. The fact that you are totally away from home. And the other is what we refer to as culture shock.
That shock was all the greater when Margaret Mead realized she faced the disturbing prospect of having to share a room with the natives. If I lived in a Samoan house with a Samoan family... I might conceivably get into a little more intimate touch with that particular family, but I feel that such advantages would be reaped would be more than offset by the loss of efficiency, due to the food and the nerve-wracking conditions of living with half a dozen people in the same room. And so, unlike many anthropologists of the time, Mead decided not to live with the natives.
Instead, She found lodgings in the home of an American naval family stationed on the island. She said, don't try to pretend to be one of the community. Don't insist on doing all the work that they do, wearing the clothes that they wear.
You're there as an observer. You can't conceal it. And anything that you can pay for... Or do to make yourself more efficient and comfortable. Do it!
But there was little that Mead could do to prepare herself for the harsh tropical climate. She was small. She was 5'2", weighed 98 pounds. She was frail in some ways. She has to contend with heat, humidity, mosquitoes, and like all anthropologists at one time or another, she throws up her arms and says, I wish that I was back in New York collecting subway fares. But Mead stuck it out. And quickly established a daily routine. Even with the heat, humidity, mosquitoes, and the despair that occasionally sets in, she is just a whirlwind of energy. She starts work at dawn and works until late into the night. She spent large sections of every day typing up her notes. She would try and be present for ceremonials. She would arrange conversations with people she wanted to interview. She would walk through the village. She did say to me once that one of the reasons she loved being in the field was that you made your own schedule. Nobody there was going to tell you what to do. Little by little, Mead began to understand the ways of her Samoan hosts. So I learned how to be courteous. How to ask questions courteously. I learned how to sit and stand and receive a gift and start a dance. I learned never to speak standing up erect if someone else was seated. And always to bend over, very far over, when you walked in front of someone of rank. As Mead discovered more and more about the Samoan adolescents she'd been sent to study, it dawned on her that there was something rather unusual about the way they'd been brought up. Children never learn the meaning of a strong attachment to one person. And because early childhood does not provide them with violent feelings, there are no such feelings to be rediscovered during adolescence. Mead discovered in Samoa a version of the extended family where children... did not have to live within this emotional pressure cooker of the nuclear family, that in this environment there was less tension within parent-child relations and generally emotions was more diffuse. All of which differed vastly from life back home. Mead felt that Samoan teenagers lacked some of the aggression that she saw in American life, that they lacked some of the sullenness that American teenagers had, the rebelliousness that they had. If American adolescence was full of storm and stress, then what she'd do is, What we discovered was Samoan adolescents, by contrast, was quite different from the patterns that we imagined were universal. Mead was also struck by the Samoan attitude towards sex. Sometimes sleep did not descend upon the village until long past midnight. Then at last there is only the mellow thunder of the reef and the whisper of lovers as the village rests until dawn. Adolescence was not a time of stress and angst and fighting and rebelliousness, but rather a time when adolescents could experiment with intimacy, with sexuality, and Mead found this very liberating. Indeed, so different was growing up in Samoa compared to the States, that Meade was moved to call Samoan adolescence a period of perfect adjustment. These things that made it hard for adolescents here... weren't there so i was able to come back and say that adolescence is not necessarily the kind of time that we've made it in europe and america that the kind of stress that we put on young people induces the kind of sturm and drang the storm and stress that exists but it isn't necessary Here then was the proof that Franz Boas had been searching for. That Samoan teenagers experienced none of the growing pains that American teens did. And if Samoan teenagers didn't have stress, then that meant that stress was not innate. It must be determined by one's upbringing, not one's genes. And if that was true, then not just American adolescents, but human beings the world over, must be the products not of nature, but nurture. After a stay of nine months, Mead wrote to her tutor, Franz Boas, informing him that her work was done. Now that this year's fieldwork is finishing up, it's possible to look back and evaluate it. It's been such fun being able to talk to me. language and make speeches, being the center of genuine ceremonies rather than merely a strictly scientific onlooker. I shall not be entirely at ease until I have laid my work in your hands, but I am finishing up my stay in the field with a good taste in my mouth."Little did Meade know just what sort of impact her work would have.
