Meads Misconstruing of Samoa

When they were working together in 1927 on the characterization of Samoan culture, Mead and Benedict carried to its logical extreme their deeply felt belief that in human societies the traditional patterns of behavior set the mold into which the raw material of human nature flows. Thus, in Social Organization of Manu'a, in her discussion of dominant cultural attitudes, every detail of which had been „thrashed out“ with Benedict, Mead wrote of the absolute determination of social pressure in shaping the individuals within ite bounds.-Mb notion that cul-turaTdeterminism was absolutewas/'so^pvious„ to Mead that, as we have seen, she also in Coming of Age in Samoa,

in respect of adolescent behavior.¹

That this doctrine of the absoluteness of cultural determinism should have seemed „so obvious“ to Mead is understand-

able. Anthropology, when she began its study in 1922, was dominated by Boas' „compelling idea^' as Leslie Spier has called it, of „the complete moulding of every human expression—inner thought and external behavior—by social conditioning,“ and by the time she left for Samoa in 1925 she had become a fervent devotee of the notion that human behavior could be explained in purely cultural terms. Further, although by the time of Mead's recruitment to its ranks cultural anthropology had achieved its independence, it had done so at the cost of becoming an ideology that, in an actively unscientific way, sought totally to exclude biology from the explanation of human behavior. Thus as Kroeber declared, „the important thing about anthropology is not the science but an attitude of mind“—an attitude of mind, that is, committed to the doctrine of culture as a superorganic entity which incessantly shapes human behavior, „conditioning all responses.“ It was of this attitude of mind that Mead became a leading proponent, with (as Marvin Harris has observed) her anthropological mission, set for her by Boas, being to defeat the notion of a „panhuman hereditary human nature.“ She pursued this objective by tirelessly stressing, in publication after publication, „the absence of maturational regularities.“²

In her own account of this mission, Mead describes it as a battle which she and other Boasians had had to fight with the whole battery at their command, using the most fantastic and startling examples they could muster. It is thus evident that her writings during this period, about Samoa as about other South Seas cultures, had the explicit aim of confuting biological explanations of human behavior and vindicating the doctrines of the Boasian school. By 1939 this battle, according to Mead, had been won. In retrospect, however, it is evident that her eristic approach to anthropological inquiry, which had sprung from the febrile nature-nurture controversy of the 1920s, is fundamentally at variance with the methods and values of science, and there can be no doubt that Mead's fervent desire to demonstrate the validity of the doctrines she held in common with Benedict and Boas led her, in Samoa, to overlook evidence running counter to her beliefs, and to place far too ready a credence in the notion that Manu'a could be put to anthropological use as a „negative instance.“³

For Mead's readers in North America and elsewhere in the Western world, there could be no more plausible location for the idyllic society of which she wrote than in the South Seas, a region that since the days of Bougainville has figured in the fantasies of Europeans and Americans as a place of preternatural contentment and sensual delight. So, as Mead reports, her announcement in 1925 that she was going to Samoa caused the same breathless stir as if she had been „setting off for heaven.“ Indeed, there were many in the 1920b, according to Mead, who longed to go to the South Sea islands „to escape to a kind of divine nothingness in which life would be reduced to the simplest physical terms, to sunshine and the moving shadows of palm trees, to bronze-bodied girls and bronze-bodied boys, food for the asking, no work to do, no obligations to meet.“ Westerners with such yearnings readily succumb to the unfamiliar lushness of a tropical island, and there have been those who have described Samoa in tones of unconcealed rapture. Rupert Brooke, for example, who visited both American and Western Samoa in November 1913, wrote of experiencing there a „sheer beauty, so pure that it's difficult to breathe in it—like living in a Keats world, only… less syrupy.“ While the Samoans in this heaven on earth were „the loveliest people in the world, moving and running and dancing like gods and goddesses, very quietly and mysteriously, and utterly content,“ with „perfect manners and immense kindliness.“⁴

