Itzel Becerril từ Fratila, Romania

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11/05/2024

Dữ liệu người dùng, đánh giá và đề xuất cho sách

Itzel Becerril Sách lại (10)

2019-03-08 01:31

Bé Học Lễ Giáo - Bubu Tập 50: Bubu Vẽ Tranh Thư viện Sách hướng dẫn

Sách được viết bởi Bởi:

This is an extremely important book, and Derek Freeman is a hero for writing it. At the beginning of his career, Freeman accepted Margaret Mead's claims about Samoa - he trusted that she had done her ethnography well. But, when he went to Samoa to do his own fieldwork there, he gradually realized that Mead had made some egregious mistakes, and that many of the claims that Mead made about Samoans were dead wrong. Given the influence that Mead's ethnography of Samoa had on the development of cultural anthropological theory, Freeman felt compelled to set the record straight. He spent the next several decades reviewing historical accounts of Samoan culture, collecting his own observations of Samoans, and analyzing hard data such as police and hospital records that provided a wealth of information about Samoan culture. Freeman refutes Mead so clearly and with so much CONVERGENT EVIDENCE from different kinds of sources that I honestly cannot imagine anyone reading this book and still believing that Mead's portrayal of Samoan culture is even slightly credible. For instance, while Mead insisted that unmarried girls were allowed and even encouraged to have casual sex with several boys before getting married, Freeman provided loads of evidence to show that girls and their families were very protective of the unmarried girls' virginity. If a girl's hymen was breached, her attractiveness as a potential wife plummeted (because she could no longer prove her virginity). Also, Mead insisted that "the idea of forcible rape or of any other sexual act to which both participants do not give themselves freely is completely foreign to the Samoan Mind." (That's a quote from Mead, not Freeman). This claim seems very hard to believe, and, sure enough, Freeman shows that it is completely false. Police records from Samoa suggest that rape and sexual assault are more common in Samoa than in most places. In fact, Samoan males would teach each other a specific technique for assaulting girls in which the male begins by stunning the girl with a strong strike to the solar plexus. Finally, the practice of "moetotolo" - in which men sneak into the beds of female virgins and penetrate their vaginas with their fingers to breach the hymen - is devastating to girls. Freeman even reported an account of a girl who committed suicide after being assaulted in her sleep. The list of slam-dunk refutations could go on and on. But this is not a morbid book, as the above discussion of rape would suggest. Rather, it is radiant with a passion for truth and scientific rigor, and its an inspiring demonstration of independent thought and intellectual courage. Freeman respected the Samoan people, and tried to convey them as fully human - with similar virtues and vices that occur all over the world. Because Freeman so unequivocally refutes Mead, and Mead is so beloved by the cultural anthropology community, lots of people have been extremely critical of Freeman's book. Since they have a very difficult time challenging his actual arguments, they desperately resort to ad hominem attacks - calling him cowardly, opportunistic, mean-spirited, etc. But these attacks are outrageously unfair: Freeman knew that his refutation of Mead would be treated as heresy by his colleagues. He knew that by defending his convictions about Samoa he would be isolating himself from the scholarly community that he had been a member of throughout his whole life. But he decided to sacrifice his reputation in the name of science, and there's nothing more admirable than that. Indeed, there is one group of people who have consistently favored Freeman's ethnography over Mead's: the people of Samoa. P.S. I should also tell you that this book is not only about the reality of Samoan culture; it is also about the intellectual history of cultural anthropology. Freeman explains how an extreme version of cultural determinism developed among social theorists as a reaction to the Eugenics movement, and how the radical cultural determinists felt morally obligated to defend their absolute rejection of "biological determinism" by all means necessary. So Freeman does not only reveal THAT Margaret Mead distorted the facts about Samoa, but WHY.

Người đọc Itzel Becerril từ Fratila, Romania

Người dùng coi những cuốn sách này là thú vị nhất trong năm 2017-2018, ban biên tập của cổng thông tin "Thư viện Sách hướng dẫn" khuyến cáo rằng tất cả các độc giả sẽ làm quen với văn học này.