Dear Norm,

Thank you for your note. (I'm assuming you meant me rather than Danny
... you replied to my note, and you also discussed the anthropology
of art.)

Michael Jackson's work and Alfred Gell's work seem most interesting.
I did not know their work and I've ordered the books you suggest.
Looking into Gell, I found two more books that look to be worth
reading for issues that interest me.

I agree with your position on anthropology and critical inquiry.

The one question that I don't think we can resolve here involves what
the young Samoan women who spoke with Margaret Mead told her -- and
why. Even though a Samoan academic living today may have heard family
stories and given you an accurate report of the stories, four
problems could account for accurate stories that fail to say much
about Margaret Mead. In saying this, I acknowledge that Mead's work
on Samoa shows significant flaws, something that even her admirers
grant. Nevertheless, this is not because the young women she
interviewed for Coming of Age in Samoa lied to her or tricked her,
but for other reasons.

First, the family stories your colleague told you about are handed
down at a distance of eighty years. Your friend was not there. She
told you about you stories that she heard from someone who heard them
from someone who heard them from someone else. While the stories she
repeats may be what she heard, this says nothing about the accuracy
of the stories. Family stories capture beliefs and positions. That
may be they may all they reflect accurately.

Most of us find it hard to get an accurate account of an argument at
a cousin's wedding a month ago. If we weren't there, being an
anthropologist or a physicist would make little difference to what we
can learn about the incident. Of course, we might not understand
fully what happened even if we witness the argument in person.
Families being what they are, family dynamics affecting our
perception. This is also the case with family stories told and retold
over eight decades.

Second, the family may have heard a different story than the account
a young woman told Mead. It may be that the young women shared
experiences, thoughts, and feelings with Mead that they would not
share with their families. Mead got a lot wrong about Samoa and that
she generalized far too much from what she heard, but she may still
have reported accurately a reasonably accurate account of the lives
of the young women who shared their experiences with her. The private
life world of teenagers is a different world than the larger life
world of the family. The life world of the family is itself embedded
in a public world of social convention.

Many teenagers speak one way about sex, smoking, drinking, and drugs
with adults whom they trust, while taking a far more conventional
position with adult family members. This is especially the case when
family culture is more conservative on these issues than the
self-selected world of teenage peers. I don't see why this should be
significantly different in Samoa in the 1920s than it was when I was
a teenager in the 1960s, or the way it seems to be for teenagers
today.

Even if the family stories are a relatively accurate reflection of
the family conversation, it could be that some of the young women who
shared their views with Mead told her a relatively true story while
speaking far more circumspectly within the family. Bonnie Nardi's
(1984) account of her experiences in Samoa certainly suggest a young
women's sub-culture that worked at some difference to the larger
culture within which young women also live their lives.

Third, and this is a key point in Nardi's article (1984: 329), it is
hard to imagine that all of the twenty-five young women in Mead's
study lied to her repeatedly over six months of conversations. They
seemed to be willing to tell the truth about their sexual experience.
Mead reported half saying that they were virgins, half saying they
were not. Mead herself was not an interloping tourist. She was
genuinely interested in Samoan culture, and she made a long and
difficult journey -- this was the 1920s -- to learn. As Nardi points
out, it seems odd that all twenty-five Samoan women would show such
little respect for this investment of time and effort that they would
lie repeatedly and maintain the same lies over half a year. You can
only get so much fun out of a joke like that.

Nardi suggests, instead, that far too many people have failed to
acknowledge the possibility that these young women gave an honest
account of their life-world, whatever mistakes Mead made in
generalizing their private stories.

It might even be that your Samoan colleague is repeating accurately
her family's correct understanding of an ancestor who DID tell a far
different story to Mead. It could be that her ancestors were among
the virgin half of the group, and that this family therefore found it
easy to believe that Mead got ALL the stories wrong rather than
believe that Mead misinterpreted Samoan culture by generalizing
inappropriately from honest accounts of sexually free teenage
behavior.

