Margaret Mead Coming Of Age In Samoa Summary
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What light is shed by the Mead-‐Freeman debate on core problems in the discipline of anthropology?
“He attacked Mead in many ways – he told the anthropologists that their God was wrong.” (Fox, Margaret Mead and Samoa, 1988)
In 1925-‐26, Margaret Mead spent some nine months in Samoa, and as a result of her research there into the life of adolescent girls, she published the book, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928). The specific question she focused …show more content…
This was known as “eugenics” and centred on the idea that the human race can be improved by selective breeding. Franz Boas, said to be the founder of American anthropology and Mead’s professor, was bitterly opposed to eugenics, he stood firmly on the side of culture, rejecting the research of biologist and geneticists as inapplicable to the study of human societies (Weiner, 1983). Through Mead’s work and resources of cultural anthropology, he showed how misguided such eugenic views were. Mead’s conclusion that adolescent behaviour is culturally determined was immense news for anthropology as …show more content…
Coming of Age in Samoa was a huge success and according to Strauss (2005) “thrust her into prominence in American central life”. Strauss also added that her work influenced the way people were brought up in this country as her work on far away cultures was in order to have an impact on how we did things close to home. However what came next resulted in arguably the greatest controversy in anthropology of its time. Derek Freeman 's 1983 critique of Margaret Mead 's Coming of Age in Samoa hasn’t only prompted one of the most heated debates in recent anthropological memory but showed one of our most illustrious ancestresses to be in error, and those errors had resulted from her violation of our discipline 's most sacred canons of field research (Feinburg,
What light is shed by the Mead-‐Freeman debate on core problems in the discipline of anthropology?
“He attacked Mead in many ways – he told the anthropologists that their God was wrong.” (Fox, Margaret Mead and Samoa, 1988)
In 1925-‐26, Margaret Mead spent some nine months in Samoa, and as a result of her research there into the life of adolescent girls, she published the book, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928). The specific question she focused …show more content…
This was known as “eugenics” and centred on the idea that the human race can be improved by selective breeding. Franz Boas, said to be the founder of American anthropology and Mead’s professor, was bitterly opposed to eugenics, he stood firmly on the side of culture, rejecting the research of biologist and geneticists as inapplicable to the study of human societies (Weiner, 1983). Through Mead’s work and resources of cultural anthropology, he showed how misguided such eugenic views were. Mead’s conclusion that adolescent behaviour is culturally determined was immense news for anthropology as …show more content…
Coming of Age in Samoa was a huge success and according to Strauss (2005) “thrust her into prominence in American central life”. Strauss also added that her work influenced the way people were brought up in this country as her work on far away cultures was in order to have an impact on how we did things close to home. However what came next resulted in arguably the greatest controversy in anthropology of its time. Derek Freeman 's 1983 critique of Margaret Mead 's Coming of Age in Samoa hasn’t only prompted one of the most heated debates in recent anthropological memory but showed one of our most illustrious ancestresses to be in error, and those errors had resulted from her violation of our discipline 's most sacred canons of field research (Feinburg,