In 1928, Margaret Mead published her findings in a book titled Coming of Age in Samoa. Going on to sell several million copies in nine languages, it would become one of the best-selling social science books of all time. The book was a phenomenal success.
It was readable, it was literate, it was sympathetic. and it ended best of all with some prescriptions for how to do transform our own family lives in society needs message was simple humans weren't just determined by their biology instead we all all had it in our power to change our lives. I think that Americans found this message that it wasn't in our genes, but it was in our cultures, to be a very acceptable message. It was a very American message. What she offered was the sense that we can make choices about the kind of society we want to be.
We have that freedom. Propelled by the phenomenal success of coming of age, Margaret Mead went on to become one of the most preeminent anthropologists in the world. Coming of age in Samoa made Mead a celebrity way beyond academia. She became a spokesperson for the power of culture and socialization, for showing us just how variable humanity can be.
Though she later acknowledged the role of biology in human development, Mead remained a symbol of the overriding importance of nurture. So powerful was Mead's philosophy, that 40 years later, it would be embraced by an entirely new generation. A generation inspired by its utopian message, that we could change our lives for the better. Mead's arguments, not only in Coming of Age, but in her subsequent books from the South Seas, certainly contributed to the countercultural revolution of the 60s. She touched the heart of a young nation that was in rebellion, particularly when it came to women's sex lives.
I don't even know why I'd be without you. When the 60s came, when these liberation movements began to form, she immediately allied herself with the kids. And she would sit on the Columbia campus talking to the kids who were demonstrating, and they would say, but Dr. Mead, you understand us.
In later years, Meade took to carrying a staff and wearing capes, gradually resembling a prophet more than an anthropologist. We face the task of recognizing that all men are indeed our neighbors and our brothers. She was an oracle. Meade had an opinion, and in fact, the common question, the cliché, was, what would Margaret Meade say? That's right.
But if Meade's persona brought her worldwide fame, it also made her enemies. Only a few years after being voted one of the three most famous women in American history, Meade and her message that nurture outshone nature became the focus of one of the most bitter feuds in the history of science. The man behind the row was Derek Freeman.
He was seen as a person that was unstable emotionally, that was given to great mood swings. Freeman was a very good actor. Freeman was professor of anthropology at the Australian National University.
I'm told he could be very charming, though I think he was probably a bully all his life. A man with a reputation for being difficult. This was a guy who saw the world as full of either supporters or enemies. And if you were his supporter, you were his for life. And if you were an enemy, he would go to great steps to try to treat you that way and to make sure you knew it.
Early on in his career, Freeman had been a believer in Margaret Mead and the supremacy of nurture over nature. When I was a student, I worked in the... seminar of Ernst Beaglehole and he introduced me to anthropology and to Margaret Mead's work and in particular taught us that this book which was then already well known was of great anthropological significance Such was his fascination with Meade's book that in 1940 Freeman visited Samoa himself.
Over the course of the next three and a half years, Freeman got so close to the Samoan people that he'd be granted an honour that had eluded even Meade. Quite unexpectedly, all of the chiefs of the village... assembled and said that they were going to give me a title, an important title of the village.
This title is Longona Itanga which literally means heard at the tree felling and it is the title of the heir apparent of the high... chief of the village. His self-image was affected by that title and he took great pride in the fact that the Samoans valued him highly. This acceptance by the Samoans was absolutely overwhelming.
He used to cry, he would cry whenever he talked about it. As a chief, Freeman was granted unrivalled access to the inner workings of Samoan society. And it was then that I began to realise that many of the things that Margaret Mead had reported in Coming of Age in Samoa certainly did not accord with what I was witnessing.
He began to see that the Samoans were not the bland, innocuous, affectless, tranquil people that Meade had seen them to be, or portrayed them to be. The Samoans were full of... Jealousy, hatred, aggression, possessiveness and all the things that in fact make them human.
But that Margaret Mead... As Freeman continued his research, he began to realize that virtually all of Mead's observations in coming of age were wrong. He used to refer to these as her Samoan fantasies.
Because he saw this as spreading the misrepresentation of Samoa and a false kind of anthropology to the general public. It dawned on Freeman that if Meade's observations were wrong, then her conclusions must also be incorrect. And if that was the case, then one of the most enduring arguments for the supremacy of nurture over nature was a sham.
