es, whose society has never attained the complexity of our own (Mead 7).
For Mead's purposes, the people of Samoa serve as an illustration of child rearing and sexual practices.
However, Derek Freeman finds that much of what Mead "discovered" in Samoa was based on false impressions, and her conclusions are suspect because the evidence on which they are based is not as assured as it needs to be. He finds Mead contradictory in her own writings about Samoa. She states that the Samoan people have "no strong passions," and then she proceeds to recount several episodes which show strong passions at work. Freeman also notes other accounts by different ethnographers which show that the Samoan people do indeed have strong passions, and he cites the Samoan people themselves who disagree with Mead's assessment of their behavior. Freeman's analysis instead finds that the passions are often suppressed for reasons of shame and embarrassment, much as they might be in our own society, but that this does not mean those passions are not present or that their suppression does not take a toll on the individual as they would in our own society. The evidence that Freeman offers is more than anecdotal, though reports by Mead, other observers, and the Samoan people themselves would come under that heading. He also looks to language as a way of assessing the character of the people, for if they had no strong passions they also would have no words for those passions, as indeed they do. Another place he looks for evidence of strong passions is in terms of death practices and the expression of grief, and here again he finds practices that involve the passions openly.
Freeman finds that in effect the Samoan people studied by Mead "fooled" her, and Freeman says they were adept at giving a false impression relative to their feelings and designs, something they normally do when they believe their personal interest may be promoted by such pretense. M...