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151 10 Samoan Sexual Conduct Belief and Behavior T   Coming of Age gave Samoans opportunities to respond to the representation of their culture and especially of Samoan sexual conduct. It also provided anthropologists opportunities to discuss what they saw as the issues in the controversy. These issues were often quite different from those that interested Samoans. For anthropologists, many of the issues were not specific to Samoa or sexual conduct but rather involved broader questions about context, rhetoric, ideology, and ethnographic authority. For anthropologists working in other areas of the world, these general issues concerning the politics of representation were as significant as the factual issues concerning Samoa itself. For example: • Richard Shweder commented that for Mead’s audience in the 1920s, it did not matter whether Samoa was in fact a sexually permissive society because somewhere in the world there was undoubtedly a place as permissive as the islands she had described. For Mead’s readers, the “mere possibility” of such a place was liberating, even if Samoa was not that place.1 • In his careful analysis of the rhetoric in Freeman’s first book on Mead, Mac Marshall noted that Freeman’s use of language gave authority to his position while undermining Mead’s. Yet in reminding readers that there was more to the controversy than the simple reporting of objective facts, Marshall deferred judgment about who was right and who was wrong.2 • George Marcus considered Freeman’s first book a public nuisance that had an implicit ideological agenda. But while Marcus was uneasy about Freeman’s argument, it was not necessarily because his facts were wrong. It was rather that his interpretation was unbalanced and one-sided.3 • In a similar vein, Nancy Scheper-Hughes contended that Mead and Freeman each wrote about one dimension of Samoan culture. Each had access to a truth about the islanders but not the truth. “And this difference can be explained by the differences between Mead and Freeman and their respective informants.”4 Although these commentaries raised important issues, the issues were generic and could apply wherever anthropologists work. And this posed a problem . Many anthropologists working in other parts of the world, including other parts of the South Pacific, disagreed with Freeman in terms of these general issues . Yet they often conceded that his factual presentation of Samoan culture and history was meticulous, convincing, and apparently accurate. Relatively few reviewers raised the possibility that substantial portions of his factual portrayal of Samoa, including sexual conduct, might be inaccurate. After the initial stages of the controversy Freeman could still say with confidence that, to the best of his knowledge, “no significant element of the empirical evidence on which my refutation [of Mead] is based has been shown to be unfactual.”5 Indeed, Freeman’s seeming certainty about factual accuracy led critics to focus on other issues. Yet the persuasiveness of Freeman’s critique rested on the assumption that his characterization of Samoa was supported by the data that he used and the sources that he cited. For Freeman, the controversy was thus necessarily about the nature of Samoan culture and history, including sexual conduct. This chapter and the next two are about Samoan sexual conduct—what is known and what is not known, what Mead knew and what Freeman knew, and the difference between belief and behavior. Malinowski on Belief and Behavior In the 1920s two works had a major impact on how anthropologists thought about sex. The first was Mead’s very accessible Coming of Age in Samoa. The second was a professional monograph by Malinowski, who not only set the standard for ethnographic fieldwork but also set the standard for studying sexual conduct in non-Western societies. In 1929 Malinowski published The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia: An Ethnographic Account of Courtship, Marriage and Family Life among the Natives of the Trobriand Islands, British New Guinea. At just over six hundred pages, this ethnography was very detailed and, in places, sexually explicit, much more so than Mead had been in Coming of Age. In fact, it was so explicit for its time that it was banned from some British libraries. It was also so ethnographically rich that it could never become a popular book, even with a preface by Havelock Ellis, the sexologist who had also endorsed Mead’s book. Although the monograph itself had limited circulation, Malinowski would write about sex and marriage in the Trobriands for popular periodicals in Great Britain , so people...

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