Fourth -- and this is an important fourth point, slightly different
to the others -- the family story may be just a story, invented by a
descendent without reference to the actual experience of the ancestor
who met Margaret Mead. For that matter, it could even be told of an
ancestor whether or not an ancestor met Margaret Mead. Even though
your Samoan colleague may have heard the story from relatives and may
be repeating it accurately, it may not be a genuine account at all.

Most of us have had these kinds of experiences. I'll give two of my
own experiences. One occurs in the history of contemporary art and
music concerning John Cage's famous classes in music composition at
the New School in New York. These classes were quite small and not
especially popular at the time. In later years, Cage's class came to
be seen as a seminal source of contemporary music and art. As it did,
increasingly more people came to have been Cage students and claim to
have studied in the class. Over the years, I have met so many more
people who claim to have studied in those classes than actually did
that the classes would have had to have been several times larger to
account for the difference in numbers.

On a personal level, I have had similar experiences. When I lived in
New York in the 1980s, I found myself at museum openings two or three
times standing quietly next to people who claimed to be extremely
close friends of Ken Friedman, regaling their companions with my
legendary exploits. These stories were so dramatic and entertaining
that I thought it would have been churlish of me to introduce myself
or amend the myth. So I suppose that I, too, by my silence, have
contributed to someone's family stories about a family member who did
something grand with -- or to -- Ken Friedman.

There may be many reasons that account for your Samoan colleague
telling you truthfully and accurately what she heard without those
family stories being truthful or accurate account. They may reflect
what living Samoans and their families think of Margaret Mead, while
not at all being what any of the twenty-five young Samoan women told
Margaret Mead in the 1920s.

It is ALSO possible that Mead was hoaxed, but I can't see the point.
Bonnie Nardi's argument seem quite reasonable to me.

That aside, I agree with your comments and position on "the different
roles that [anthropological, scientific, and design] practices occupy
at their culture center and at various margins at different times."

Warm wishes,

Ken


Reference

Nardi, Bonnie. 1984. The Height of Her Powers. Margaret Mead's Samoa.
Feminist Studies, Vol. 10, No. 2, (Summer 1984), pp. 232-337.

Norm Sheehan wrote:

>Thanks Danny ...you are correct concerning the stream of research within
>which I work for critical views of anthropology ... and my response to
>Mead does come from a conversation with a visiting Samoan academic who told
>stories from her family concerning the games that cheeky teenagers
>played (as they do) with this very serious and seemingly obsessed
>interloper. Much in the same way as Australian kids will sometimes warn
>tourists to be wary of the drop-bear a larger and more dangerous
>relative of the Koala that tends to randomly fall out of trees onto
>people.
>
>The issue under investigation in this critique is not the validity of
>anthropology, science or design but the different roles that such
>practices occupy at their culture centre and at various margins at
>different times. Mead's work so central and scientific at publication to
>inform the academy about remote practices ... is now valuable in
>revealing the pseudo-scientific origins of cultural anthropology when
>operating from such a centre. Also for Indigenous scholars these flaws
>in academic practice index to the often seen complicity of such science
>in past and contemporary projects of domination at these margins.
>
>One of the leveling games that I play with my students is to present
>Aboriginal stories collected by anthropologists (many eminent pre 1978).
>These stories reveal the narratives of resistance embedded in the ways
>that these active and intelligent agents responded to an anthropological
>inquiry - one that presented their thematically flexible narrative streams as
>static primitive artifacts ... mere reproductions for recording and
>preservation.
>
>Much modern anthropology has learnt from these fallacies ... but some
>still build on these themes to present denegrations of Indigenous cultures
>see Diamond's work on ecocide and the reply by
>
>Peiser, B. (2005) From Ecocide to Genocide the Rape of Rapa Nui.
>In Energy and Environment Vol 16 No: 3&4 pp. 513-539
>
>Michael Jackson's (the anthropologist) work is exceptional particularly
>in relation to place and space & I find Gell's Art anthropology one of
>the most illuminating works where the agency of images is explored ...
>they cause us to talk about them... and the prospect introduced (new for
>western understandings but integral to Indigenous) -that design
>constitutes externalized cognition.