Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 48(3), 291–292 Summer 2012View this article online at Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI: 10.1002/jhbs.21557C© 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

B O O K R E V I E W

Paul Shankman. The Trashing of Margaret Mead: Anatomy of an Anthropological Contro-versy. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009. 299 pp. $29.95 (paperback).ISBN-13: 978-029923454-6.

Anyone who has attempted seriously to follow Derek Freeman’s many assertions aboutwhat Margaret Mead meant or wrote back to Mead’s texts, especially Coming of Age inSamoa of 1928, will have found Freeman’s use of those texts to be dubious at best. PaulShankman’s experience of tracking Freeman through the scholarly bushes is greater thanalmost anybody else’s. In his recent book, The Trashing of Margaret Mead: Anatomy of anAnthropological Controversy, Shankman provides the most thorough account to date of thewhole of what has become known as the Mead-Freeman controversy. Unfortunately, manywho have taken Freeman at face value will be no more likely to be persuaded than they wereearlier by Lowell Holmes (who undertook a restudy of Ta’u, Manua, Samoa in the 1950s),Martin Orans, James Cote, Hiram Caton, Bradd Shore and others, including, in a minor way,myself.

Like Holmes and Shore, Shankman is a Samoanist. Unlike Freeman, Shankman is thor-ough and scrupulous. Shankman does not agree in all ways with Mead; anyone who does isnot the brightest button in the box. Mead was human and therefore could get things wrong ormisinterpret, just as we all do. Nonetheless, Shankman (pp. 227–228) tells us:

Whatever the reasons, Freeman systematically used sources out of context or omittedthem altogether. He failed to disclose crucial parts of Fa’apua’a’s testimony that castdoubts on his hoaxing hypothesis. He even neglected parts of his own scholarship that didnot support his arguments against Mead. Freeman carefully cloaked his critique of Meadin what appeared to be exhaustive scholarly detail and reference to the great issues ofthe day. Yet, the controversy was not primarily about Samoa or the nature–nurture debateor new scientific paradigms as Freeman conceived them. It was, in large measure, aboutMead’s reputation and, by implication, Freeman’s as well.

By the time Shankman is finished not one of Freeman’s claims survives.The book is divided into five broad parts. The first portion concerns the beginnings of

the controversy. Harvard University Press sent a prepublication copy of Freeman’s MargaretMead and Samoa to the New York Times, which then published a review. Mead was famous.Word that someone had questioned her findings spread among people who were not themselvesqualified to evaluate or even interested in checking Freeman’s assertions and his sources.

Part two provides a short biography of Freeman. He was trained at Victoria College,Wellington, New Zealand, in psychology by Ernest Beaglehole, who happened to offer the firstcourse in anthropology offered there. As a footnote to Shankman, I note that Freeman served onthe supervisory board of a bookstore run by Reo Fortune’s brother, Barter. I might suggest, butcannot prove, that Freeman heard Reo Fortune’s scathing assessment of Mead, his former wife,when Fortune visited Wellington to write up his findings from a trip to New Guinea secretlyfunded by Mead. Freeman found his way to Samoa in 1942, where he tells us he quicklyrealized that the task of showing Mead wrong about Samoa had fallen to him. After the War,Freeman studied under Raymond Firth, another New Zealander and distinguished Oceanianist,producing a thesis on Samoan social structure that inexplicably makes no reference to Mead’s

1

2 BOOK REVIEW

Social Organization of Manua of 1930. Freeman did not return to Samoa for some years. Nordid he publish his critique of Mead until after her death.

Part three concerns Mead in Samoa. Part four takes up what Samoans make of thecontroversy and what some Samoans see as the invidious choice of being understood byoutsiders as either unduly promiscuous or very violent. Part five concerns what Shankmancalls the big questions.

The first of these questions concerns Freeman’s claim that two young women, Fafoa andFa’apua’a, lied to Mead about their sexual activities during the night of March 13, 1926, andthat a young, naıve Mead believed them. The most important of Freeman’s proofs that theseyoung women hoaxed Mead was a videotaped interview of Fa’apua’a undertaken by a seniorchief in Freeman’s presence. By then a widow, and therefore of insignificant social status,Fa’apua’a told the chief what he clearly wanted to hear, given that he said that Mead had calledSamoans whores. Not only did Freeman’s hoaxing hypothesis change over the years, but alsohe suppressed two later interviews with Fa’apua’a that did not support his hypothesis.

The second big question concerns the nature-nurture debate. Mead and Freeman’s positionthat we are both cultural and embodied beings were fairly similar. Shankman is able to showby quoting Mead in full and comparing that with Freeman’s version of Mead that Freemanmisrepresented Mead’s contention that one cannot use the universal processes of femaleadolescence to explain why adolescence was troubled in the United States but not in Samoa.One might add that Mead several time uses the term “temperament” in William McDougall’ssense of innate or constitutional dispositions, notably in her discussion of young Samoandeviants in chapter eleven (The Girl in Conflict) of Coming of Age in Samoa. Nonetheless,Freeman’s argument appealed to and continues to appeal to many.

A last footnote: in his second book, The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead, Freemanrepeatedly asserts that Mead’s two projects, female adolescence and Samoan social organiza-tion, were somehow at odds with one another. Freeman may or may not have been aware ofMead’s debts to Edward Sapir, especially his notion of the individual in culture, and W. H. R.Rivers, notably his distinction between sociology and psychology. For Mead adolescence andsocial organization were two sides of the same question about human development in all of itscontexts.

Shankman’s book is both important and well written. Those interested in an accuratehistory of the Mead-Freeman controversy need go no further.

REFERENCES

Freeman, D. (1983). Margaret Mead and Samoa: The making and unmaking of an anthropological myth. Canberra,Australia: Australian National University Press.

Freeman, D. (1999). The fateful hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A historical analysis of her Samoan research. Boulder,CO: Westview Press.

Mead, M. (1928). Coming of age in Samoa. New York: William Morrow

Reviewed by GERALD SULLIVAN, Professor of Anthropology, Collin College, Plano, TX.

JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI 10.1002/jhbs