These claims have been put to rest, at least to some degree, by works like Paul Shankman’s The Trashing of Margaret Mead (2009), which argued that the attack on Mead’s work was highly personal and itself indebted to settling an ideological score, as Freeman insisted on a sociobiological approach to anthropology to the exclusion of considerations of social environment. One spectacular example is the so-called Mead-Freeman controversy, in which anthropologist Derek Freeman refuted Mead’s findings by retrying them in the court of the culture wars, arguing that she had been “hoaxed” by her Samoan informants who had been only too happy to play up the life imagined by their visitor. It almost certainly goes without saying that Mead’s work has been plagued with criticism since its publication. She hoped, in this work, to demonstrate that the rigid sexual strictures of American society weren’t “natural” or right - and that they could be overcome to the betterment of society more generally. Uneasy in the night, populous with ghosts, they shout lustily to one another as they hasten with their work.” Mead opens her work with a twist: she describes the men of Ta’u hastening to their work, but what she’s really describing is a Morning After scenario, a Walk of No Shame, because these men are returning from al fresco sexual adventures of the night before: “As the dawn begins to fall among the soft brown roofs and the slender palm trees stand out against a colorless, gleaming sea, lovers slip home from trysts beneath the palm trees or in the shadow of beached canoes.” Her titillating glance into the evening habits of her Indigenous subjects provides the material for her first ethnography, written for a general reader, that detailed the sexual habits of adolescent girls in Samoa. The work begins, “The life of the day begins at dawn, or if the moon has shown until daylight, the shouts of the young men may be heard before dawn from the hillside. By Megan Tusler: With the publication of Coming of Age in Samoa, Margaret Mead brought to her audience in 1928 a readable vision of adolescent sexuality derived from nine months of fieldwork on the island of Ta’u.

Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead