The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis of Her Samoan Research

Australian anthropologist Freeman set off a firestorm of controversy with his 1983 book, Margaret Mead and Samoa, which presented Mead's 1928 bestseller, Coming of Age in Samoa, as wildly inaccurate and based on slipshod research. Now Freeman goes even further, using a wealth of new evidence to argue not only that Mead was the victim of her own predisposition to reach conclusions acceptable to her mentor, the cultural determinist Franz Boas, but also that she had the wool pulled over her eyes by some canny Samoans. In 1987, Freeman interviewed Fa'apua'a Fa'amu, who was a 24-year-old ceremonial virgin in 1925-26 when, as one of Mead's principal informants, she claimed that she and other young women regularly spent nights with members of the opposite sex. But in 1987 (and in a 1989 videotaped interview), Fa'apua'a stated that her youthful boasts of premarital promiscuity were a mischievous prank, an outright fabrication made in response to Mead's insistent questions. Moreover, ""recreational lying"" is a widespread practice in Samoa, Freeman reports. Freeman draws on his own fieldwork in Samoa, on Mead's Samoan field notes (which he pried loose from the Library of Congress) and on newly unearthed correspondence between Mead and Boas in which Mead admits that she made no systematic investigation of Samoan sexual behavior. His painstaking detective work is convincing and leaves the woman known as the ""Mother-Goddess of American Anthropology"" teetering precariously on her pedestal. Photos. (Dec.)