Posted on 07/14/2002 10:09:32 PM PDT by eclectic
Sometimes history is shaped by the most unexpected of people. Take the case of Fa'apua'a Fa'amu.
Fa'amu mounted the world stage, and from a very remote location, only twice in her long life: once, by telling a lie, in 1926; next, by telling the truth, in 1987. The lie, told to a 24-year-old graduate student in anthropology from Columbia University, concerned nothing less than Fa'amu's sex life. The truth-telling concerned the same.
"We just fibbed and fibbed to her," an abashed Fa'amu confessed to Australian anthropologist Derek Freeman when he interviewed her in her old age. "Samoan girls are terrific liars when it comes to joking. But Margaret accepted our trumped-up stories as though they were true."
"Margaret," of course, was Margaret Mead (1901-1978), probably the best known and most influential cultural anthropologist of the 20th century. In November 1925, at the behest of her mentor, the German-Jewish anthropologist Franz Boas, Mead arrived in American Samoa for what was intended to be a nine-month study of "the life of Samoan girls," particularly their "sexual life and any philosophical conflicts."
But Mead, according to biographer Phyllis Grosskurth, was not interested in "socially unimportant adolescents"; her real interest lay more in collecting artifacts. Nor was she much taken by the Samoans, whom she refused to live among because she couldn't stomach the local food staple, taro.
In March 1926, intent on leaving Samoa early for France, and having done virtually no fieldwork on Boas's project (all the while assuring him that her labors were "going nicely"), Mead turned to virtually the only Samoan girls she knew, Fa'amu and a companion named Fofoa, prodding them insistently with questions about sex. Though "embarrassed and offended" by her inquiries, the two girls decided to play along.
"They told Mead everything she wanted to hear," wrote Scientific American columnist Martin Gardner. "Yes, adolescents had complete sexual freedom, moving stress-free from childhood to adulthood. Samoans were a happy, free-love people. Poor Mead bought it all."
Whether Mead really did buy it all remains a subject of debate. According to Freeman, impressionable young Mead, eager to please the paternal figure of Boas, was guilty only of willful self-deception. Yet the account she furnished in Coming of Age in Samoa, her blockbuster 1928 book, was by every measure an astonishing fabrication. Mead claimed to have learned Samoan; she had not. She claimed to have drawn her conclusions from a sample of 66 subjects; the sample number was closer to two. As to her depiction of Samoans as sexual libertines ("as the dawn begins to fall... lovers slip home from trysts beneath the palm trees...") the truth was starkly opposite. At traditional weddings, a Samoan bride furnished public evidence of her virginity by allowing a representative of the groom to rupture her hymen using two fingers covered in cloth.
YET FACTS tend to count for little when they stand in the way of desire, belief, or ideology. Coming of Age in Samoa descended on a public eager for its message of sexual liberation and cultural relativism. "Back to the South Sea Isles," exulted Samuel Schmalhausen in 1929. "Back to naturalness and simplicity and sexual joy."
Thus was a revolution started.
Ultimately, the effects of this revolution were felt most keenly in the West. The supposedly liberal, actually conservative, people whom the modern world sought to emulate would tend to remain mired in their traditions; only the moderns would try to remold themselves in the shape of their illusions.
Matters were otherwise in the West's other great recasting of its relationship with the Third World - its endorsement of the right to self-determination.
The Great War had done much to eradicate Western self-belief in the superiority of its ways, yet it was only that self-belief that could, in the long term, justify the pursuit and possession of empire. If all cultures were equal, however - if Samoans lived longer and healthier and freer lives than Americans and Europeans - then this belief turned into just another excuse for tyranny. By what right did Europe rule over Africa? Or America over the Philippines?
Like nothing else, cultural relativism spelled the end of William McKinley's "civilizing mission." Indeed, maybe those Samoans had a thing or two to teach the rest of us.
Such thinking did not, of course, originate with Margaret Mead or Franz Boas. The great Scottish skeptic David Hume had entertained similar beliefs, as had Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as had Emile Durkheim. So, too, did another intellectual, Woodrow Wilson, the first modern-day statesman to advance national self-determination.
"The other nationalities which are now under Turkish rule should be assured an undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development," he wrote in 1919 as one of his 14 points.
Wilson advocated self-determination as part-and-parcel of his larger goal, to "make the world safe for democracy." Plainly, an empire could not offer its imperial subjects democratic governance unless it was prepared to make citizens of those subjects, which would mean the end of empire. Plainly, too, to be ruled by one's own was of the essence of democracy. "Self rule" was not just a matter of democratic procedure but also of cultural autonomy. For personal freedom to flourish, there first had to be group freedom.
Or so the thinking went.
