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Margaret Mead and the Samoa:
In a previous post, I explained that, at the most abstract level, all human cultures are the same and there is only one human culture. Nothing illustrates this point better than the recent (and somewhat shameful) history of the social sciences. It shows that every time there was news of a discovery of a new, exotic culture in a remote region of the world, completely different from the Western European culture, it turns out that the discovery was a hoax. Every time, it turns out that there are no human cultures that are radically and completely different from other cultures. The first such example is Margaret Mead’s research on the Samoa.
In 1923, Margaret Mead (1901-1978), one of the most celebrated anthropologists of all time, was an anthropology graduate student of Franz Boas (1858-1942) at Columbia University. Boas was a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, and was therefore politically and personally motivated to prove wrong the Nazi policy of eugenics. While this is an admirable goal in and of itself, Boas unfortunately chose the wrong tactics to achieve it. He wanted to show that biology had nothing to do with how humans behave, and that environment -- culture and socialization -- determines human behavior completely. He was a strong proponent of cultural determinism.
In order to demonstrate that culture and socialization determine human behavior in its entirety, Boas gave his graduate students (including Mead) the impossible task of finding a human culture radically different from the Western culture, where people behave completely differently from Americans and Europeans. Margaret Mead was sent to Samoa with this mandate from Boas.
On August 31, 1925, Mead arrived in American Samoa to conduct her research. She was to spend six months doing her fieldwork. Unbeknownst to Boas, however, Mead was involved in another, secret research project, and spent almost all of her time in Samoa doing this other work. She was to leave Samoa in a month, and she had not done any of the fieldwork for Boas on the topic of cultural and behavioral variability to find evidence that Samoan behavior was completely different from American behavior. She decided to finish this work quickly by interviewing two young local women about the sexual behavior of adolescents in Samoa on March 13, 1926.
Mead knew that in the United States and the rest of the Western world, boys were sexually aggressive and actively pursued girls, while girls were sexually coy and waited to be asked out on dates by boys. “How different are things in Samoa? How are Samoan boys and girls when it comes to sex?” Mead asked her two young female informants, Fa’apua’a Fa’amu and Fofoa Poumele.
Fa’apua’a and Fofoa, just like young women everywhere, were quite embarrassed to talk about sex to a total stranger. So they decided to make a big joke about it out of sheer embarrassment. They told Mead the opposite of how things were in Samoa. They told her that boys were quite shy, and girls actively pursued boys sexually. It was a hoax, but in the minds of Fa’apua’a and Fofoa, the story that they were telling Mead was so outrageous and so obviously untrue that they couldn’t believe that anyone in her right mind would believe them.
Except that Mead did, for this was exactly the type of “evidence” that Boas had sent her to Samoa to gather. Here now was evidence that sexual behavior of adolescents could be completely different from (nay, the opposite of) how it is in the United States. So culture does completely determine human behavior after all! Mead was ecstatic. She left Samoa in April 1926 and published her “findings” in Samoa in a book called Coming of Age in Samoa in 1928. The book immediately became an international bestseller and later a classic in cultural anthropology, and, among other things, formed the foundation of modern feminism. Feminists pointed to the “evidence” in the book to support their claim that, given different “gender socialization,” Western boys and girls could be completely different. Boys could be more like girls, and girls could be more like boys. So, in a sense, modern feminism was founded on the basis of a hoax.
More than sixty years later, on May 2, 1988, Fa’apua’a, who was then 86 years old, told a Samoan government official (who happened to be the son of Fofoa, who passed away in 1936) that everything she and her friend told Margaret Mead about the sexual behavior of Samoan boys and girls on that fateful night of March 13, 1926, was untrue. It was a hoax. As it turns out, overwhelming ethnographic evidence by now shows that Samoan adolescents are no different from adolescents anywhere else in the world. Boys are sexually aggressive and active, and girls are sexually coy and shy.
