January 17, 2010

The Battle of Samoa, Revisited

The Battle of Samoa, Revisited 1

U. of Minnesota Duluth

Margaret Mead, circa 1926, sitting with two Samoan girls. Samoan adolescence, -- she would argue in her -- 1928 book Coming of Age in Samoa, was less emotionally turbulent than adolescence in the West.

By Peter Monaghan

Paul Shankman hopes his new book will lay to rest one of the most divisive and protracted debates in the history of anthropology: the one that Derek Freeman sparked in the early 1980s when he denounced Margaret Mead's early research in Samoa.

In The Trashing of Margaret Mead: Anatomy of an Anthropological Controversy (University of Wisconsin Press), Shankman, a professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado at Boulder who has conducted fieldwork in Samoa

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