Freeman, Derek (1916–2001)

John Derek Freeman was born in Wellington, New Zealand. He first studied anthropology when Ernest Beaglehole offered a course on the subject through the Psychology Department of what is now Victoria University of Wellington. In 1940, Freeman took up a position teaching in Samoa, where he remained until 1943. Freeman subsequently studied at both University College London (MA Phil., 1948) and Cambridge University (PhD, 1953),writing a master's thesis on Samoan social structure and a doctoral dissertation on the Iban of Sarawak, Borneo. This latter work grew out of Freeman's 1949 to 1951 field study of the Iban. Freeman returned to New Zealand, teaching briefly at the University of Otago in Dunedin, before taking a position at the Australian National University in Canberra in 1957, where he remained until his death.

Thus, while he must have read some American or Boasian four-field anthropology, notably the work of Margaret Mead on Samoa, Freeman was largely trained in and taught within the British tradition of social anthropology.

Despite the quality of Freeman's Iban work, he was best known for his role in the so-called Mead-Freeman debate. For Freeman, this debate, at heart, concerned evolution. Freeman had become interested in the subject in the mid-1960s, not long before he returned to Samoa to undertake fieldwork. His later, more developed, position held that humanity's evolutionary history had produced a creature capable of making choices but nonetheless one whose capacities for responding to the world were embedded in biology, hence derived from the evolutionary past. Freeman considered that most modern anthropology had abandoned a concern with evolution and with human biology. He understood his part of the debate as both an exploration of anthropology's history and a correction of anthropological theory.

Freeman's first major statement in the debate was his 1983 volume,Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making of an Anthropological Myth. The book is organized into two broad sections.

The first section advanced a historical argument. According to Freeman,Mead's teacher, Franz Boas, had become alarmed at the rise of the eugenics movement within the generally racist societies of the [Page 1001]United States and Britain. Accordingly, Boas had encouraged his students to gather materials that tended to emphasize the variability of human beings and thereby call into question the notion of an underlying, universal human nature. One of Boas's nemeses, G. Stanley Hall of Clark University, published a major work arguing that adolescence is everywhere a time of so-called storm and stress. As part of Boas's general project, Margaret Mead went to Samoa in 1925,intent upon studying female adolescence. In her 1928 book, Coming of Age in Samoa, Mead concluded that the young women and the girls she studied, all things considered, led comparatively stress-free lives.

Mead's argument attained wide circulation when her publisher,William Morrow, insisted that Mead add two chapters of material comparing Samoan and American adolescence. More important, for Freeman, modern anthropologists, unaware of or indifferent to the shortcomings of Mead's analysis, would contend that her Samoan findings supported radically culturalist hypotheses, emphasizing the mutability of humanity over and against more biologically grounded theories of an evolving human nature.

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