I’d heard that, and it made me pause before using that example, but I didn’t think of another one off the top of my head at the time. There’s an example that should have been immediately obvious to me: the Hawai’ians, or Kanaka Maoli. Since the Kanaka Maoli are also Polynesians, and definitely had much laxer pre-contact sexual mores than Europeans, I’m inclined to suspect there’s a fair bit of truth to what Mead’s informants told her.
But I’d also heard it asserted that her data was probably not that bad, but that the missionaries had been really influential in the subsequent generation or so, and the Samoans interviewed later had been eager to repudiate what Mead had been told. (I admit, that seems a bit of a stretch.) In any case, it seems to me that if groups of kids were even comfortable making up the stuff they told her, that suggests they were at least somewhat less sexually repressed than their Anglo-American contemporaries.
If you have a URL or two about the controversy, or a reference to an article I could find in a smallish academic library, I’d be interested in it. I read CoAiS a long time ago, and my only other information about Samoan culture is casual comments in conversation about her book.
Hmmm, on a hunch, I checked at the Wikipedia (certainly not an authoritative source, I admit). The article on Margaret Mead is interesting, and meshes nicely with my expectations.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2003-07-26 14:01 (UTC)I’d heard that, and it made me pause before using that example, but I didn’t think of another one off the top of my head at the time. There’s an example that should have been immediately obvious to me: the Hawai’ians, or Kanaka Maoli. Since the Kanaka Maoli are also Polynesians, and definitely had much laxer pre-contact sexual mores than Europeans, I’m inclined to suspect there’s a fair bit of truth to what Mead’s informants told her.
But I’d also heard it asserted that her data was probably not that bad, but that the missionaries had been really influential in the subsequent generation or so, and the Samoans interviewed later had been eager to repudiate what Mead had been told. (I admit, that seems a bit of a stretch.) In any case, it seems to me that if groups of kids were even comfortable making up the stuff they told her, that suggests they were at least somewhat less sexually repressed than their Anglo-American contemporaries.
If you have a URL or two about the controversy, or a reference to an article I could find in a smallish academic library, I’d be interested in it. I read CoAiS a long time ago, and my only other information about Samoan culture is casual comments in conversation about her book.
Hmmm, on a hunch, I checked at the Wikipedia (certainly not an authoritative source, I admit). The article on Margaret Mead is interesting, and meshes nicely with my expectations.