Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth (1983) is a book by Derek Freeman.
Published five years after Margaret Mead had died, Derek Freeman – a New Zealand anthropologist who lived in Samoa –challenged all of Mead's major findings. In 1988, he participated in the filming of Margaret Mead in Samoa, directed by Frank Heimans, which claims to document one of Mead's original informants, now an elderly woman, swearing that the information she and her friend provided Mead when they were teenagers was false; one of the girls would say of Mead on videotape years later:
- 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.
Another of Mead's statements on which Freeman focused was her claim that through the use of chicken blood, Samoan girls could and do lie about their status of virginity. Freeman pointed out that virginity of the bride is so crucial to the status of Samoan men that they have a specific ritual in which the bride's hymen is manually ruptured in public, by the groom himself or by the chief, making deception via chicken blood impossible. On this ground, Freeman argued that Mead must have based her account on (false) hearsay from non-Samoan sources.
The argument hinged on the place of the taupou system in Samoan society. According to Mead, the taupou system is one of institutionalized virginity for young women of high rank, and it is exclusive to women of high rank. According to Freeman, all Samoan women emulated the taupou system, and Mead's informants denied having engaged in casual sex as young women and claimed that they had lied to Mead.
