nvironment. Before Freeman published his refutation of much of Mead's work in 1983 (five years after Mead had died), the New York Times ran a story on page one, beginning with the lines, "a book maintaining that the anthropologist Margaret Mead seriously misrepresented the culture and character of Samoa has ignited heated discussion within the behavioral sciences."
In order to accept the validity of Mead's studies, rather than to dismiss them as "anthropological myth," as Freeman did, one has to place them into a fitting perspective. As already discussed, Mead's studies are relative to a specific place and time. The Samoan island in the 1920s were, of course, a very different sociological, political, and economic place than they are today. If today's Samoans are more murderous, more competitive--in short, more prone to internal stress, than previous generations, they are just representative of the world's changes. Why do such changes refute Mead's work? Surely, the very fact that individuals change in response to changing social conditions does much to
...