Benjamin Wiker
National
Catholic Register
May 19, 2002
In
1928, Margaret Mead published Coming of Age in Samoa. An
immediate success, this slender volume established Mead as the most
famous and most influential anthropologist of the 20th century. For
nearly half a century, whether writing scholarly articles from her
desk at the American Museum of Natural History in New York or
pontificating as contributing editor of the popular magazine Redbook,
Mead helped to refashion attitudes on nearly every social issue.
In
1979, a year after her death, Mead was posthumously awarded the
Presidential Medal of Freedom. Few women have been more adored, more
honored and more influential than she.
If Mead’s influence
were for the good, then she would deserve the profuse praise she
received. The truth about Mead, however, points elsewhere. Coming
of Age in Samoa, perhaps more than any other work, helped to
convince the intelligentsia of the West that the only natural
expression of sexuality was casual sexuality. Even more distressing,
Mead’s work in Samoa, which allegedly established the
naturalness of casual sex, was a work of fraud and fiction, merely a
projection of Mead’s own sexual beliefs.
Science--or
Shenanigans?
Mead portrayed Samoa, a small island in the
South Pacific, as a sexual paradise, free from all the oppressive
restrictions of sexuality burdening the west. According to Mead,
"Romantic love as it occurs in our civilization, inextricably
bound up with ideas of monogamy, exclusiveness, jealously and
undeviating fidelity does not occur in Samoa."
Perhaps Mead’s
most famous picture of this sexual paradise was that of the casual
lovers rendezvousing "under the palm trees." In her famous
description of "A Day in Samoa," she painted the following
tantalizing scene: "As the dawn begins to fall among the soft
brown roofs and the slender palm trees stand out against a
colourless, gleaming sea, lovers slip home from trysts beneath the
palm trees or in the shadow of beached canoes, that the light may
find each sleeper in his appointed place."
As one might
have guessed, according to Mead, Samoans took marriage lightly. "If
…a wife really tires of her husband, or a husband of his
wife," she wrote, "divorce is a simple and informal matter,
the non-resident simply going home to his or her family, and the
relationship is said to have ‘passed away.’" Mead’s
Samoans had quick and easy no-fault divorce in place long before the
backward West caught on.
The "only dissenters,"
according to Mead, "are the [Christian] missionaries." But
Mead’s Samoans happily ignore them, so that the missionaries’
"protests are considered unimportant." Even though
missionaries had "introduced a moral premium on chastity,"
the "Samoans regard this attitude with reverent but complete
skepticism and the concept of celibacy is absolutely meaningless to
them." Indeed, Mead claimed that although Samoans had been
Christians since the 1840s, the Christianity they actually accepted
was "gently remoulded" by being filtered through the
carefree and casual attitude of Samoan life, so that "its
sterner tenets" were blunted, resulting in a liberalized form of
Christianity "without the doctrine of original sin."
Mead
ended her study of the Samoans by stating the underlying goal which
had animated the entire work, a call for release from the moral
strictures of a society still formed by Christianity. "At the
present time," she claimed, "we live in a period of
transition," still, unfortunately, believing "that only one
standard can be the right one." The sexual revolution must begin
in the home. "The children must be taught how to think, not what
to think. And because old errors die slowly, they must be taught
tolerance, just as today they are taught intolerance. They must be
taught that many ways are open to them, no one sanctioned above its
alternative."
Research as Romantic Fiction
Perhaps
the most intriguing aspect of this chapter of popular scholarship,
looking back on it, is that, despite its aura of scientific
authority, Mead’s influential account of Samoa as a sexual
"paradise" was almost completely false. Yet it was not
until 1983 that the myth of Mead was exploded.
The blow was
delivered by Derek Freeman’s Margaret Mead and Samoa: The
Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth. Freeman, an
anthropologist and professor at the Australian National University
for 40 years, showed step by step that nearly every assertion made by
Mead in Coming of Age was either completely false or severely
distorted. "The main conclusions of Coming of Age in
Samoa are, in reality, the figments of an anthropological myth which
is deeply at variance with the facts of Samoan ethnography and
history," Freeman wrote.
As it turns out, Mead
completely misrepresented Samoan sexual attitudes and practices both
before and after Christianity. Rather than being a society built on
promiscuity, the entire civilization was actually built on the
veneration of virginity, a devotion that Christianity only
intensified.
For Samoans, there were no women more esteemed
than the ceremonial virgins (called taupous), whose virginity
at the time of marriage was so important that Samoans had an
elaborate pre-marital, public ritual to determine
virginity.
Furthermore, as Freeman shows, this regard for
virginity was not confined to the upper classes from which the
taupous came, but permeated the entire society, down to the
lower levels--the levels Mead claimed were sexually the freest.
Casual sexual liaisons under the palm tree, rather than being smiled
upon, were (when they actually did occur) "recognized by all
concerned as shameful departures from the well-defined ideal of
chastity." Finally, contrary to Mead, marital exclusivity was
taken with the utmost seriousness by the Samoans. Adultery was
punished by beating, mutilation or even death.
As for
Mead’s assertions that the Samoans paid only "the
slightest attention to religion," this claim contradicted the
actual, fervently religious nature of the Samoans both before and
after Christianization. According to Freeman, pre-Christian Samoans
were devoted polytheists, with very intricate and elaborate religious
beliefs and rites. After being converted by missionaries in the
mid-19th century, they became "almost fanatical in their
practice and observance of Christianity."
Also, in
complete contradiction to Mead’s claim that the Samoans were
guilt-free, and that they quickly dispatched with Christian notions
of original sin, Samoans themselves informed Freeman that
"sinfulness, or agasala (literally, behavior in
contravention of some divine or chiefly ruling and so deserving of
punishment), is a basic Samoan concept antedating the arrival of
Christianity, and, further, that the doctrine of original sin
contained in Scripture is something with which, as converts to
Christianity, they have long been familiar."
In regard to
Mead’s fantasy-images of casual sex, Christianity only elevated
the Samoan regard for sexual purity, the result being that
"fornication is strictly forbidden to all church members and any
suspicion of indulgence in this ‘sin’ results in
expulsion from the church." In short, as Freeman concludes, it
should "be apparent that Samoa, where the cult of female
virginity is probably carried to a greater extreme than in any other
culture known to anthropology, was scarcely the place to situate a
paradise of adolescent free love."
How could Mead get it
so wrong? Simply put, it appears her desire to eliminate restrictions
upon her own sexuality determined her conclusions about that of the
Samoans. For Mead, science was a form of autobiography, as is clear
from her own life. She was married and divorced three times,
apparently with the ease which she falsely claimed was characteristic
of the Samoans; she engaged in numerous affairs with the same
casualness of the fictional youth slipping off to the palm trees at
dusk; and she was also bisexual as were the Samoans in her fantasy
work Coming of Age.
How ironic that Margaret Mead’s
anthropological myth, masquerading as science, could help to bring
about a real sexual revolution, leading the west not only to casual
sex and casual divorce, but the scourge of abortion. Such are the
ways of the culture of death.
Ben Wiker teaches philosophy
of science at Franciscan University of Steubenville (Ohio).
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