Editing Margaret Mead (section)

===''Coming of Age in Samoa'' (1928)===
{{Main|Coming of Age in Samoa}}
[[File:Samoan taupou girl 1896.jpg|thumb|Samoan girl, {{circa}} 1896]]
Mead's first ethnographic work described the life of Samoan girls and women on the island of Tau in the Manu'a Archipelago in 1926.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Mead |first=Margaret |url=https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/44550546 |title=Coming of age in Samoa : a psychological study of primitive youth for western civilisation |date=2001 |publisher=Perennial Classics |isbn=0-688-05033-6 |edition=First Perennial Classics |location=New York |oclc=44550546}}</ref> The book includes analyses of how children were raised and educated, sex relations, dance, development of personality, conflict, and how women matured into old age. Mead explicitly sought to contrast adolescence in Samoa with that in America, which she characterized as difficult, constrained, and awkward. In the foreword to ''Coming of Age in Samoa'', Mead's advisor, [[Franz Boas]], wrote of the book's significance:<ref>Franz Boas, "Preface" in Margaret Mead, ''Coming of Age in Samoa''</ref>

<blockquote>Courtesy, modesty, good manners, conformity to definite ethical standards are universal, but what constitutes courtesy, modesty, very good manners, and definite ethical standards is not universal. It is instructive to know that standards differ in the most unexpected ways.</blockquote>

In this way, the book tackled the question of nature versus nurture, whether adolescence and its associated developments were a difficult biological transition for all humans or whether they were cultural processes shaped in particular societies. Mead believed childhood, adolescence, gender, and sex relations were largely driven by cultural practices and expressions.

Mead's findings suggested that the community ignores both boys and girls until they are about 15 or 16. Before then, children have little social standing within the community. Mead also found that marriage is regarded as a social and economic arrangement in which wealth, rank, and job skills of the husband and wife are taken into consideration. Aside from marriage, Mead identified two types of sex relations: love affairs and adultery. The exceptions to these practices include women married to chiefs and young women who hold the title of taupo, a ceremonial princess, whose virginity was required. Mead described Samoan youth as often having free, experimental, and open sexual relationships, including homosexual relationships, which was at odds with mainstream American norms around sexuality.

In 1970, [[National Educational Television]] produced a documentary in commemoration of the 40th anniversary Mead's first expedition to New Guinea. Through the eyes of Mead on her final visit to the village of Peri, the film records how the role of the anthropologist has changed in the forty years since 1928.<ref>{{Citation|title=NET Festival; 49; Margaret Mead's New Guinea Journal. Part 1|url=http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-75-77sn0b0r|language=en|access-date=December 16, 2020}}</ref>
[[File:Margaret Mead NYWTS.jpg|thumb|Mead, {{circa}} 1950]]

====Criticism by Derek Freeman====
After her death, Mead's Samoan research was criticized by the anthropologist [[Derek Freeman]], who published a book arguing against many of Mead's conclusions in ''[[Coming of Age in Samoa]]''.<ref>[[Derek Freeman]] (1983). ''Margaret Mead and Samoa''. Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press. {{ISBN|978-0-674-54830-5}}.</ref> Freeman argued that Mead had misunderstood Samoan culture when she argued that Samoan culture did not place many restrictions on youths' sexual explorations. Freeman argued instead that Samoan culture prized female chastity and virginity and that Mead had been misled by her female Samoan informants. Freeman found that the Samoan islanders whom Mead had depicted in such utopian terms were intensely competitive and had murder and rape rates higher than those in the United States. Furthermore, the men were intensely sexually jealous, which contrasted sharply with Mead's depiction of "free love" among the Samoans.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Buss |first=David M. |title=Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind |date=2019 |publisher=Routledge |isbn=978-1-138-08861-0 |pages=26}}</ref>

