This is hardly surprising since the whole field of
anthropology has mostly been a major fraud.
Nonsense. Some of my best friends are anthropologists.
Margaret Mead really established the tone of
anthropological study with her major work, "Coming
of age in Samoa." She drew a portrait of a tribal
society whose characteristics were as she wished them
to be, rather than the way they were. I notice
that after all this time, anthropology departments
are working hard to rehabilitate her just because,
well, she's still politically correct.
That's silly.
First, anthropology is a big field, and there is a wide range of opinion within it. Mead was popular with the public and respected in the profession but not a superstar. Personifying the whole field with her is like judging all of neo-Darwinism based on the works of S. J. Gould.
Second, I have read Mead's stuff and it isn't that bad, and I knew her personally, and she was among the least "politically correct" people I have ever encountered.
All research looks obsolete decades later. That's a good thing -- it means we are making progress. You can always find mistakes, misjudgments, and oversimplifications. Everyone always sees what they want to see; bias is inevitable. It is unfair to criticize groundbreaking work done under difficult circumstances because it is inaccurate, or because we learn much more later on. That is like criticizing Fleischmann and Pons because they used the BF3 counter wrong.
I do not mean to personalize this, but my guess is that if we were to dispatch Michael Foster to a totally alien culture, with primitive conditions, where nobody speaks his language and he has not got a clue what they are saying at first, and we gave him a few years to learn the language and figure out the culture, he would do a lot worse job than Mead did. My point is, the job is harder than it looks, and unless you have some field experience doing things like this you should not yell "fraud" or "incompetence." Considering the difficulties they face it is astounding how much anthropologists accomplish.
- Jed
