The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead
Basic Books (Verlag)
978-0-8133-3693-0 (ISBN)
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For most of the twentieth century, Margaret Meads renowned book Coming of Age in Samoa has validated an antievolutionary anthropological paradigm that assumes that culture is the overwhelming determinant of human behavior. Her account of female adolescent sexuality in Samoa initiated a career that led to Margaret Mead becoming indisputably the most publicly celebrated scientist in America. But what if her study wasnt all it appeared to be? What if, having neglected the problem she had been sent to investigate, she relied at the last moment on the tales of two traveling companions who jokingly misled her about the sexual behavior of Samoan girls? What if her famous study was based on a hoax?In The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead, Derek Freeman addresses these issues in a detailed historical analysis of Margaret Meads Samoan researches and of her training in New York by Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict.
By examining hitherto unpublished correspondence between Mead, her mentor Franz Boas and othersas well as the sworn testimony of Faapuaa Faam, one of Meads traveling companions of 1926Freeman provides compelling evidence that one of the most influential anthropological studies of the twentieth century was unwittingly based on the mischievous joking of the investigators informants. But The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead goes beyond a historical account of how the hoax took place; it is an examination of how Meads Boasian training set her up to be hoaxedand set others up to accept her conclusions. The book is more than a correction of scientific error: It is a crucial step toward rethinking the foundations of social science and the overly relativistic worldview of much of the modern world.
Derek Freeman is a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia. For over forty years he has been either a professoral fellow or a professor in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies in the Institute of Advanced Studies at the Australian National University. He has made a lifelong study of the people of Samoa and, during recent years, has done major historical research in Samoa, the Library of Congress, and elsewhere on Margaret Mead's Samoan fieldwork of 1925-1926.
* Introduction * Franz Boas: The Incorrigible Idealist * At Barnard College: Studying with Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict * Funding the Samoan Research Project: A National Research Fellowship * Professional Researcher Status: A Bishop Museum Associate in Ethnology * In Honolulu: At the Bishop Museum * At the U.S. Naval Station, Tutuila, American Samoa * Ethnological Research in Pago Pago and Vaitogi * In Manua: The First Two Months * In Manua: After the Hurricane * In Fitiuta: A Gold Mine Ethnologically * The Ides of March * Meads Samoan Fieldwork in Retrospect * From Pago Pago to New York-Via Paris, London and Rome * Coming of Age in Samoa and Boasian Culturalism * The Mythic Process
| Erscheint lt. Verlag | 8.10.1999 |
|---|---|
| Sprache | englisch |
| Maße | 153 x 229 mm |
| Gewicht | 425 g |
| Themenwelt | Geisteswissenschaften ► Psychologie ► Sexualität / Partnerschaft |
| Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie | |
| Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie | |
| ISBN-10 | 0-8133-3693-7 / 0813336937 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-0-8133-3693-0 / 9780813336930 |
| Zustand | Neuware |
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