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135 9 What the Controversy Meant to Samoans B      had become part of American consciousness. As Mead wrote Coming of Age, she thought about what the islands might mean to her American audience. But she did not anticipate what her book would mean to Samoans. She had written Coming of Age for Americans, and although she said that she wrote about Samoans from the perspective of the Samoan girls she had known, she did not write as a Samoan. Mead presented Samoans as potential models for minimizing the problems of American adolescence, shaping them to her message. From her perspective, she had portrayed them in a positive manner. Yet as Samoans heard about her book in subsequent decades or read it in English, many felt that Mead had misrepresented them. Her voice was not their voice. At stake were their identity and the world’s perception of them. When Freeman criticized Mead, he claimed to be speaking on behalf of Samoans and upholding their dignity. To him, Mead’s book was a “travesty,” not just a potential misunderstanding of another culture. Freeman was particularly adamant about the subject that Samoans themselves found most offensive in Mead’s work—her description and interpretation of their private lives. Although most of Coming of Age was noncontroversial, with only a single chapter about sex framed within a broader discussion of marriage, this part of the book drew everyone’s attention. Freeman believed that he was representing Samoan views in his critique of Mead and providing them with symbolic retribution for Mead’s alleged transgression of their culture. Some Samoans have vigorously objected to Coming of Age for decades. Anthropologist Leonard Mason remembered that, while using the book in his course at the University of Hawai‘i in the late 1940s, a young Samoan student protested that, contrary to Mead, Samoans greatly valued female virginity.1 The student, who became a Samoan chief and later governor of American Samoa, remembered his protest almost four decades later, when he appeared in the documentary film Margaret Mead and Samoa.2 In 1971, when Mead briefly stopped in American Samoa on her first visit there since the 1920s, a young Samoan woman challenged her presence on local television. Many other Samoans , including some Samoan academics, have been critical, believing that Mead disregarded the sanctity of virginity for Samoan women and neglected the institution of the ceremonial virgin, or taupou, that was at the center of Samoan public morality. One Samoan academic, Le Tagaloa Fa‘anafi, felt that Mead had portrayed Samoans “like animals.”3 Today, younger Samoans compare themselves to their American contemporaries and view their own sexual conduct as far more restricted. Many have visited America or have relatives there. They note that in America boys can openly ask girls to go out or vice versa; in Samoa relationships are usually secretive due to parental opposition. Younger Samoans view American parents as much easier on their adolescents than Samoan parents. As one young woman informed me, “In America, if you do something wrong, you get a lecture. In Samoa, you get a beating.” There is no doubt that Mead struck a raw nerve among Samoans with her discussion of sex in Coming of Age. Mead herself later acknowledged that if she had realized that Samoans would read the book, she would have written it differently . And she recognized that younger Samoans could be embarrassed by its contents.4 However, she wrote in the 1920s, when Samoans, while literate in their own language, were often not literate in English. And Mead chose not to revise and update the text itself but rather added new prefaces to new editions, explaining that the book should remain faithful to what she observed then.5 To Freeman, her failure to revise it demonstrated that Mead was unrepentant in her permissive view of Samoan sexual conduct. For some Samoans, the problem with Mead was not only what she wrote about their private lives but that she wrote about them without their knowledge or approval. As we have seen, Mead’s writing reflected the era in which she did her research and wrote her book. In the 1920s almost no one, including most Americans, knew what anthropology was. Studying other people was the anthropologist ’s prerogative; indigenous people were ethnographic subjects, not research collaborators. Furthermore, in the 1920s American Samoa was a colony . Samoans were American subjects, not American citizens. Research permissions were not required. There was no concern about informed consent; that...

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