Tales From The Jungle: Margaret Mead
Margaret Mead was one of the world’s most celebrated anthropologists. After living with a small Samoan tribe, in the 20s, she published research which suggested nurture was more important than nature, a view shared by her supervisor at Columbia but few others.
This lead to one of the most famous controversies in science, after it was strongly refuted by another anthropologist, Derek Freeman. It’s a controversy that is still unresolved, although a dramatic documentary made in 1987 proved that her evidence was flawed.
Mead argued that the passage from childhood to adulthood in Samoa was a smooth and not marked by the angst and stress seen in the United States. One possible reason: Samoan women deferred marriage for many years while enjoying casual sex, but eventually married, settled down, and successfully reared their own children. Not the kind of society that had values that many Americans shared, in the 20s when it was assumed that less developed societies were primitive in all aspects.
Its very funny that the principal controversy perfectly describes most Western societies today, and yet the debate seems to have pushed this fact, that the initial conditions are now synchronized, into the background. There was no word for teenager in the 20s. Our societies seem to have more rite of passage angst and later settling down – or at least people singing about it. Without our Samoan style society there would be no Emo bands from Brooklyn, or double-wide strollers containing the result of fertility-enhanced, older-couple, pregnancies.
It is a classic case of where politics and science collide, and one that could surely be studied as an anthropological phenomenon in itself. The ‘meta’ nature of it is what appeals to me.
58 min 53 sec Feb 15, 2007