Penguin Books Margaret Mead and the Heretic Derek Freeman was born in Wellington, New Zealand, in 1916. After studies in the Universities of New Zealand and London he took his PhD in anthropology at the University of Cambridge in 1953. Since 1955 he has been an Australian citizen and a member of the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies in the Institute of Advanced Studies of the Australian National University. As well as having done extensive field research among the Iban of Borneo, he has taken a special interest in the history of biology and anthropology. He has visited Samoa on seven occasions since 1940, and spent six years working in various parts of the Samoan archipelago. He has thoroughly investi gated Margaret Mead's Samoan researches, both in Manu'a (where she worked in 1925-26), and in her field notes and other papers now held in the Manu script Division of the Library of Congress in Wash ington, D.C. In 1964 he had detailed discussions with Mar garet Mead when she visited the Australian National University. In 1983 his formal refutation of Mead's conclusions about Samoa was published by Harvard University Press as Margaret Mead and Samoa. It was given worldwide attention and led to what has been called "the greatest controversy in the history of anthropology". Today, Derek Freeman and his wife Monica live in Canberra, where Freeman, as an Emeritus Professor, is actively working towards the realization of a new anthro pological paradigm. What is heresy, and who are the heretics? The word itself is instructive. The Greek term hairesis originally meant a taking or conquering, especially the seizing of a town by military force. But the meaning shifted to indicate the taking for oneself, that is, the making of a choice. A heretic is one who prefers to make a personal choice rather than accept and support the view held by the majority of his community. T. W. Organ, Third Eye Philosophy: Essays in East West Thought, Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio, 1987 DEREK FREEMAN MARGARET M E A D AND THE HERETIC The making and unmaking of an anthropological myth Penguin Books Penguin Books Australia Ltd 487 Maroondah Highway, PO Box 257 Ringwood, Victoria 3134, Australia Penguin Books Ltd Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England Viking Penguin, A Division of Penguin Books USA Inc. 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Books Canada Limited 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2 Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand First published as Margaret Mead and Samoa by Harvard University Press 1983 Published as Margaret Mead and Samoa, with addendum to preface, by Penguin Books 1984 Reissued as Margaret Mead and the Heretic, with new preface, by Penguin Books 1996 10 9 8 7 6 54 3 2 Copyright © Derek Freeman, 1983, 1984, 1996 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this bciok. Made and printed in Australia by Australian Print Group The line quoted on pxiii) of the preface from Robert Bolt's play, The Common Man, is reprinted by permission of Heinemann Educational, a division of Reed Educational and Professional Publishing Ltd. National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data: Freeman, Derek. [Margaret Mead and Samoa] Margaret Mead and the heretic. Includes index. ISBN 0 14 026152 4. 1. Mead, Margaret, 1901-1978.2. Ethnology-Samoa. 3. Samoa-Social life and customs. I. Title. II. Title: Margaret Mead and Samoa. 306.089994 For David Williamson Foreword MEAD'S SAMOA AS OF 1996 MY BOOK of 1983 is being republished, under a new title, to coincide with the staging in Australia of David Williamson's play Heretic. Since it was first published, over thirteen years ago, our knowledge of Margaret Mead's fieldwork in Samoa, and in particular our knowledge of what befell her on the island of Ofu in 1926, has been radically transformed. It becomes vitally important therefore to present a brief account of what historical research has finally revealed about Margaret Mead's much dis cussed Samoan researches of the mid 1920s. In my book of 1983 evidence was amassed to demonstrate that Margaret Mead's conclusion in Coming ofA ge in Samoa, because it is at odds with the relevant facts, cannot possibly have been Foreword vii correct. It had become apparent that the young Margaret Mead had, somehow or other, made an egregious mistake. At that time, however, no credible explanation could be given of how this mistake had come to be made. I noted then that the explanation most consistently advanced by the Samoans themselves for the magnitude of the error in Mead's depiction oftheir sexual morality was, as Eleanor Gerber had reported in 1975, "that Mead's informants must have been telling lies in order to tease her". But I then went on to say that plausible as this might seem, we could not "in the absence of detailed corroborative evidence be sure about the truth of his Samoan claim". In 1983, any such "detailed corroborative evi dence" was entirely lacking. The situation dramatically changed however in 1987 when I revisited American Samoa in the company of Frank Heimans, the Australian documentary film maker. At that time, the Secretary for Samoan Affairs of the Govern ment of American Samoa was Galea'i Poumele, a high chief from Fitiuta in Manu'a. When I called on Galea'i Poumele in his office