Derek Freeman now had an epiphany. He decided to devote the rest of his career to bringing about a revolution in anthropology. A radical shift away from the power of nurture to a much more biological approach.
Derek had a very specific hero image of himself. It was St. George. And he modelled his behaviour on what he perceived to be St. George doing, which is slaying the dragon, of course.
And at the end of Derek Freeman's lance was Margaret Mead. Because Freeman knew that the best way to bring about his revolution was to discredit the one book which embodied everything he now thought rotten with anthropology, coming of age in Samoa. Hostilities commenced when Margaret Mead visited Australia on a lecture tour. We had a long private meeting in my study. I laid before her all of the evidence that I had that indicated that her conclusion was not empirically justified.
She was very much taken aback by this and subsequently reported that she felt that her results were now under threat. He questioned her about specific items, including the statement that she made that the Samoans had a perfect adjustment. in their social life and Margaret reacted strongly to this saying I never said any such thing and he just showed her in an underlined red passage yes she did and she grabbed the book out of his hand and refused to let him read any further passages from her own book I think it's still a bit of a mystery uh what happened there knowing Derek Derek would have harangued Margaret you know and pointed out you're wrong you're wrong and therefore she would say Oh my goodness, yes.
I got it wrong. How nice of you to point this out to me. And I think it kind of amazed Derek that this didn't happen.
It looked as though the matter might end there. Years passed, with little sign that Freeman was ready to go public with his refutation. In fact, so long did Derek Freeman remain silent, that in 1978, Margaret Mead died.
Her reputation... Still intact. But if people assumed that Meade's death would signal the end of Freeman's quest, they were wrong, because Derek had been a busy man. In 1983, Derek Freeman announced the publication of a book.
Well, it was catastrophic. It was front page news. It was going to sink cultural anthropology once and for all.
It was devastating. Coming of age had become like a religious orthodoxy. And Derek's book hit.
that religious orthodoxy a bit like the Da Vinci Code has hit the Catholic Church. It came, I think, as a shock, as a bombshell. So even people who had a favorable impression of Margaret Mead were now asking the question, was her fame that well deserved? Freeman's book accused Mead of giving rise to what he called the most widely propagated myth of 20th century anthropology. Derrick's book was titled Margaret Mead and Samoa the making and unmaking of an anthropological myth.
A very clever powerful title in a way precisely because of the ambiguity of that last word that punch line the myth. The one myth was the myth of Samoa being as Margaret Mead had painted it that was a myth. The other myth was that culture could completely trump Samoa. nature. From the outset, Freeman launched into a scathing critique of Mead and her method, condemning her poor grasp of the language, the limited time she'd spent in Samoa, and her tiny pool of interviewees.
Her material on the Samoan girls was based on a few that she knew, not on any in-depth and long-term analyses of Samoan culture. The title of the book is Coming of Age in Samoa, but she actually studied adolescent girls only on one island of Tahu, and her sample was 26 young girls. So she didn't have the evidence to generalize to Samoa, and that's a grave deficiency. A deficiency which, according to Freeman, had resulted in one gross error after another. Freeman claimed that growing up in Samoa was as fraught with difficulty as anywhere else, and nothing like Meade's period of perfect adjustment.
Margaret Mead presented a picture of these people as very shallow. They were just too easy. about everything.
They didn't have any religion because that would be too upsetting. There was no jealousy, there was no violence, there was no rape. Well, on all these points, Derek presented not just his impressions, but masses of evidence, court records and everything else that, no, the Samoans, amazingly, were just like us. I would say that Samoa doesn't stand out in my experience from any other place.
You know, there's the usual complex mix of human behaviour. And certainly I witnessed several acts of violence while I was there. I remember one of my very best friends at the time being beaten until her arm was broken by her father because she didn't obey his rules.
As for Meade's portrayal of Samoa as a haven of free love, Derek Freeman argued that she'd underplayed something crucial. This original footage from the 1920s, about the same time Need was in Samoa, shows a young girl being prepared for a Taupo, or virgin, ceremony. The highest ideal, to them, of a young woman, was the total virgin. And this was absolutely central, and the fate of girls who weren't virgins, who failed on this, of the ceremonial virgins, was terrible. Far from being promiscuous, Samoans, according to Freeman, worshipped chastity above all else, something need had ignored.