It was in comparably euphoric terms that Tahiti had been described to European readers after Bougainville's visit of 1768, as though the Isles of the Blest, of which Horace and Plutarch had written so alluringly, had materialized in the far away South Seas. The New Cythera, they were told, was an earthly paradise, with no other god but love, and with inhabitants who lived in peace among themselves, knowing neither hatred, quan-els, dissension, nor civil war, constituting „perhaps the happiest society which the world knows.“ This account is so strikingly similar to Mead's depiction of Samoa as to make it evident that in constructing her negative instance, she was, in fundamental ways, influenced by the romantic vision that had possessed the imaginations of Westerners from the eighteenth century onward. The Samoans, she told her readers, among whom free love-making was the pastime par excellence, never hate enough to want to kill anyone and are „one of the most amiable, least contentious, and most peaceful peoples in the world.“⁵

A romantically beguiling vision, like those of Bougainville and Brooke! Yet, as I have shown in Chapters 9 to 18, these and numerous other components of Mead's depiction of Samoa as a negative instance, on which she based her claims about Samoan adolescence and about the absolute sovereignty of nurture over nature, are fundamentally in error, so that her negative instance is no negative instance at all, and her conclusions are demonstrably invalid. How did the young Margaret Mead come so to misconstrue the ethos and ethnography of Samoa? The fervency of her belief in cultural determinism and her tendency to view the South Seas as an earthly paradise go some way in accounting for what happened, but manifestly more was involved.

The Ph.D. topic that Boas assigned to Mead was the comparative study of canoe-building, house-building, and tattooing -in the Polynesian culture area. During 1924 she gathered information on these activities from the available literature on the Hawaiians, the Marquesans, the Maori, the Tahitians, and the Samoans. These doctoral studies did not have any direct relevance to the quite separate problem of adolescence in Samoa that Boas set her in 1925, and, indeed, the fact that her reading was mainly on Eastern rather than Western Polynesia concealed from her the marked extent to which the traditional culture and values of Samoa differ from those of Tahiti. Again, during the spring of 1925 she had little time for systematic preparation for her Samoan researches. Indeed, the counsel she received from Boas about these researches prior to her departure for Pago Pago lasted, she tells us, for only half an hour. During this brief meeting Boas' principal instruction was that she should concentrate on the problem he had set her and not waste time doing ethnography. Accordingly, when in the second week of November 1925 Mead reached Manu'a, she at once launched

into the study of adolescence without first acquiring, either by observation or from inquiry with adult informants, a thorough understanding of the traditional values and customs of the Manu'ans. This, without doubt, was an ill-advised way to proceed, for it meant that Mead was in no position to check the statements of the girls she was studying against a well-informed knowledge of the fa'aSamoa.⁶

It is also evident that Mead greatly underestimated the complexity of the culture, society, history, and psychology of the people among whom she was to study adolescence. Samoan society, so Mead would have it, is „very simple,“ and Samoan culture „uncomplex.“ In the introduction to Coming of Age in Samoa she tells us that while years of study are necessary before a student can begin to understand the forces at work within „complicated civilizations like those of Europe, or the higher civilizations of the East,“ a „primitive people“ presents a much less elaborate problem, with a trained student being able to „master the fundamental structure of a primitive society in a few months.“⁷

As any one who cares to consult Augustin Kramer's Die Samoa-Inseln, Robert Louis Stevenson's A Footnote to History, or J. W. Davidson's Samoa mo Samoa will quickly discover, Samoan society and culture are by no means simple and uncomplex; they are marked by particularities, intricacies, and subtleties quite as daunting as those which face students of Europe and Asia. Indeed, the fa'aSamoa is so sinuously complex that, as Stevenson's step-daughter, Isobel Strong, once remarked, „one may live long in Samoa without understanding the whys and wherefores.“ Mead, however, spent not even a few months on the systematic study of Manu'a before launching upon the study of adolescence immediately upon her arrival in Ta u in accordance with Boas' instructions. Thus, she has noted that while on her later field trips she had „the more satisfactory task of learning the culture first and only afterwards working on a special problem,“ in Samoa this was „not necessary.“⁸

For some ten weeks prior to her arrival in Manu'a, she had, it is true, been resident in the port of Pago Pago learning the vernacular, and had spent about ten days living with a Samoan family in the village of Vaitogi. But this experience, while it did give her a useful initial orientation, did not amount to the systematic study of the fa'aSamoa that would have enabled her to assess adequately the statements of her adolescent informants on the sexual and other behavior of the Manu'ans. Another problem was that of being able to communicate adequately with the people she was to study. Mead had arrived in Pago Pago without any knowledge of the Samoan language, and although she at once began its study, the ten or so weeks she gave to this task before beginning her researches was far too brief a period for obtaining a fluent command of the formidable Samoan tongue, with its multiple vocabularies stemming from the distinctions of the traditional rank system. In this situation Mead was plainly at some hazard in pursuing her inquiries in Manu'a, for Samoans, when diverted by the stumbling efforts of outsiders to speak their demanding language, are inclined not to take them seriously.

