Derek Freeman; Professor, Mead Critic

Derek Freeman, who helped modernize anthropology when he challenged Margaret Mead’s famous 1920s studies of adolescent sexuality in Samoa, has died. He was 84.

Freeman, an emeritus professor of anthropology at the Australian National University, died July 6 in Canberra, Australia, of congestive heart failure.

Touching off one of the most heated and prolonged scholarly fights in anthropology studies, Freeman challenged the venerated Mead’s findings published in her 1928 “Coming of Age in Samoa.” She described a society in which early sexual freedom and promiscuity flourished, which fueled anthropology’s “nature versus nurture” theory of behavior.

Author David Rains Wallace, discussing several books involving controversy in anthropology for a Times Book Review article in November, wrote: “Australian anthropologist Derek Freeman’s 1983 book, ‘Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth,’ contained the most publicized accusations until this year [he referred to criticism of studies of the Yanomamo civilization in the Amazon].

“Freeman accused Mead not only of being wrong in her observations of Polynesian folkways . . . but also of using them to promote her own ‘cultural determinist’ ideology against the ‘genetic determinism’ that had prevailed,” the reviewer wrote. “Because Mead’s work was fundamental to the ‘cultural anthropology’ prevalent since the 1930s, Freeman’s accusations gratified a new breed of sociobiological genetic determinists. The two factions started fighting about his book two months before it was published and are still fighting about it.”

Freeman wrote a second book criticizing Mead’s studies two years ago called “The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead.”

First an admirer of Mead but later skeptical, Freeman himself spent six years in Samoa and a total of 40 years researching Asian and Pacific peoples.

Born in New Zealand and educated at the University of London and Cambridge, he became fluent in Samoan and studied village culture there as well as missionary archives involving Samoans over the years.

By contrast, he argued, Mead based her seminal study on a hasty five-month stay in Samoa when she was in her early 20s and lived among white officials instead of native islanders. He claimed Mead was ill-prepared for the research, had little understanding of the Samoan language and was distracted by another concurrent research project.

As for the “hoax,” Freeman claimed, Mead was misled by young Samoan women who lied to her, exaggerated and invented mischievous stories in answer to her questions about their sexual habits.

When Mead visited Australia in 1964, she met Freeman a single time and was warned by him that he questioned her research. He hoped to publish his criticism before her death in 1978, but was unable to find a willing publisher. Freeman had sent a manuscript to Mead during the final year of her life, but she did not read it.

Freeman, in addition to his long research and teaching career, was a former director of the Australian National University’s Research School of Pacific Studies.

He is survived by his wife of 53 years, Monica; two daughters, Jennifer, who lives in Berkeley, and Hilary; and three grandchildren.