Furthermore, Freeman argued that Mead had also overlooked the influence of Christianity on Samoan sexual habits. Derek saw that the Samoans were highly puritanical, very Christian, and puritan Christian at that, something which Margaret had left out virtually completely. Anybody who's been to Samoa knows that there's a deep religious conviction. have churches everywhere.
There is no Samoan who is not organized into a religious community. Even Samoans, it seemed, didn't recognize the picture Margaret Mead had painted of them. Those things she wrote down is not right.
It's not right. That's why people get mad with Earth, because some Earth idea is right, but the rest of Earth ideas is wrong. But most serious of all, Derek Freeman accused Margaret Mead of possibly the greatest sin in all of science, that of manipulating one's findings. To fit a pre-held theory, in this case, that nurture trumped nature.
Derek placed great emphasis on the fact that Margaret Mead came to her field work with an agenda. He felt that that distorted all her collection of evidence, determined how she collected her evidence, and how she evaluated it. And then when she wrote it up, it was written up in what was seen as just a popular novel-etish, naive way that was geared more at selling copies than it was in answering ethnographic questions. And he felt that this was... Job done.
Freeman sat back and waited. The next thing I knew was one morning while I was having a bath here, the telephone rang. And I got up and went to the telephone, unclad, quite naked, and there was Ewan McDowell on the telephone. McDowell was a journalist with a new...
New York Times. I'd never heard of him before, and I talked to him for about 40 minutes. And on the 31st of January, it was on the front page of the New York Times.
Scenting blood, the rest of the world's media latched onto the story. The media loved Freeman's book in a way that shocked me. For almost two years, the media took this story and ran with it and created story after story.
I think the attack fed into the love that the public has of debunking heroic figures. There's almost an anti-heroic tendency and Meade was something of a hero. For so many years the outsider, Derek Freeman was now a bona fide media celebrity.
I don't think he assumed that this would make him world famous and they'd write plays about him and things. I think he didn't mind that once it happened. Any more than Margaret did. But I don't think he predicted that.
Certainly Freeman couldn't have predicted that he and his book would make it onto primetime TV. Derek Freeman, Professor Emeritus Anthropology, Australian National University. You're a nature guy.
I was asked to appear on the Donahue show with Kathy Bateson and Derek Freeman, which at the time I think had the highest television audience of any show, about 36 million viewers. And throughout the show, whenever the lights would go down and there would be a commercial break, he would lean over and whisper intimidating things in my ear like, I'm going to get you, or I'm going to find mistakes in your work, you're next on my agenda. I was made a Samoan chief.
This boy is untitled. No, I have a PhD, my friend. One moment you would see the charming and polite face.
At another moment you would hear real viciousness in what he was saying and you came to feel that there was a sort of reptilian quality to him that you didn't know when he would strike. With their profession under attack as never before, the anthropological community began to close ranks. This was an attack that went too much to the heart of what they believe.
Not just what they knew or what they demonstrated, but what they believed. And so the response was quite violent. I actually don't think that most people were defending Margaret Mead personally, herself. Anthropologists love a good fight and they have no problem with restudies and with people attacking one another, but they have a sense of a fair fight. And I think there was a sense that this was not a fair fight.
The opening salvo came from the august offices of the American Anthropological Association. The American Anthropological Association, in one of its greater moments of glory, actually passed a resolution saying that his book was in error. It was scientific error. Ha! As though this can be decided.
And this used to drive Derek nuts. Condemned by his peers. Freeman nevertheless drew strength from his newfound isolation.
Derek said, in effect, shame on you for condemning a piece of valid, objective research. It betrays your own ideological commitment and the insufficiency and deficiency of your supervision of research practices. It was a very angry response. He could not believe that...
Truth could be determined by consensus, by a show of hands. You couldn't believe that the scientific method was being cast out in that manner. He was incredulous. By now, Freeman was being attacked from all sides.
As magazine articles, academic papers, even books were churned out in defense of Margaret Mead. Her defenders argued... That Mead had visited Samoa in the 20s, while much of Freeman's evidence had been gathered as late as the 1960s, and that in the intervening 40 years, much was bound to have changed. It was as if he was blind to things that any thoughtful scholar would take into account.
Mead and Freeman really saw two different Samoas. On the one hand, the Samoa that Margaret Mead experienced had far less influence of the church than the one that Derek Freeman really was used to. Furthermore, the two anthropologists...