Mead, then, began her inquiries with her girl informants with a far from perfect command of the vernacular, and without systematic prior investigation of Manu'an society and values. Added to this, she elected to live not in a Samoan household but with the handful of expatriate Americans who were the local representatives of the naval government of American Samoa, from which in 1925 many Manu'ans were radically disaffected. In his introduction of September 1931 to Reo Fortune's Sorcerers of Dobu, Bronislaw Malinowski expressed great satisfaction at Fortune's „ruthless avoidance“ of both missionary compound and government station in his „determination to live right among the natives.“⁹ Of the immense advantage that an ethnographer gains by living among the people whose values and behavior he is intent on understanding there can be not the slightest doubt. Mead, however, within six weeks of her arrival in Pago Pago, and before she had spent any time actually staying in a traditional household, had come to feel that the food idie would have to eat would be too starchy, and the conditions of living she would have to endure too nerve-racking to make residence with a Samoan family bearable. In Ta'u, she told Boas, she would be able to live „in a white household“ and yet be in the midst of one of the villages from which she would be drawing her adolescent subjects. This arrangement to live not in a Samoan household but with the Holt family in their European-style house, which was also the location of the government radio station and medical dispensary, decisively determined the form her researches were to take.

According to Mead her residence in these government quarters furnished her with an absolutely essential neutral base from which she could study all of the individuals in the surrounding village while at the same time remaining „aloof from native feuds and lines of demarcation.“ Against this exiguous advantage she was, however, depriving herself of the close contacts that speedily develop in Samoa between an ethnographer and the members of the extended family in which he or she lives. Such contacts are essential for the gaining of a thorough understanding of the Samoan language and, most important of all, for the independent verification, by the continuous observation of actual behavior, of the statements being derived from informants. Thus, by living with the Holts, Mead was trapping herself in a situation in which she was forced to rely not on observations of the behavior of Samoans as they lived their lives beyond the precincts of the government station on Ta'u, but on such hearsay information as she was able to extract from her adolescent subjects.¹⁰

That this was her situation is made clear in Mead's own account of her researches. Her living quarters, she records, were on the back verandah of the dispensary, from where she could look out across a small yard into part of the village of Luma. This part of the government medical dispensary became her research headquarters, and soon the adolescent girls, and later the small girls whom she found she had also to study, came and filled her screen-room „day after day and night after night.“ When she began her researches in this artificial setting Mead was still only 23 years of age, and was smaller in stature than some of the girls she was studying. They treated her, she says, „as one of themselves.“¹¹

It is evident then that although, as Mead records, she could „wander freely about the village or go on fishing tripe or stop at

a house where a woman was weaving“ when she was away from the dispensary, her account of adolescence in Samoa was, in the main, derived from the young informants who came to talk with her away from their homes in the villages of Luma, Si'ufaga, and Faleasao. So, as Mead states, for these three villages, from which all her adolescent informants were drawn, she saw the life that went on „through the eyes“ of the group of girls on the details of whose lives she was concentrating. This situation is of crucial significance for the assessment of Mead's researches in Manu'a, for we are clearly faced with the question of the extent to which the lens she fashioned from what she was being told by her adolescent informants and through which she saw Samoan life was a true and accurate lens.¹²

As I have documented in Chapters 9 to 18, many of the assertions appearing in Mead's depiction of Samoa are fundamentally in error, and some of them preposterously false. How are we to account for the presence of errors of this magnitude? Some Samoans who have read Coming of Age in Samoa react, as Shore reports, with anger and the insistence „that Mead lied.“ This, however, is an interpretation that I have no hesitation in dismissing. The succession of prefaces to Coming of Age in Samoa published by Mead in 1949,1953,1961, and 1973 indicate clearly, in my judgment, that she did give genuine credence to the view of Samoan life with which she returned to New York in 1926. Moreover, in the 1969 edition of Social Organization of Manu'a she freely conceded that there was a serious problem in reconciling the „contradictions“ between her own depiction of Samoa and that contained in „other records of historical and contemporary behavior.“¹³

