Robert Winston: for many years, sexual jealous was thought not to be a universal human instinct, rather a product of our own Western sexual repression, hang-ups and neuroses. ๐งต
Mead seemed to be saying that we do not need to be the way that we are. It is only our Western way of life that blemishes the 'tabula rasa', the blank slate with which we are all born, leading to violence, moral disintegration and sexual confusion.
Many years later, in 1983, the Samoan bubble burst...Derek Freeman, returned from an intensive study of the Samoans with very different conclusions.
Freeman took much criticism for his re-evaluation of Mead; the anthropologists were not quite ready to overturn her idealism & utopian view of human nature... the orthodoxy was eventually overcome, & now there is a grudging acceptance that some things are the same the world over.
Margaret Mead nonetheless was a firm advocate of free and open debate. At a gathering in Washington DC in 1976 some social scientists tried to get EO Wilson's Sociobiology banned in schools and universities. Mead took the stage and likened these actions to medieval book burning.
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