Questioning Cultural Relativism - ＂The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead＂ (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_951)
Episode Stats
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Summary
In the first episode of 2020, Scott Saad discusses the controversial book, The Fatal Hoaxing of Margaret Mead, written by Derek Freeman, about the controversial anthropologist Margaret Mead and her work on sex differences in human sexuality.
Transcript
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Hi everybody, this is Scott Saad. I hope that the new year is treating you well.
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Today I wanted to talk briefly about a controversy between two anthropologists, Margaret Mead and Derek Freeman.
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Margaret Mead is one of the, in some sense, legendary anthropologists of the 20th century.
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She was a doctoral student of Franz Boas, who was a Columbia professor of anthropology.
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And he was really the guy who started the movement of cultural relativism.
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Cultural relativism is a parasitic idea that I discuss in The Parasitic Mind because it basically purports that, you know,
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everything when you're studying culture is driven by idiosyncratic realities, whether they be historical realities or cultural realities.
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So there is no such thing as a universal human nature.
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And hence, cultural relativism results in the type of degeneracy of moral arguments,
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such as who are you to judge whether we should cut off the clitorises of five-year-old girls.
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If that's what they do in their culture, then those are the idiosyncrasies of their culture.
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And you have to study it from that relativistic point of view.
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Of course, it's very relevant to my own work in evolutionary psychology,
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where you're trying to tease out, you know, how much of nature versus nurture plays into a particular phenomenon.
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But today what I'd like to talk about is this book,
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The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead, written by Derek Freeman, who I didn't know.
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I mean, I thought he had passed away, but I wasn't sure.
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And I quickly realized or perhaps remember that he had died in 2001.
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Well, the main claim to fame, the thing that put Margaret Mead on the map,
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was that she went to Samoa as an anthropologist to demonstrate precisely that which her doctoral supervisor had pioneered,
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to show that even when it comes to something as supposedly innate as, you know, the trajectory of adolescence
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or sexual behavior among the adolescents, there are no universals.
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Now, of course, we know, for example, from paternity uncertainty theory or from parental investment theory, rather,
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that, well, actually, both of those things apply in understanding universal patterns of mating.
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But parental investment theory from Robert Trivers explains that if you want to know in any species
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which of the two sexes is likely to be more judicious in their mate choice,
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then look to the sex that has to commit the greater minimal obligatory parental investment.
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Although in some species that are called sex role reversal species,
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then you will have an exact reversal of all of the sex differences.
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Now, in the human context, of course, women bear much more of the minimal parental obligatory investment,
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and therefore, they are going to be more sexually restrained.
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Doesn't mean that they're not sexual beings, but certainly they're going to be less so than men.
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Well, here comes Margaret Mead on her cultural relativistic horse,
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and she's going to show that, no, even when it comes to sex differences in human sexuality,
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I can find an exotic culture where that doesn't hold true.
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she studied supposedly young girls, Samoan girls,
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who exhibited many of the reversals that heretofore were supposedly universal.
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Now, we can debate about the methodology that Margaret Mead used,
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how much she incorporated her own ideological commitments into interpreting the data and so on.
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But this gentleman, Derek Freeman, wrote this book.
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And, you know, I highly recommend that you read it because it's part,
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it's a real story, of course, but that's, in a sense, a detective story.
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How much was she doing things, she meaning Margaret Mead,
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that were, say, unethical or perhaps inadvertently was she being biased by her thing
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versus the reason why he uses the term the fateful hoaxing of Margaret Mead
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is because he argued that there were several of the participants that she interacted with in Samoa
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that were just bullshitting her, just having fun with her.
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But boy, was she ready to accept their narrative as long as it supported her idea.
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So, in any case, great scientific detective story
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because it deals with arguably the most important debate within, you know,
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Of course, the truth is that we are an inextricable mix of both.
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But here comes Franz Boas and his female doctoral students,
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Ruth Benedict would have been another one, all of whom were fully committed to this idea of cultural relativism.
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Margaret Mead goes and tries to find an exotic society where, voila,
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all sexual patterns are somehow different from what we're used to,
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demonstrating that the cultural relativist view is, quote, correct.
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And then here comes another gentleman who says, uh-oh, not so fast, Margaret Mead.
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Now, some people have said that, no, he was unfair and that he also cherry-picked his data
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You know, it's tough to know without getting into the knee-deep of the exact data
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what percentage of what she said was false versus how he interpreted it and so on.
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But we certainly know, I think very few people would disagree with this statement,
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that Margaret Mead had an ideological commitment towards cultural relativism.
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she made sure to find out exactly what she was hoping to find.