The Samoa Reader: Anthropologists Take Stock - Hardcover

Caton, Hiram

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0819177202 ISBN 13: 9780819177209

Publisher: UPA, 1990

Synopsis

The Samoa Reader is a source book on the most extensive controversy in the history of anthropology, touched off by the publication of Derek Freeman's Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth. Freeman's book purported to refute the most famous writing of the world's most honored and celebrated anthropologist. This book seemed to many to be an attack on liberal values; anthropologists believed that it was a concerted assault on the reliability and conceptual structure of cultural anthropology in the name of "sociobiology." The Reader canvasses these and other issues by assembling, in readable form, the most cogent writings to come out of the controversy. This book is based on the study of unpublished sources, some of which are included.

About this title

About the Author:

The Editor

Hiram Caton, D.Litt., is professor of politics and history at Griffith University, Brisbane, Australian. He is well qualified for his task. He holds the M.A. in Arabic and Islamic Civilization from the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago and the doctorate in Philosophy from Yale University. He is familiar with the project to unite the social and biological sciences, having contributed to that effort as a historian, political psychologist, human ethnologist, and bibliographer. As a political scientist he is at home with cultural politics that lent passion to the controversy. His philosophical training and policy studies on applications of biomedical technology have equipped him to deal with the challenging problems of knowledge evaluation raised by the clash between the two images of Samoa. Among his current publications are The politics of Progress: The Origins and Development of the Commercial Republic 1600-1835, University of Florida Press, and Trends in Biomedical regulation (editor), butterworths, in press.

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Introduction

This collection of essays is offered in the belief that the Samoa controversy, touched off by the publication of Derek Freeman's Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth, prompted a stock-taking that is of immediate importance and probably of lasting significance as well. The theory and methods of a key social science were examined from many sides, and evaluated in the light of the field's history. It is hoped that by bringing the chief contributions together with other related essays and unpublished writings, the energy unleashed in this uncommon review will more effectively work out its results.

The controversy ranged over many topics, and perceptions of the central issues varied. Some dismissed it as a prestige struggle of no particular theoretical relevance, even if it furnished sociologists of knowledge rare grist for their mill. At the other end of the spectrum were those who believed that it marked a watershed in the history of anthropology.

The selection of readings presented here is meant to preserve that range of opinion. Nevertheless my own interest in the debate is nourished by the belief that one of its themes is deeply significant for anthropologists and social scientists generally. I mean the broad question on what terms the methods and findings of the biological sciences, behavioral biology especially, can be integrated with anthropology and the social sciences. It is fitting that this question should have arisen forcefully in anthropology, since it is the social science most conscious of its proximity to evolutionary science. For this reason the Samoa controversy is likely to hold lessons that may apply more broadly. What sort of lessons? It is easy to say what they are not. No discussion of the application of specific biological methods in anthropology took place. One cannot learn from the exchanges how actually to conduct the nature/nurture "Interactionist" anthropological research that various protagonists in the debate espouse.

We do learn that anthropologists differ markedly about the reality, possibility, and desirability of the interactionist option. The terms of these disagreements, I suggest, mark out the broad lines of the problematic of any project to unite cultural anthropology with behavioral biology, or for that matter, to maintain its separate existence. The debate here is essentially how anthropology interfaces and should interface with biology; and about what a robust integrated anthropology would look like. A few patterns that recur in the selections may be indicated.

Surprisingly, there is disagreement as to whether a body of interactionist anthropological research exists. Freeman, a tireless students of this subject since 1962, has spoken as if the integration of biology into anthropology is a project for the future. What is needful now, he thinks, is an unclouded view of basic issues to provide orientation for existing methodologies.

His view is supported in this volume by Robin Fox, who is often named as a leading contributor to "bio-anthropology." In his essay, "The Disunity of Anthropology and the Unity of Mankind," Fox reconnoiters the conceptual terrain obstructing passage into the new continent, and proposes some simple yet basic renovations meant to cut a conceptual path into virgin for-est. another voice in the same key is the pioneer of human ethology and author of the first textbook on that subject, Irenaus Eibl-Eibesfeldt. In his forward to the German translation of Margaret Mead and Samoa, Eibl identified Freeman's critique of environmentalist or cultural determinist theory as his fundamental contribution to the anthropology of the future. A similar view has been expressed by sociobiologist E. O. Wilson.

Mead's protagonists tended to dismiss Freeman's dramatic proposal for interactionist anthropology as old hat. They rejected as tendentious his foray into anthropological history, which was meant to show how the environmentalist or cultural determinist presuppositions of American cultural anthropology were created from the anti-evolutionary anxieties of Franz boas and his students. Boas, they retorted, included biology in the discipline as physical anthropology and proved his seriousness by conducting such research himself.

About this edition

• Publisher: UPA
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0819177202
• ISBN 13: 9780819177209
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 366