in Pago Pago on 12 November 1987, he announced that he would be flying with us to the island ofTa'u (the site of Mead's research headquarters in 1925-1926) where there was someone in the village of Fitiuta whom he wanted us to meet. When we reached Fitiuta the next morning, we were approached by a formally dressed, dignified Samoan lady, who had obviously been expect ing us. Having greeted Galea'i, she announced that she had something to say, and would like to have it recorded on video so that all might know of it. She was, to my great surprise, Fa'apua'a Fa'amu, Margaret Mead's foremost Samoan friend of 1926, and at 86 years of age still mentally alert and active. Fa'apua'a Fa'amu, although I had read about her in Margaret Mead's Letters from the Field of 1977, was someone I had never previously met. Nor had I been in any kind of communication with her. During my pre vious visits to Manu'a she had, unknown to me, been living in Hawaii. She had gone there in 1962 with her husband Telemu Togia and all but one of their seven children. It was only on the death of Telemu Togia in June 1986 that she decided to viii Foreword return to her birthplace. In March 1987 she had taken up residence back in Fitiuta with her daughter Lemafai, the only one of her children to have remained in Samoa. The key excerpt from Galea'i Poumele's conversation with Fa'apua'a Fa'amu on 13 November 1987, translated into English, runs as follows: Galea'i Poumele: Fa'amu, was there a day, a night or an evening, when the woman [i.e. Margaret Mead] questioned you about what you did at nights, and did you ever joke about this? Fa'apua'a Fa'amu: Yes, we did. We said that we were out at nights with boys. She failed to realize that we were just joking and must have been taken in by our pretences. Yes, she asked, 'Where do you go?' And we replied, 'We go out at nights!' 'With whom?' she asked. Then your mother, Fofoa, and I would pinch one another and say, 'We spend the night with boys, yes, with boys!' She must have taken it seriously but we were only joking. As you know Samoan girls are terrific liars when it comes to joking. But Mar garet accepted our trumped up stories as though they were true. Galea'i Poumsle: And the numerous times that she ques tioned you, were those the times the two of you continued to tell these untruths to Margaret Mead? Fa'apua'a Fa'amu: Yes, we just fibbed and fibbed to her. Fa'apua'a had made this confession, she later explained, because when she had been told by Galea'i Poumele and others about what Margaret Mead had written about premarital promiscuity in Samoa, she suddenly realized that Mead's faulty account must have originated in the prank that she and her friend Fofoa had played on Mead when they were with her on the island of Ofu in 1926. Innocuous though it seemed at the time, it was a prank, she had come to realize, which had had the unintended consequence of totally misleading very many people about Samoans. She had decided, she said, to set the record straight by making a formal confession in the presence of the Secretary Foreword ix for Samoan Affairs about the way in which she and Fofoa had totally misinformed Margaret Mead when she questioned them about the sexual behavior of Samoan girls. In 1988 Fa'apua'a's statements of 1987 were investigated in great detail and her memory of other events of 1926 carefully checked by Leulu Felise Va'a, who holds a PhD in anthropology from the Australian National University, and is a lecturer in Samoan language and culture at the National University of Samoa. For Samoans, like Fa'apua'a Fa'amu, who are devout Christians, swearing on the Bible is the most serious of sanc tions. It is believed that the punishment for swearing falsely is etemal damnation. On 2 May 1988, in a formally witnessed dep osition, Fa'apua'a swore on the Bible that all parts of her testi mony were true and correct. In December 1989, my report on the testimony of Fa'apua·a Fa'amu was published in the American Anthropologist, and, a few months later, in British Columbia, I had the great good fortune to meet Douglas Cole, a Professor of History at Simon Fraser University, who is working on a definitive biography of Franz Boas. Professor Cole generously presented me with copies of the correspondence of Franz Boas and Margaret Mead for the years 1925-1926 which he had obtained in the course of his own researches. These, and the additional letters for 1927-1928 which I obtained from the archives of the American Philosoph ical Society in Philadelphia (where the Boas papers are held), contained much vitally significant information, and I was left in no doubt at all about the importance of making a thoroughgoing historical study of Mead's Samoan fieldwork. Mead's Samoan fieldwork of 1925-1926 was conducted as a National Research Fellow in the Biological Sciences of the National Research Council of the USA. In 1991 I secured from the archives of the National Research Council copies of all the doc uments referring to Mead's tenure of this research fellowship, as well as copies of her correspondence with the National Research Council for the years 1925 to 1930. Then, in 1992, I flew from Canberra to Washington to research thoroughly the relevant sec tions of"the papers of Margaret Mead" in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress. Among my principal discoveries were