Psychologists had got their information from very different sources. Freeman, very proud of the fact that he was a chief, would naturally gravitate towards the information from the chiefs. And Mead, who was assigned to really interview adolescents, not chiefs, and her information came largely from young girls. It's not surprising that the information would appear quite different from both of these sources. Freeman was also accused of placing far too much emphasis on Samoa's system of ceremonial virgins, or taupos.
Freeman concluded that Samoans worship virginity and that indeed place a higher value on virginity than probably any other society known to anthropology. What Freeman doesn't talk about are the marriages of everybody else. The Taupo system applied to the very upper tiers of Samoan society. It did not apply to most of the rest of Samoan society, which had a different system of marriage. But most damaging of all for Freeman, Mead's sympathizers publicly questioned his academic rigor.
Some of the critics took a close look at how Freeman carefully edited. ...and manipulated information. And this is not something that people expect of scholars.
And if you analyze the intellectual structure of his attack in detail, it was inconsistent, it was full of quotes out of context, it was intellectually dishonest, and it was just poison. By the mid-80s, it appeared as though Derek Freeman's attempt to refute coming of age had failed. That both Meade's reputation and the supremacy of nurture over nature had weathered the storm.
But Freeman wasn't prepared to throw in the towel just yet. He was just like a dog that's got his teeth into something a bulldog doesn't let go. And Derek was not about to let go of this. This was his final claim.
to fame in the world and I think that he was anxious to keep this alive as long as he could. In 1987, Derek Freeman went back to Samoa, accompanied by a film crew making a documentary about the Mead controversy. He became intensely curious about what had happened with Margaret Mead's research in Samoa in those early days. He wanted to find out.
He really genuinely wanted to get to the bottom of that mystery. Less than 24 hours after his return, Freeman stumbled upon a remarkable piece of new evidence that appeared to totally undermine the key message to emerge from coming of age. The central thing about the book that everybody has globbed onto since, and of course this was the central thing that American society had, Taken from Margaret Mead was the ease of sexual existence of the Samoan girls with their casual lovers.
I mean, they invented recreational sex, as we came to call it. Freeman's new evidence seemed to give him an extraordinary insight into just how Mead had reached this conclusion about the Samoan attitude towards sex. Well, the day after we arrived in Samoa, we heard that there could be someone on an island close by. Who had been living on the mainland for many, many years and had come back to live in Samoa again and she was actually one of the girls that Margaret Mead interviewed.
The woman's name was Fa'apua. More than 60 years ago, she and Margaret Mead had been close friends. Derek was very excited about that news because for years and years he'd been trying to find someone and he hadn't. What's more, Pa'apua was prepared to be interviewed by the two Australians. He was over the moon.
He said, Oh, my God, you don't know how important this is. This is wonderful news that someone's alive who can tell the story. He knew the significance more than I did. When we sat down to interview the lady, we had absolutely no idea what she was going to say or how deeply connected she was to my... Only when Fa'apua began to speak that the size of the part she played in Meade's portrayal of Samoan sexuality became apparent.
The people of the land, the people of the land, they are not going to let us go. They are going to let us go. They are going to let us go.
They are going to let us go. They are going to let us go. They are going to let us go. They are going to let us go.
They are going to let us go. They are going to let us go. They are going to let us go. They are going to let us go. They are going to let us go.
They are going to let us go. In other words, Margaret Mead had been hoodwinked. Coming of age in Samoa, and all its evidence for the power of nurture over nature, was based on the lies of Samoan girls.
He said to me, Frank, you don't know what you've got here. You don't know how important this is that you've just filmed today. And he noted the day, you know, it was November 1987. He said, this will go down in my diary as the most significant day in my life. Freeman immediately began work on a second book, based on Fa'apua's astonishing claim. A book he called The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead.
Let's show them on fire. Freeman thought that Mead was not simply hoaxed, but that she was fatefully hoaxed. It's almost as if she set herself up to be hoaxed, because according to Freeman, she didn't really understand the culture.
She didn't speak the language that well. She wanted a certain outcome. I think Derek thought that the second book would be the nail in the coffin, as it were.