Of course, there remained the nagging possibility that, by retreating from its colonies, the West might simply be paving the way for home-grown tyrannies. But if the dictates of cultural relativism were to be believed, this could not be. Cultures are "adaptive"; their political, social, and economic institutions are tailored for the environments in which they exist. What may seem strange, even brutish, to Western eyes - human sacrifice, cannibalism, clitoral excision, the immolation of a widow on her husband's funeral pyre - actually serves a necessary, even useful, social function, in which individuals willingly participate.
Similarly, apparently nondemocratic political institutions - monarchies, castes, rule by strongmen - may genuinely reflect the wishes of the majority. In this way, cultural "recognition" came to be seen not only as complementary to personal liberty, but as a legitimate substitute for it. Such thinking was to lead to the creation of what historian Paul Johnson called "Caliban's Kingdoms": Nkrumah's Ghana, Mobutu's Zaire, Idi Amin's Uganda, Ho Chi Minh's Vietnam. In each case, the absence of colonial rule was taken as sufficient evidence of real freedom; whatever went on internally was a purely domestic affair concerning which the West was neither morally nor politically entitled to voice an opinion.
Yet, as these post-colonial newborns went on their merry way, two things became evident.
First, local cultures are usually totally maladapted when it comes to governance of a state. Tribal leaders cannot be recast as statesmen; local potentates do not enjoy popular support; local mores do not supply answers to the challenges of 20th century governance. Indeed, local mores are often quite simply dumb.
Second, cultural autonomy, far from being a precondition for democratic governance, is an obstacle to it. The demand for national self-determination is fundamentally exclusionary of other groups, and so runs counter to the pluralism that is the basis for genuine democracy. Democracies like France and Britain are amalgams of several cultures - Breton, Alsatian, Catalan; English, Welsh, Scottish. They have flourished not because they hew rigorously to their ways, but because they have learned to be open to others.
FAST-FORWARD to our own era. In 1983, Freeman published Margaret Mead in Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth. The American Anthropological Association, in thrall to the orthodoxies of cultural relativism, swiftly denounced his work as "poorly written, unscientific, irresponsible and misleading."
Yet Freeman, a serious academic who spoke Samoan fluently and had studied the islanders for more than 40 years, was not so easy to dismiss, and the evidence (including the interview with Fa'amu) kept piling up. Today, Mead's academic reputation lies in tatters, though her prestige as a feminist role model remains high.
Not so the cultural and political movements she helped spawn. True, in the wake of September 11, not all cultures seem quite so equal; the pre-Meadian language of barbarism and civilization is enjoying something of a vogue. Yet here's New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof to provide a refresher course in relativism: "It's reasonable to worry about the implications of the spread of Islam for the status of women and the genital mutilation of girls," he writes. "But simply thundering that Islam is intrinsically violent does not help to understand it and picks up on racist and xenophobic threads that are some of the sorriest chapters in our history."
Much the same goes for what's happening in this part of the globe. Fundamentally, the argument made on behalf of Palestinian self-determination is that statehood offers Palestinians a kind of partial justice; at least they'll be governed by one of their own, following Palestinian customs and patterns.
Then too, as The Economist has editorialized, "No doubt, when Palestine eventually becomes an independent country, its people will choose a new, more democratic president."
In fact, nearly everything we've discovered in recent months about Palestinian culture tells us the opposite. What used to be considered the most secular and modern of Arab communities is now the most radical, least democratic and, to go by opinion polls, most terroristically inclined. "Palestine" is what anthropologist Robert Edgerton would call "a sick society," whose beliefs, far from being adaptive responses to their situation, have amounted to a form of national-political suicide. To grant Palestinians statehood today would be to ignore all of this, and simply to indulge in the belief that every culture is of equal worth.
ROBERT LANSING, Wilson's hardheaded secretary of state, called national self-determination "a phrase loaded with dynamite." In combination with Mead's cultural relativism, it proved to be more than that - a jet airplane, loaded with fuel.
What will it take to undo the damage? Confessing the truth, as Fa'apua'a Fa'amu did, would be a good place to start.
First, local cultures are usually totally maladapted when it comes to governance of a state. Tribal leaders cannot be recast as statesmen; local potentates do not enjoy popular support; local mores do not supply answers to the challenges of 20th century governance. Indeed, local mores are often quite simply dumb.Agreed. But where can one find a boot big enough to stomp them all flat?
Sorry Charlie, it is their racism and xenophobia that is being pointed out, 1400 years of killing in the name of Allah.
The Museum of Natural History in New York has a big exhibit on Margaret Mead's work. This exhibit's text never bothers to mention all the facts that have come to light since her "groundbreaking" study.
Since I read about Mead's scam, in the N.Y. Times, many decades ago, I assumed that it was common knowledge. Guess I was VERY wrong.
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