Coming of Age in Samoa

Of the alleged cases of fraud Gatto mentions here, Mead's case and Freud's are the only one's I've got opinions on. Mead's book Coming Of Age In Samoa is a great read I'd highly recommend. In her intro she positions the book as explicitly being a response to the budding class of childhood psychology experts, lead by G. Stanley Hall with books like Adolescence, which characterized the teen years as a period where "idealism flowered and rebellion against authority waxed strong, a period during which difficulties and conflicts were absolutely inevitable."[p.18] She argued that if we don't see similar behavior in teens from vastly different cultures, then such "inevitable conflict" can't be some biological imperative. The rest of the book depicts life and the family structure among the Samoans, noting among other things, that the teens years weren't marked by consistent parent-child conflict, which she partially attributes to the fact that family structures were more flexible and it was common for children to leave their families and live in the household of some other relative if they didn't like how they were being treated. The part of her work that became the center of controversy some decades later was her claim that teen sex was common and chill and casual in their culture, and in the 80's Derek Freeman wrote a book claiming that he had tracked down the Samoan girls Mead would have interviewed about this and they reported that they'd been pranking her about the casual sex. My read on the situation is that Mead was likely mislead about the cultural casualness of teen sex, but that the bulk of her observations about how the village was organized and how families were structured are likely correct, as they were based much more on direct observation that would be much harder to be wrong about.