Sex, Science, and History

The history of sexual liberation is inextricably bound with the history of scientific rationalism. Throughout the twentieth century, the basic moral consensus on sexual liberation has proved capable of accommodating a wide variety of scientific methodologies, from the cultural anthropology of Margaret Mead to the biological taxonomy of Alfred Kinsey. Two recent works, Derek Freeman's The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis of Her Samoan Research, and James H. Jones's Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life, critique their respective subjects'specific scientific practice only to reaffirm the general practice of sexual science and its underlying (a)moral consensus. In this article, I will examine the treatment of methodological issues in these books as a reflection of the historical profession's participation in the moral bankruptcy of the social sciences. Freeman's empirical deconstruction of Mead's Samoan research and Jones's empirical reconstruction of Kinsey's life both skirt substantive moral issues by affirming a hopelessly nineteenth-century ideal of scientific objectivity. Each book, in its own particular way, fetishizes fact at the expense of argument and obscures the nature of intellectual developments of interest to historians of every moral and methodological orientation.

Freeman's The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead is the more curious of the two books in that it presents so few significant new facts. Most of the book is a twice-told tale, a rehash of Freeman's earlier work, Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth (1983). In both works, Freeman, a biological evolutionist, wages what he styles to be a one-man war against the Boasian culturalism that has dominated the anthropology profession since the 1920s. As an intellectual historian, I cannot help but see this motivating animus as somewhat confused from the start. True, Franz Boas, along with his students Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, did lead the profession away from the biological determinism that dominated Victorian anthropology; true as well, his attack on scientific racism and his affirmation of the dignity of all cultures struck a powerful humanist chord within the profession, and throughout the broader intellectual community. Still, a bias toward culture over biology cannot be equated with the persistence of a Boasian methodological orthodoxy. No self-respecting cultural anthropologist would speak of culture as a unified pattern of values; Clifford Geertz may be a cultural anthropologist, but he is hardly a Boasian. Freeman himself concedes that the hostility that greeted his first book came more from its implied threat to Mead's symbolic status as "the Mother Goddess of American Anthropology" than from his specific methodological critique. ¹ Mead's enduring standing comes not from her methodological sophistication, but from her work as a public intellectual, bringing anthropology to bear on the social problems of her time, in the service of a "progressive" social agenda that included, among other values, sexual liberation. Freeman grinds his methodological ax with an obsessiveness that blinds him to the broader intellectual significance of Mead's work.

Freeman was spurred to continue this public crusade against Mead primarily by the revelation of one new fact. In 1987, Faí apuaí a Faí amu, one of Mead's native informants during her original trip to Samoa in 1926, announced that she had fibbed to Mead regarding the promiscuous sexual practices of Samoan adolescents. Through a detailed, empirical reconstruction of Mead's field trip, Freeman argues that the empirical basis for her claims concerning Samoan sexual freedom rested entirely on Faí amu's joke that she had had many sexual experiences with boys. The final nail in a coffin long buried, this new fact nonetheless elicited a passionate response from the scholarly community. No less a historian than George Stocking immediately cast suspicion on the reliability of what he called "octogenarian recollections" (Faí amu was eighty-six years old at the time) (FH, 12). Freeman then proceeded to write an entire book to confirm those recollections--as well as his previous book.

Ironically, Freeman...