Freeman's book was controversial in its turn and was met with considerable backlash and harsh criticism from the anthropology community, but it was received enthusiastically by communities of scientists who believed that sexual mores were more or less universal across cultures.<ref>{{cite video | title = Margaret Mead and Samoa| year = 1987| author = Frank Heimans| time = 20:25| quote=Roger Fox, Professor of Anthropology, Rutgers: '[What Freeman did was to] attack the goddess... she couldn't be wrong because if she was wrong then the doctrine was wrong and the whole liberal humanitarian scheme was wrong.'| url = https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOCYhmnx6o8}}</ref><ref>{{cite video| title = Margaret Mead and Samoa| year = 1987| author = Frank Heimans| time = 21:20| quote = Marc Swartz, Professor of Anthropology, University of California, San Diego: "one of the leading anthropologists came out immediately after Derek's book was out and said I haven't read the book but I know he's wrong."| url = https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOCYhmnx6o8}}</ref> Later in 1983, a special session of Mead's supporters in the [[American Anthropological Association]] (to which Freeman was not invited) declared it to be "poorly written, unscientific, irresponsible and misleading."<ref name="shawnyt">{{cite news |author=John Shaw |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/05/world/derek-freeman-who-challenged-margaret-mead-on-samoa-dies-at-84.html |title='Derek Freeman, Who Challenged Margaret Mead on Samoa, Dies at 84,' |work=[[The New York Times]] |date=August 5, 2001}}</ref> Some anthropologists who studied Samoan culture argued in favor of Freeman's findings and contradicted those of Mead, but others argued that Freeman's work did not invalidate Mead's work because Samoan culture had been changed by the integration of Christianity in the decades between Mead's and Freeman's fieldwork periods.<ref>{{cite video | title = Margaret Mead and Samoa| year = 1987| author= Frank Heimans| time = 26:125| quote = Anthropologists Richard Goodman and Tim Omera talk about their work in Samoa and how it supports Freeman's findings| url = https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOCYhmnx6o8}}</ref>

[[Eleanor Leacock]] traveled to Samoa in 1985 and undertook research among the youth living in [[urban area]]s. The research results indicate that the assertions of [[Derek Freeman]] were seriously flawed. Leacock pointed out that Mead's famous Samoan fieldwork was undertaken on an outer island that had not been colonialized. Freeman, meanwhile, had undertaken fieldwork in an urban slum plagued by drug abuse, structural unemployment, and [[gang]] violence.<ref>{{cite book | editor1=Andrew Lyons | editor2=Harriet Lyons | editor3=Robert J. Gordon |title=Fifty Key Anthropologists |publisher= Taylor & Francis |year=2010 |page=124 |isbn=9781136880124 }}</ref>

Mead was careful to shield the identity of all her subjects for confidentiality, but Freeman found and interviewed one of her original participants, and Freeman reported that she admitted to having willfully misled Mead. She said that she and her friends were having fun with Mead and telling her stories.<ref>{{cite video | title = Margaret Mead and Samoa| year = 1987| author= Frank Heimans| time = 41:20| quote = We girls would pinch each other and tell her we were out with the boys. We were only joking but she took it seriously. As you know, Samoan girls are terrific liars and love making fun of people, but Margaret thought it was all true. | url = https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOCYhmnx6o8}}</ref>

In 1996, the author [[Martin Orans]] examined Mead's notes preserved at the Library of Congress and credits her for leaving all of her recorded data available to the general public. Orans points out that Freeman's basic criticisms, that Mead was duped by ceremonial virgin Fa'apua'a Fa'amu, who later swore to Freeman that she had played a joke on Mead, were equivocal for several reasons. Mead was well aware of the forms and frequency of Samoan joking, she provided a careful account of the sexual restrictions on ceremonial virgins that corresponds to Fa'apua'a Fa'auma'a's account to Freeman, and Mead's notes make clear that she had reached her conclusions about Samoan sexuality before meeting Fa'apua'a Fa'amu. Orans points out that Mead's data support several different conclusions and that Mead's conclusions hinge on an [[Symbolic anthropology|interpretive]], rather than [[positivism|positivist]], approach to culture. Orans went on to point out concerning Mead's work elsewhere that her own notes do not support her published conclusive claims. Evaluating Mead's work in Samoa from a positivist stance, Orans's assessment of the controversy was that Mead did not formulate her research agenda in scientific terms and that "her work may properly be damned with the harshest scientific criticism of all, that it is '[[not even wrong]]'."<ref name="orans">Orans, Martin (1996), ''Not Even Wrong: Margaret Mead, Derek Freeman, and the Samoans''.</ref>{{page needed|date=September 2022}}

