Margaret Mead and Samoa

Derek Freeman unmask the fake research done by Margaret Mead in his book "Coming on age in Samoa" and his Cultural Determinism.

This book describes a society, the Samoans, with no sexual inhibitions and no competition. That influenced deeply the western world about the image of herself and turned upside-down the scale of values, by rising primitive cultures to the top scale of civilization and depicting Western culture as plenty of unnecessary war agression and market competition and religious repression.

The inmediate effect when the book was written, in the 1930s, where the end of many colonial governments, leaving the power mostly to local tyrans. In the 1960s, the hippie movement, the new left and the cultural determinism, stablished as undiputable orthodox theory about human nature in intelectual life, risen up Margaret M. to levels of divinity and omniscence. No other woman has been so popular in science.

Derek Freeman, a formerly enthusiast follower on MM theories, went to samoa for many years to continue his work. But he found absoluterly contrary evidences. DF even interviewed the same samoan girls and reach the conclussion that the research made by MM during is few weeks study was a fake. She even could´nt learn Samoan language in his short stay. His work was, mostly, an invention with misunderstandigns of Samoan jokes.

Anyway the doccumentary is balanced, taking both sides of the polemic, with the testimony of followers of both MM and DF.

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