In Mead's view there were but two possibilities: either there was in Manu'a at the time of her sojourn „a temporary felicitous relaxation“ of the severe ethos reported by other ethnographers, or the vantage point of the young girl from which she „saw“ Samoan society must, in some way, have been responsible. As I have documented in Chapter 8, the mid 1920s were in no way a period of felicitous relaxation in Manu'a, being rather a time of unusual tension during which the majority of Manu'ans, as adherents of the Mau, were in a state of disaffection from the naval government of American Samoa. We are thus left with Mead's second possibility, and with the problem of the way in which her depiction of Samoa might have been affected by the vantage point of the young girls on whose testimony she relied.¹⁴

Mead's depiction of Samoan culture, as I have shown, is marked by major errors, and her account of the sexual behavior of Samoan8 by a mind-boggling contradiction, for she asserts that the Samoans have a culture in which female virginity is very highly valued, with a virginity-testing ceremony being „theoretically observed at weddings of all ranks,“ while at the same time adolescence among females is regarded as a period „appropriate for love-making,“ with promiscuity before marriage being both permitted and „expected“ And, indeed, she actually describes the Samoans as making the „demand“ that a female should be „both receptive to the advances of many lovers and yet capable of showing the tokens of virginity at marriage.“ Something, it becomes plain at this juncture, is emphatically amiss, for surely no human population could be so cognitively disoriented as to conduct their lives in such a schizophrenic way. Nor are the Samoans remotely like this, for, as has been documented in Chapter 16, they are, in fact, a people who traditionally value virginity highly and so disapprove of premarital promiscuity as to exercise a strict surveillance over the comings and goings of adolescent girls. That these values and this regime were in force in Manu'a in the mid 1920s is, furthermore, clearly established by the testimony of the Manu'ans themselves who, when I discussed this period with those who well remembered it, confirmed that the fa'aSamoa in these matters was operative then as it was both before and after Mead's brief sojourn in Ta'u. What then can have been the source of Mead's erroneous statement that in Samoa there is great premarital freedom, with promiscuity before marriage among adolescent girls, being both permitted and expected?¹⁵ The explanation most consistently advanced by the Samoans themselves for the magnitude of the errors in her depiction of their culture and in particular of their sexual morality is, as Gerber has reported, „that Mead's informants must have been telling lies in order to tease her.“ Those Samoans who offer this explanation, which I have heard in Manu'a as well as in other parts of Samoa, are referring to the behavior called tau fa'ase'e, to which Samoans are much prone. Fa'ase'e (literally „to cause to slip“) means „to dupe,“ as in the example given by Milner, „e fa'ase'e go fie le teine, the girl is easily duped“; and the phrase tau fa'ase'e refers to the action of deliberately duping someone, a pastime that greatly appeals to the Samoans as a respite from the severities of their authoritarian society.¹⁶

Because of their strict morality, Samoans show a decided reluctance to discuss sexual matters with outsiders or those in authority, a reticence that is especially marked among female adolescents. Thus, Holmes reports that when he and his wife lived in Manu'a and Tutuila in 1954 „it was never possible to obtain details of sexual experience from unmarried informants, though several of these people were constant companions and part of the household.“ Further, as Lauifi Ili, Holmes's principal assistant, observes, when it comes to imparting information about sexual activities, Samoan girls are „very close-mouthed and ashamed.“ Yet it was precisely information of this kind that Mead, a liberated young American newly arrived from New York and resident in the government station at Ta'u, sought to extract from the adolescent girls she had been sent to study. And when she persisted in this unprecedented probing of a highly embarrassing topic, it is likely that these girls resorted, as Gerber's Samoan informants have averred, to tau fa'ase'e, regaling their inquisitor with counterfeit tales of casual love under the palm trees.¹⁷

This, then, is the explanation that Samoans give for the highly inaccurate portrayal of their sexual morality in Mead's writings. It is an explanation that accounts for how it was that this erroneous portrayal came to be made, as well as for Mead's sincere credence in the account she has given in Coming of Age in Samoa, for she was indeed reporting what she had been told by her adolescent informants. The Manu'ans emphasize, however, that the girls who, they claim, plied Mead with these counterfeit tales were only amusing themselves, and had no inkling that their tales would ever find their way into a book.

