Margaret Mead and Samoa, 1988
Here's a second documentary, made by the BBC in 2007, about the same issue:
Tales from the Jungle: Margaret Mead, 2007
I much preferred the first video. In fact, I'd go so far as to say I found the first video considered, poignant, and intelligent; and the second video dishonest, manipulative and superficial.
The first documentary follows Derek Freeman's arguments and logic in much more depth than the latter, and ends with him walking from the camera, proclaiming that science needs 'heretics', prepared to challenge conventions and orthodoxy, and that social science needs to develop a stronger sense of what people have in common. The latter video presents Derek Freeman as a vengeful, hateful, spiteful creature, obsessed with tarnishing the legacy of the greatest female social scientist anthropology has ever produced. (It then ends on a insincerely equivocatory note: suggesting that both perspectives - that produced by Mead in a matter of months, and that produced by Freeman after decades of research - should receive equal merit, and neither should be seen as adequately 'countering' the different ontological perspective offered by the other...)
However, I despised the latter video and admired the former video, not because I 'hate' the concept of 'social construction', and 'love' the concept of 'genetic determinism'. For instance, I also despise this Channel 4 documentary made in 2006 by geneticist Armand Leroi, which argues from a mirror vantagepoint: showing a general ignorance and arrogance about the importance of culture and historical contingency, and over-attribution of human society's success to its genetic differences from other animals.
I despise both the 2007 BBC documentary, and the 2006 Channel 4 documentary because they seem to think nothing wrong with reducing social theory, and debates about social theory, to an arid binary: nature or nurture.
It perhaps sounds trite and insincere to say that both nature and nurture - and more importantly the complex and unpredictable interactions between the two - should be recognised as vital for understanding social behaviours, but this my position. It should be accepted as a starting point for any investigation into social and societal processes, and without this acceptance both the more biologically and sociologically inclined social sciences will bitterly assert their own half-truths as complete realities. This understanding should have been accepted decades ago, and debates regarding such issues should not take up any more space than an endnote.
In fact, endnote 96, on pages 309-310 of Manuel De Landa's A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History:
In the 1980s many of the original "discoveries" of cultural anthropologists were found to be oversimplifications or even distortions of the social realities they had studied. (The most famous debunkings were perhaps of Margaret Mead's claims that adolescents in Samoa did not go through similar anxieties as their Western counterparts and that males and females in Chambri exhibited an opposite pattern of dominance as in most other societies.) On all this, and the process through which cultural relativism became entrenched in academic circles, see Donald E. Brown, Human Universals (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991)
The "debunker", in the case of Mead's observations on Samoa, was the anthropologist Derek Freeman. However, this cannot be boiled down to a question of different interpretations of the data, each having an equal chance of being valid. As Brown puts it, "Mead's book was based on 9 months of fieldwork when she was 23 years old. Derek Freeman ... conducted 6 years of field work in Samoa" (ibid., p. 16) He then adds: "One can only ask how Mead could have been so wrong ... Mead went to Samoa without a knowledge of the language and with unfortunate games in her familiarity with the extensive literature on Samoa ... When she reached Samoa she did not undertake a general study of the Samoan ethos and culture but launched directly into her study of adolescence. Her informants were adolescent girls; neither boys nor adults were studied. (ibid., pp. 18-19).
The list of criticisms continues. One can only wonder how the modern left (or rather, that influential segment of it, the "social constructionists") can pretend to offer a coherent strategy of resistance based on such flimsy foundations. In any event, the fortress walls of cultural relativism will prove a poor defence against the new dangers posted by human sociobiologists. Indeed, the old stance may actually be counterproductive since it will make any revelation of its inadequacies (as in the case of the universality of color perception of facial expressions ) seem like a triumph for the opposition.
Exactly. There is nothing intrinsically 'left wing' or 'progressive' or appreciative of cultural and ethnic differences to assert a fully 'social constructivist' position about differences between peoples. In fact, as native Samoan Dr Fanaafi le Tagoloa suggests, 43 minutes into the 1988 documentary, the converse could be argued:
We're no different from you in Australia or the United States or any other part of the world. We all go through these phases and perhaps it's our cultures that makes the semblances of differences. But for Margaret Mead to make us behave as if we are non-humans... like animals in our promiscuity... I think that is a very great disfavour that she has done us.
