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Derek Freeman
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Derek Freeman carried out his own fieldwork in Samoa across several periods from the 1940s onward and, in Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth, published in 1983, argued that Mead's 1928 account of untroubled Samoan adolescence was wrong on the ground, that Samoan society was in fact marked by strict controls on female chastity, rivalry and occasional violence, and that Mead had been misled by informants and predisposed by Boas's own arguments about culture and biology to find what she was looking for. The book set off a sustained and still unsettled dispute among anthropologists over Mead's fieldwork and over Freeman's own use of evidence; that dispute is recorded on the fieldwork's own page.
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Critiqued Here
Samoa Fieldwork, Experiments Why this is disputed. Freeman's 1983 book argued Mead's conclusions about untroubled Samoan adolescence were wrong, that she had been misled by informants who later said they had been joking or boasting, and that her nine months of fieldwork at nineteen were too brief and too shaped by Boas's own thesis about culture and biology to be reliable. Mead's defenders, including several anthropologists who carried out later fieldwork in Samoa, responded that Freeman overstated the certainty of his own claims, that Samoan society changed considerably between Mead's 1925 visit and Freeman's own fieldwork decades later, and that Mead's book was more nuanced than either side's popular account of the dispute suggests. The controversy remains unresolved among anthropologists and is treated here as contested rather than settled in either direction.
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1. Derek Freeman (Wikipedia)
WikipediaLead sectionQuote, Lead section
John Derek Freeman (15 August 1916 – 6 July 2001) was a New Zealand anthropologist known for his criticism of Margaret Mead's work on Samoan society, as described in her 1928 ethnography Coming of Age in Samoa.
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