Tales From The Jungle: Margaret Mead - Part 5 of 6

Exploring the work of Margaret Mead, this film investigates the 12 months Mead spent with the Samoans in the Twenties.

Her resulting book, Coming Of Age In Samoa, had a huge impact on Western culture.

Mead believed cultures like the Samoans could teach people how to live in harmony. Her book depicts a society of free love -- devoid of jealousy and teenage turmoil.

But, decades later, her work was criticised as being tainted by her romantic views and strong belief in liberal values.

Tales From The Jungle examines whether Mead's study was merely misinterpretation and romantic wishful thinking.

Category:

People & Blogs

Tags:

• Mead
• Anthropology
• Samoa
• Biography
• Documentary

[somor98]

Lol! 'You're a nature guy'

[karmscho]

Hahaha I agree with bbsirup, Mary Catherine Bateson just wont see the evidence against her mum and just hates Freeman 'I think he was a bully all his life' and saying he's mentally unstable...even if she was correct (which she's probably not), he was still right about Samoa! Even when the American Anthropological Association was against him and condemned his book.Pretty much the definition of vindicated.

[bigban1989]

Derek Freeman is a bit of an eccentric and world does not take too kindly to those eccentrics. It's a shame but even in my anthropology courses today, professors are too quick to dismiss him as mentally unstable, bully, nutcase etc. Overall, I think his view was correct and his critiques on Mead (small data, selective data, misrepresentation) is very much valid. However, it does not mean Mead's contribution to the discipline could be ignored. He should've published it earlier when Mead was alive

[SlySoiBee]

In the end, like most things in anthropology, the answer to who was right was: a little bit of both. They each had their faults as well as their accuracies.

[TehClockwork]

@thebirthmuse

"I think the point is that Freeman and Mead talked to different people."

Oh God, just give it up. Mead would have to have been extremely unlucky to be as wrong as she was. She was a politically motivated fraud. Take your licks and move on.

[thebirthmuse]

actually Freeman did have mental breakdowns several times in his life, which is well-known. (See even Wikipedia) I think the point is that Freeman and Mead talked to different people. I did ethnographic research in Russia with a particular population. If you asked the same questions of a different group of people in Russia, you would get totally different answers. Culture is not monolithic.

[ttaylorsmithh]

paused to say that phil donahue is a jerk, and terrible talk show host. Not directed at this film but in other shows I have seen him host.

[suddenlyitsobvious]

(4)

...of course weren't actually living harmoniously and peacefully, since obviously they are equally part of the "aberrant" (Dawkins) human species.

All of this corresponds to skeaming of think tanks for purposes of social engineering.

[suddenlyitsobvious]

(3)

... another very crucial societal narrative from the system's point of view: humankind's INHERENT EVIL. The systemof course has a lot staked on this notion that has flooded society since ages: Original Sin, Freud's Thanatos, the Banality of Evil etc.

So when the time was ripe, and all the foundations of anthropology solidly lain and the field developed, they used another pawn -Freeman- to make sure it was equally understood by the masses that the natives ...

[suddenlyitsobvious]

(2)

... nurture the edge over nature, as society was entering a stage of publicity, PR and massive focus on psychology and social egineering. So the PTB's came up with the Mead scam: promote a beautiful society of natives spiced with sex in order to loosen the rigidity of social norms and structures and launch a massive assault on Western patriarchal Judeo-Christianity.

However, it soon turned out that Mead's narrative conficted with...

[suddenlyitsobvious]

What's so interesting about this is that it again shows what a load of crap science is -as soon as it ventures outside of the technological and engineering departments. All these anthropologists could easily have known that Mead's work was worthless. A 23 year old girl sent off to study the "savages"? Come on! It's even more ridiculous than the bureaucrat Levi-Strauss' "structuralism".

At first sight, it seems that what happened is that the system wanted to give...

[talenia21]

Poor Derek Freeman. I guess the only thing you are missing for them to support you is you have to be an American. Interesting how they mention dishonesty and poisonous like Margret didn't do that.