This would be the thing that finally did it. But unfortunately for Freeman, Meade's allies were once again lying in wait. Is it possible that Samoans will joke or have small lies about sex?
Absolutely. They do it all the time. But generally they do it with a kind of wink, which lets you in on the fact that they're joking and that everybody knows it. So the question is, would Margaret Mead have missed it if they had joked?
And I don't know the answer to that question. After that my intuitions tell me no, that she was too canny. Mead's supporters argued that she would obviously have realized that Fa'apua was in fact a Taupo or virgin.
Being a Taupo, and Margaret Mead knew she was a Taupo, it was very unlikely that she would have thought that Fa'apua would have been engaging in the kinds of casual love affairs that she had heard about from other girls. Certainly she would have known that if she were in an affair, there was nothing casual about it, because she would have been watched by her brothers, by the chiefs, etc., and under a kind of vigilance. Moreover, it was pointed out that Mead had got her information from girls other than Fa'apua, who anyway was the wrong age. Mead had already taken a sample of 25 adolescent girls from the three villages.
Why she would need the opinion of a Taupo in her mid-twenties to tell her about adolescent girl sexuality is unclear. Yet again, Derek Freeman had run into a brick wall. After devoting more than 40 years of his life to discrediting Margaret Mead's coming of age, he was still no nearer to achieving his ambition.
Instead, he remained out on a limb, vilified by the establishment he was so desperate to reform. I have always been a heretic, but what you've got to be in science is a heretic who gets it right. It's no use being a heretic who gets it wrong, because then you're a pariah dog in their eyes. But if you are a heretic who gets it right, you can't do better.
So is it possible, after all these years, to gauge who was right and who was wrong? Certainly, in the 80 years since Mead so powerfully argued the case for the influence of nurture over nature, only for Derek Freeman to refute it, anthropology has changed a great deal. deal.
No longer is it believed that human beings are the products of simply their biology or their environment. Instead, the old battle lines between nature and nurture have disappeared, to be replaced by a more all-encompassing approach. And yet, despite this newfound harmony, the Mead-Freeman controversy continues to divide anthropology like no other topic.
On the one hand, Derek Freeman's supporters argue that he was a visionary, that by taking on a science which had become stale, he helped to move anthropology on. For those critics who say that the controversy was nothing but a media event, simply neglect this impact that his work actually did have. He really believed that he had set anthropology, you know, he set it on its feet, that it had lost its direction. On the other hand, there are those convinced that Freeman was a fanatic, whose only achievement was to tarnish the name of one of the greatest thinkers America has ever produced. I think one could say that one might feel sorry for Derek Freeman, really unbalanced and in the grip of an obsession, except for the fact that he was able to ride that obsession.
To his personal version of fame and to do an immense amount of damage. And it worked for him. He had fun.
That's very clear that he had just great fun. He'd found his specialty. But from all the bitterness and rancor, one overriding question has emerged. How could two scientists who visited the same part of the world and come up... with such different sets of results.
Anthropologists, probably more than most people, are aware that in trying to describe a society, all understanding is to some extent positioned, and that's the word anthropologists use. And the picture that we get of a society, any society, is going to look different depending upon whose eyes we use to see it. In other words, more than almost...
any other science. Anthropology is a subjective affair. Some scholars have understood the Mead-Freeman controversy in terms of the Rashomon effect.
That is Kurosawa's film technique whereby he played a scene from four different angles with four different stories without any conclusion, allowing the viewer to decide for themselves what the nature of truth was in this situation. I think that's a possible way of understanding any ethnographic description, knowing that it will be told from a different vantage point, if it's told from the viewpoint of men or women, or a younger generation versus an older generation, or during different historical periods. So given that anthropology can't be truly objective, perhaps the irony of the Mead-Freeman controversy is this.
that both its protagonists were right and wrong. I think Derek and Margaret were both looking for something they believed they could find, which was the absolute truth about Samoa, whereas, of course, what you get are different versions of Samoa. So, like anthropology itself, with its new balance between nurture and nature, maybe the real Samoa is even more complex than Mead or Freeman portrayed.
Both chaste and promiscuous, laid-back and disciplinarian. In fact, a place much like anywhere else. Another tale from the jungle here on BBC4 next Monday at 9. Next up tonight, continuing the anthropology season, a gothic mystery and an Oscar-nominated piece of animation.