Extra Credit Review #2
Margaret Mead was born on December 16, 1901 in Philadelphia. She grown up with the influence of her intellectual family, and she started her fieldwork at Samoan island in 1925. Mead learned the local language before her fieldwork which is not required for anthropologist at her time. Because she had to face helpless loneliness and encounter numerous culture shocks at her arrival, she decided to not live with the local and just being an observer. Meanwhile, she tried all the strategy to do her fieldwork and everything worked out very well. She found out that the children in Samoan have less tension from the family. She noticed that adolescent problems were not generated due to teenagers themselves but the social and environmental atmosphere. This is in the contrary that most American people thought that gene is the determination to a person or even to a whole race. After her return to the America, she published her fieldwork, Coming of age in Samoa, and pointed out that a person is formed from nurture but not nature. Her influence soon spread out on the 60s’ young generation due to her successful book and her reputation as being a spokesperson for the power of culture and socialization. At the death of Margaret Mead, she was voted as one of three most famous women in American history and known as the founding mother of cultural anthropology.
But Margaret Mead’s research to cultural anthropology was questioned by another anthropologist called Derek Freeman. He was a professor of anthropology at the Australian National University. Freeman had been a believer in Margaret Mead’s research that supremacy of nurture over nature. But after his fieldwork among Samoan people, he found out that Margaret Mead’s report was not the same as his witnessing. He saw that Samoans were full of jealousy hatred aggression possessiveness that not as Mead described. And as his observation kept going, he found all the Mead’s observation in her book were wrong. When he had chance to confront Mead, she refused to reply his criticisms. After Margaret Mead’s death, Freeman published his book to criticize Mead’s research on Samoan people which brought