The Samoa Reader

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 This book is based on the study of unpublished sources, some of which are included.

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.