Nurturing a Myth

Coming of Age in Samoa,
by Margaret Mead,
USA, 1928

PSST!  Want a stress-free environment?  Palm trees and lagoons?  A home life without discipline and harsh words?  A work life far from book-keeping and bottom lines, where picturesque ceremonies fill each carefree day?  And all the guilt-free sex you can take?  You do?  Then Anthropological Fantasy Tours have just what you're looking for!  Have you seen our brochure? -- it's Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead.

According to large numbers of people, including its remarkably energetic, ambitious and imaginative author, this 1928 book settled the than distinct adults (such as "nature versus nurture" debate once and for all.  This was and is a debate about real issues.  Up until 1920 the "nature, not nurture" eugenics movement had set the pace.  The eugenicists claimed that individual genetic inheritance was the main clue to human achievement.  Some went further, taking the much more dubious line that the collective achievements of Europe itself were also a matter of biology (or race) rather than environment (or culture).  With the rise of the Nazis this was soon no laughing matter.

In sharp contrast, "nurture, not nature" was the slogan of America's cultural anthropologists, who promptly took the argument to the other extreme.  The ageing advocate of this point of view was Franz Boas, and he was desperate to rout the eugenicists before he died.  Boas was also the supervisor of an adoring young woman anthropologist, and as he wondered how to demonstrate the paramountcy of cultural rules over genetic design a solution suggested itself.  He would send this devoted disciple to collect "appropriate evidence" from another culture far off in the South Seas.

So away to Polynesia went the 23-year-old Margaret Mead.  There she was required by Boas to study an aspect of human behaviour which everyone assumed to be biological -- the difficulties and unhappiness of sexual and social adjustment at adolescence.  She would look at the situation in Samoa.  Would she find the same difficulties and unhappiness as in America?  If she didn't -- if instead the sun shone down on a no-worries, do-your-own-thing world -- that would show conclusively that "biology is not destiny".

For Boas such a finding would confirm the environmentalist doctrine that social life is just a matter of arbitrary rules.  For Mead and countless others it meant that all America had to do was change the rules regarding parental authority, discipline and juvenile sexuality (weakening them all of course), and the dream of sexual liberation would come true.

And lo and behold, a world of easy licentiousness is just what she found.  Appearingat the height of the Jazz Age, the book she wrote was a huge success.  A blend of feminist wishful thinking, ethnographic misinterpretation and romantic writing of the kind associated with Mills and Boon, Coming of Age in Samoa was a potent mixture which has sometimes been imitated but has seldom been done as well.  Yet, as Derek Freeman showed in Margaret Mead and Samoa (1983), in all important particulars it is demonstrably untrue.

Mead's portrait of Samoans as mild-mannered Pacific pacifists travestied a culture well known for prowess in war.  Her report that no individual mother was recognised by infants, just a "group of adults" with general minding responsibilities, grossly misinterpreted a situation where the primary bond between mother and child is as strong as anywhere else.  As for the famously relaxed sexual life of the Samoans -- this had to wait 50 years before being publicly and systematically exposed for the nonsense it was.

Franz Boas wrote in his introduction to Mead's book that it was based on "painstaking investigation".  But how little poor Boas knew!  Perhaps the most astonishing thing about Coming of Age in Samoa is what her "painstaking investigation" really boiled down to.  In recent years, Derek Freeman has studied Mead's Samoan field notebooks and other papers.  If the conclusions he draws in a forthcoming book are correct then Mead's hugely influential claims about the supposedly promiscuous behaviour of Samoan teenage girls rested on the shakiest possible foundations.

They were not based on any kind of systematic inquiry, but on the deliberately misleading information she received from two Samoan women of about her own age with whom she made a brief excursion.  Embarrassed at Mead's questions about their sexual behaviour they resorted to what is known locally as "recreational lying" -- the usual Samoan response to such questioning -- and told her the exact reverse of the truth.  (In 1987, at the age of 87, Mead's closest informant spoke about these matters to straighten the record and to clear her conscience.)

I find that the Sydney University library has four copies of Freeman's book and 12 copies of Mead's.  This fact is significant.  Anyone who takes the proportions one-third to two thirds as an index of ratio of sense to nonsense in anthropological writing, especially in the holdings of academic libraries, will not be too far wrong.