Dear Norm and David,

Without entiering into the full debate, I want to raise a couple of modest 
questions on your recent notes. The thread following from Dori Turnbull's 
post, and especially some replies, interests me greatly. I've been 
traveling a great deal this past week, so I have not had a chance to enter 
in. I'm writing today from Loughborough University, so I don't have access 
to my library. This means I must ask a few questions and point out some 
facts from unaided memory.

First, let me make my position clear. I am not writing to defend Mead's 
work or to argue that Mead's book was perfect or without flaw. I am writing 
to say that some of the issues in the debate on the flaws in Mead's work 
have to do with flawed arguments put forward by a scholar who met and 
corresponded often with Mead during her lifetime, but failed to challenge 
her until after her death. This scholar was a chap named Derek Freeman, and 
many other have challenged his work and conclusions, and especially some 
serious gaps and flaws in his arguments.

While I am not myself an anthropologist, I was active in antrhopology in a 
serious way in the 1970s. Even then, the notion that anthropologists were 
Western scholars who studied supposedly primitive people was considered 
absurd. Anthropologists are scholars who study human beings in social and 
cultural context using an array of methods and mental models. The area of 
anthropology that interested me in those days was the anthropology of art --
I was engaged in dialogue with people who primarily studied contemporary 
Western art forms, especially conceptual art and intermedia. Other areas of 
rich interest with such fields as urban anthropology, social anthropology, 
the anthropology of war, and dozen of other topics that focus on explicitly 
modern societies in developed economies. There were -- and are still --
anthropologists who study other issues in other contexts. But if we are 
going to address a controversial debate on this list by attempting to prick 
the balloon of a scholarly myth, let's start with a robust and responsible 
presentation of the field who balloon we plan to prick. 

Anthropology is far different to and broader than the representation that I 
infer from Norm's notes. Dori Turnbull is the anthropologist I now best and 
work with most closely these days, and she works in an explicity 
contemporary context embedded in the social and cultural practices of 
Western societies. This is true of Dori, of Karen Lisa Salamon, of Daria 
Loi, and of most of the thousand or so anthropologists on the Anthropology 
and Design list. (That's a kind of PhD-Design list for anthropologists 
working in design areas, but their focus is more specialized, and the 
research experience and background of participants tends to be quite 
strong, with a rich interdisciplinary research foundation, inside design 
and out.) 

So much for my position and view of anthropology.

Now to the case:

The debate on whether Margaret Mead was hoaxed by the young women of Samoa 
is far from a proven fact or a closed question. If Norm personally knows 
Samoan anthropologists, I'd be curious about what they know and how they 
know it. A Samoan anthropologist living in Australia who is young enough to 
be active in anthropology today is not the same as a Samoan anthropologist 
living in Samoa who is old enough to have known anyone who was involved in 
the supposed hoax.

There are three serious challenges to Derek Freeman's asserions.

The first and most serious of these is, again, that Freeman could have 
asked Mead about the central issues in his argument and he could have 
challenged when she was still alive. He did not. 

Freeman knew Mead. He met her several times in conferences and scholarly 
settings. He corresponded with her extensively. 

He had every chance to bring this forward yet he did not.

Second, Freeman's claim was in part based on his own extensive field work 
in Samoa. BUT -- and this is a major 'but' -- he worked in completely 
different region with a dramatically different cultural group at a 
different time. Most important, this was long after the part of Samoa where 
Freeman worked was changed by exposure to Western culture in a way far 
different to the part of Samoa had been when Mead worked there. I was 
therefore culturally different in two key ways.

In the era before today's telecommunications, this would be the equivalent 
of making assertions about Canadians based on field work in Texas. More to 
the point, it is like claiming that a scholar studying European cultural 
patterns in rural Italy in 1948 was hoaxed because I found different 
European cultural patterns in Copenhagen in the 1970s. As a former American 
who moved to Europe in the 1980s, I found it possible to see significant 
cultural changes within a decade of my move, and the America where I grew 
up is far different to the America that re-elected George Bush -- or, 
better said, elected George Bush for the first time -- in 2004.

Third, there are a number of fine-grained arguments that one can raise 
located in Freeman's specific claims of a Samoan culture that I won't 
address here.

I may return to address the main thread, but I felt this deserved a 
question and a mild challenge.

Of course Mead made some mistakes -- but the legend of the 'hoax' is vastly 
exaggerated, and it fails to account for some important challenges that 
Freeman never satisfactorily addressed.

Then, too, there are some issues about anthropology in the post that don't 
quite make sense to me. My research subjects tended to be artists living in 
cities such as New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles, or the cultural satellite 
cities of the North American art world. (To define my term, a 'subject' is 
a voluntary individual who is the subject of his or her own life world, as 
contrasted with an inanimate object or an abstract concept. In my view, 
Mead attempted to treat people as subjects and not as objects.)

If we are going to put forward these issues as a dehate, I'd like to see 
them treated seriously enough to bring out serious issues. 

Yours,

Ken Friedman