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Anthropology Wars: Margaret Mead by Brian Correia

It’s a familiar tale to those who have just watched a documentary about it: In 1925, a student named Margaret Mead ventured to the six-hundred person Samoan island of Ta’u on an anthropological mission to study adolescence. She was assigned this task by her professor at Columbia, the legendary “Father of Anthropology,” Franz Boas. Adolescence, as far as they knew it in America and Europe, was a hellish, stressful time for all involved parties; A blood-sweat-and-tears-soaked bungle of fits and zits that had seemingly been that way since the beginning of time. Was it like this all over? That’s what he intended for Mead to find out.

And find out she did. Mead moved into the US naval dispensary in Samoa, learned a whopping (or meager, depending on whose side you’re on) five hundred words of the Samoan language, and dove right in. Based on her observations of the inhabitants of Ta’u and her interviews with local adolescent girls, she found the culture to be tame, peaceful, promiscuous, and even (mon dieur!) incestuous…

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