How are distinguished dissident scholars treated by the defenders of "Knowledge Nation", the "Clever Country", or whatever other slogan marketing men coin for the ideal of a scientifically literate Australia?
Badly, if the Canberra Times' reaction to the death of Professor Derek Freeman on July 6 offers any guide. Just seven days later, the paper's editor Jack Waterford wrote that Freeman, one of Canberra's most eminent academics, was "barking mad", and that a previous editor had banned most coverage of the professor's activities "because it was not good form to make fun of the insane".
Waterford's comments immediately raised two significant questions. Since when has it been "good form" to cause gratuitous distress to the grieving family of an honourable man? And are any other prominent individuals being subjected to the Canberra Times' self-imposed censorship?
Professor Freeman was an anthropologist who achieved international fame in the early 1980s for showing that Margaret Mead's idyllic portrayal of a sexually permissive adolescence in Samoa was false. Many people, including anthropologists who had previously dismissed Mead as more of a populariser than a scholar, could never forgive him.
It may seem strange to make such a fuss about research on teenagers in a remote South Pacific country carried out by a woman at the beginning her career. But the results of that research, published in 1928 as Coming of Age in Samoa, had an influence far beyond the confines of anthropology, popularising a view about human culture that is fundamentally misguided, although still remarkably prevalent.
The book launched Margaret Mead on the path towards her eventual status as an American icon. Time Magazine once declared her "Mother to the World"; she appeared on a recent United States stamp commemorating the 20th century; and the committee celebrating this year's centennial of her birth is chaired by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter.
Mead went to Samoa with a task that had been set for her by her teacher, Franz Boas, who wanted to test his conviction that it was culture, and not biology, that was the overwhelming determinant of human behaviour. She would investigate whether the emotional turbulence and crises that were a common characteristic of adolescence in America were also present in societies with very different patterns of culture.
Mead's research supposedly showed that Samoans went through an adolescence that was "peculiarly free" of stress. And this was because in Samoa -- unlike what was then the practice in Western countries -- the community did not attempt to curb teenage sexual activity.
This was great news for the then-young discipline of cultural anthropology, struggling to establish the autonomy of its subject matter. There was no biologically-based human nature, for human beings were almost infinitely plastic, capable of being "relentlessly shaped and moulded" by cultural forces, which of course, were the very phenomena that anthropologists specialised in studying.
But Mead's research was also music to the ears of a much wider group -- progressives who wished to cast off the shackles of a restrictive sexual morality and change many other aspects of social life that were usually believed to express an underlying human nature, such as gender roles, or competitive behaviour. Mead's book quickly became a best-seller, and its conclusions were adopted as conventional wisdom by large numbers of educated people.
Freeman, who first went to Samoa in 1940, and who, unlike Mead, was fluent in the Samoan language, published two major books analysing Mead's research. Basing his findings on a wide range of sources, including his own fieldwork, historical documents and Mead's own letters and papers, he demonstrated that Samoan sexual mores and adolescent behaviour were very different to the impression given by Coming of Age in Samoa.
Freeman showed that Mead had been too pre-occupied with secret research she was doing for a museum to carry out a proper study of Samoan adolescents. As she came to realise that she could not fulfil the task Boas had set her, she turned in desperation to a couple of Samoan female companions, and interrogated them about their sexual activities.
Embarrassed by her insistent questioning about a forbidden topic, the two young women resorted to a customary practice Samoans call "taufa'ase'e", or prankish hoaxing. Unaware that their fibs might find their way into a book, and have a profound effect on the way Western intellectuals thought about the cultural patterning of behaviour, they had a great time fooling Mead into believing the very opposite of the truth about Samoan adolescent life.
The animosity that Freeman provoked from Mead's legions of supporters was extraordinary -- though perhaps not surprising. They subjected him to a continuing campaign of vilification that could have destroyed a lesser person. Amongst their many falsehoods was the claim that Freeman was a coward for waiting until Mead's death in 1978 before going public. In fact, he had personally told Mead of his disagreement with her work many years previously, and some months before she died he had offered to send her a draft of his first book.
As those who have seen The Heretic -- David Williamson's fine play about the Samoan controversy -- will realise, Freeman could be a difficult man. But he was also a great scholar, whose contributions to anthropology went well beyond debunking Margaret Mead; and his intellectual and moral compass was more firmly grounded than was the case with most of his critics. Derek Freeman was the kind of person that a nation which is really serious about its intellectual life should do everything it can to foster.
ADVERTISEMENT
No comments:
Post a Comment