While we cannot, in the absence of detailed corroborative evidence, be sure about the truth of this Samoan claim that Mead was mischievously duped by her adolescent informants, we can be certain that she did return to New York in 1926 with tales running directly counter to all other ethnographic accounts of Samoa, from which she constructed heT picture of Manu'a as a paradise of free love, and of Samoa as a negative instance, which, so she claimed, validated Boasian doctrine. It was this negative instance that she duly presented to Boas as the ideologically gratifying result of her inquiries in Manu'a.

For Mead, Franz Boas was a peerless intellectual leader who „saw the scientific task as one of probing into a problem now of language, now of physical type, now of art style—each a deep, sudden, intensive stab at some strategic point into an enormous, untapped and unknown mass of information.“ Boas continually warned his students, so Mead claims, against premature generalization, which was something he „feared like the plague.“ Again, in J. R. Swanton's judgment, Boas was „meticulously careful in weighing results and rigidly conservative in announcing conclusions“; while in Robert Lowie's estimation he was a scholar „concerned solely with ascertaining the truth,“ who controlled the ethnographic literature of the world „as well as anyone.“ It is pertinent then to take cognizance of Boas' response to the absolute generalization at which Mead had arrived after probing for a few months into adolescent behavior in Samoa. What can be said with certainty is that if Boas, as the instigator and supervisor of Mead's Samoan researches, had taken the elementary precaution of consulting the readily available ethnographic literature on Samoa, as, for example, the writings of Williams, Turner, Pritchard, Stuebel, and Kramer, he would have very quickly found accounts of the sexual and other behavior of the Samoans that are markedly at variance with Mead's picture of life in Manu'a; and further, that if he had done this in a thoroughgoing way, the need to check Mead's findings by an independent replication of her investigations in Samoa would have become unequivocally clear. However, when he read Coming of Age in Samoa in manuscript Boas voiced no doubts at all about the absoluteness of its general conclusion,

and later in an enthusiastic foreword he wrote of the „painstaking investigation“ on which this extreme conclusion was based. He had from the outset, as Mead reports, believed that her work in Samoa would show that culture was „very important.“ The response of Benedict, Mead's other mentor at Columbia University, was equally uncritical, and a few years later in Pat-terns of Culture she used Mead's conclusions, as had Boas in 1928, as apparently clinching evidence for the doctrine of cultural determinism in which she, like Boas and Mead, so fervently believed.¹⁸

We are thus confronted in the case of Margaret Mead's Sa-moan researches with an instructive example of how, as evidence is sought to substantiate a cherished doctrine, the deeply held beliefs of those involved may lead them unwittingly into error. The danger of such an outcome is inherent, it would seem, in theveiy process of belief formation. Thus, P. D. Mac-Lean has suggested that the limbic system of the human brain „has the capacity to generate strong affective feelings of conviction that we attach to our beliefs regardless of whether they are true or false.“ In science, as Albert Einstein once remarked, „conviction is a good mainspring, but a poor regulator.“ In the case of Mead's Samoan researches, certainly, there is the clearest evidence that it was her deeply convinced belief in the doctrine of extreme cultural determinism, for which she was prepared to fight with the whole battery at her command, that led her to construct an account of Samoa that appeared to substantiate this very doctrine. There is, however, conclusive empirical evidence to demonstrate that Samoa, in numerous respects, is not at all as Mead depicted it to be.¹⁹

A crucial issue that arises from this historic case for the discipline of anthropology, which has tended to accept the reports of ethnographers as entirely empirical statements, is the extent to which other ethnographic accounts may have been distorted by doctrinal convictions, as well as the methodological question of how such distortion can best be avoided. These are no small problems. I would merely comment that as we look back on Mead's Samoan researches we are able to appreciate anew the wisdom of Karl Popper's admonition that in both science and scholarship it is, above all else, indefatigable rational criticism of our suppositions that is of decisive importance, for such criticism by „bringing out our mistakes… makes us understand the difficulties of the problem we are trying to solve,“ and so saves us from the allure of the „obvious truth“ of received doctrine.

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