On the whole, anthropologists have rejected the notion that Mead's conclusions rested on the validity of a single interview with a single person and find instead that Mead based her conclusions on the sum of her observations and interviews during her time in Samoa and that the status of the single interview did not falsify her work.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Shankman |first1=Paul |title=The Trashing of Margaret Mead |publisher=The University of Wisconsin Press |isbn=978-0-299-23454-6 |page=113|date=December 3, 2009 }}</ref> Others such as Orans maintained that even though Freeman's critique was invalid, Mead's study was not sufficiently scientifically rigorous to support the conclusions she drew.<ref name="orans" />{{page needed|date=September 2022}}

In 1999, Freeman published another book, ''The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis of Her Samoan Research'', including previously unavailable material. In his obituary in ''The New York Times'', John Shaw stated that Freeman's thesis, though upsetting many, had by the time of his death generally gained widespread acceptance.<ref name="shawnyt" /> Recent work has nonetheless challenged Freeman's critique.<ref>Paul Shankman,[''The Trashing of Margaret Mead: Anatomy of an Anthropological Controversy,''] University of Wisconsin Press, 2009 esp. pp. 47–71.</ref> A frequent criticism of Freeman is that he regularly misrepresented Mead's research and views.<ref name="ReferenceA">Shankman, Paul 2009 ''The Trashing of Margaret Mead: Anatomy of an Anthropological Controversy''.  Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press</ref>{{page needed|date=September 2022}}<ref>See Appell 1984, Brady 1991, Feinberg 1988, Leacock 1988, Levy 1984, Marshall 1993, Nardi 1984, Patience and Smith 1986, Paxman 1988, Scheper-Hughes 1984, Shankman 1996, Young and Juan 1985</ref> In a 2009 evaluation of the debate, anthropologist Paul Shankman concluded:<ref name="ReferenceA"/>

<blockquote>There is now a large body of criticism of Freeman's work from a number of perspectives in which Mead, Samoa, and anthropology appear in a very different light than they do in Freeman's work. Indeed, the immense significance that Freeman gave his critique looks like 'much ado about nothing' to many of his critics.</blockquote>

While nurture-oriented anthropologists are more inclined to agree with Mead's conclusions, some non-anthropologists who take a nature-oriented approach follow Freeman's lead, such as Harvard psychologist [[Steven Pinker]], biologist [[Richard Dawkins]], evolutionary psychologist [[David Buss]], science writer [[Matt Ridley]], classicist [[Mary Lefkowitz]]<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.unl.edu/rhames/courses/current/readings/Shankman-Trashing%20of%20Margaret%20Mead.pdf |title=The Trashing of Margaret Mead – How Derek Freeman Fooled us all on an Alleged Hoax |access-date=November 2, 2013}}</ref>{{page needed|date=September 2022}}.

In her 2015 book ''[[Galileo's Middle Finger]]'', [[Alice Dreger]] argues that Freeman's accusations were unfounded and misleading. A detailed review of the controversy by Paul Shankman, published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2009, supports the contention that Mead's research was essentially correct and concludes that Freeman cherry-picked his data and misrepresented both Mead and Samoan culture.<ref>{{cite book | title=The Trashing of Margaret Mead: Anatomy of an Anthropological Controversy| author=Shankman, Paul | year=2009 | publisher=University of Wisconsin Press | isbn=978-0-299-23454-6}}</ref>{{page needed|date=September 2022}}<ref>{{cite journal|doi=10.1126/science.1189202|author=Robert A. Levine|title=Cutting a Controversy Down to Size|journal=Science|pages=1108|volume=328|date=May 28, 2010|issue=5982|s2cid=162343521}}</ref><ref>{{cite web|title=The Trashing of Margaret Mead|url=https://savageminds.org/2010/10/13/the-trashing-of-margaret-mead/|website=Savage Minds|access-date=August 4, 2017|date=October 13, 2010}}</ref>

A survey of 301 anthropology faculty in the United States in 2016 had two thirds agreeing with a statement that Mead "romanticizes the sexual freedom of Samoan adolescents" and half agreeing that it was ideologically motivated.<ref>{{cite journal| last1=Horowitz| first1=Mark| last2=Yaworsky| first2=William| last3=Kickham| first3=Kenneth| date=October 2019| title=Anthropology's Science Wars: Insights from a New Survey| journal=[[Current Anthropology]]| volume=60| issue=5| pages=674–698| doi = 10.1086/705409| s2cid = 203051445}}</ref>