The Girls Who Broke Your Heart Thread

Dumar_sl said:

I've been waiting on a solution from many different people for years on a different model to describe concepts like social proofing. Everyone hates RP yet when push comes to shove, they grudgingly admit parts are true, and the other parts are just 'misogynist'. You're not the first that can't deliver.

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Mead was a respected and often controversial academic who popularized the insights of anthropology in modern American and Western culture.[2] Her reports detailing the attitudes towards sex in South Pacific and Southeast Asian traditional cultures influenced the 1960s sexual revolution. She was a proponent of broadening sexual mores within a context of traditional Western religious life...

"There is now a large body of criticism of Freeman's work from a number of perspectives in which Mead, Samoa, and anthropology appear in a very different light than they do in Freeman's work. Indeed, the immense significance that Freeman gave his critique looks like 'much ado about nothing' to many of his critics."[27]...

In 1996 Martin Orans examined Mead's notes preserved at the Library of Congress, and credits her for leaving all of her recorded data available to the general public. Orans concludes that Freeman's basic criticisms, that Mead was duped by ceremonial virgin Fa'apua'a Fa'amu (who later swore to Freeman that she had played a joke on Mead) were false for several reasons: first, Mead was well aware of the forms and frequency of Samoan joking; second, she provided a careful account of the sexual restrictions on ceremonial virgins that corresponds to Fa'apua'a Fa'auma'a's account to Freeman, and third, that Mead's notes make clear that she had reached her conclusions about Samoan sexuality before meeting Fa'apua'a Fa'amu. He therefore concludes, contrary to Freeman, that Mead was never the victim of a hoax. Orans points out that Mead's data support several different conclusions, and that Mead's conclusions hinge on an interpretive, rather than positivist, approach to culture

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Mead is also a frequent target of evolutionary psychologists, behavioral geneticists and other scientists who emphasize nature over nurture as a determinant of human behavior. The psychologist Steven Pinker has chastised Mead for supposedly claiming that we are "blank slates" whose behavior is unconstrained by biology. Pinker's Harvard colleague, the anthropologist Richard Wrangham, has derided Mead for suggesting that "human evil is a culturally acquired thing, an arbitrary garment that can be cast off like our winter clothes."...

Mead's critics harrumph that she was politically biased-and, of course, she was, from early on in her life. The child of Quaker social scientists, Mead studied at Barnard College in the 1920s under Franz Boas, a political progressive and outspoken critic of social Darwinism and eugenics, which in this pre-Nazi era were still intellectually fashionable. As a result of these influences, Mead opposed genetic determinism, racism, sexism, militarism and stultifying religious morality. She was biased-and she was right...

A recent book on the controversy-The Trashing of Margaret Mead: Anatomy of an Anthropological Controversy by the anthropologist Paul Shankman of the University of Colorado at Boulder, a specialist on Samoa-may restore Mead's unjustly tarnished reputation. On the anthropology blog Savage Minds, Alex Golub of University of Hawaii at Manoa called Shankman's book "the most definitive and thorough analysis of the Mead-Freeman 'debate' that has been published so far."

Golub summed up the book as follows: "Freeman's arguments about Mead are shown not to hold very much water, and his own claims about Samoa don't seem to stand close scholarly scrutiny either." Shankman also documented what Golub calls Freeman's "atrocious behavior, such as contacting universities and demanding that they revoke the PhDs of his opponents."

Shankman "points out the ways in which Coming of Age reaches conclusions about American life that Mead quite liked but which were not really supported by the Samoan data," Golub added. "Still, it is clear from his book that Mead was basically a decent fieldworker and a careful scholar while Freeman was, frankly, a nutcake."

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Dumar_sl said:

Huh? Of course I know who she is - I'm a huge fan of Pinker, who totally destroys her every time he opens his mouth. His lectures are online too, if you're interested. I didn't know she was a SJW though.

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Dumar_sl said:

Very simple. I just use your man Harris's approach to moral culpability and voila! No problem executing millions if my intentions are good.

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Boas was one of the most prominent opponents of the then popular ideologies of scientific racism, the idea that race is a biological concept and that human behavior is best understood through the typology of biological characteristics.[7] In a series of groundbreaking studies of skeletal anatomy he showed that cranial shape and size was highly malleable depending on environmental factors such as health and nutrition, in contrast to the claims by racial anthropologists of the day that held head shape to be a stable racial trait. Boas also worked to demonstrate that differences in human behavior are not primarily determined by innate biological dispositions, but are largely the result of cultural differences acquired through social learning. In this way, Boas introduced culture as the primary concept for describing differences in behavior between human groups, and as the central analytical concept of anthropology.[6]

Among Boas's main contributions to anthropological thought was his rejection of the then popular evolutionary approaches to the study of culture, which saw all societies progressing through a set of hierarchic technological and cultural stages, with Western-European culture at the summit. Boas argued that culture developed historically through the interactions of groups of people and the diffusion of ideas, and that consequently there was no process towards continuously "higher" cultural forms. This insight led Boas to reject the "stage"-based organization of ethnological museums, instead preferring to order items on display based on the affinity and proximity of the cultural groups in question. Boas also introduced the ideology of cultural relativism which holds that cultures cannot be objectively ranked as higher or lower, or better or more correct, but that all humans see the world through the lens of their own culture, and judge it according to their own culturally acquired norms. For Boas the object of anthropology was to understand the way in which culture conditioned people to understand and interact with the world in different ways, and to do this it was necessary to gain an understanding of the language and cultural practices of the people studied. By uniting the disciplines of archaeology, the study of material culture and history, and physical anthropology, the study of variation in human anatomy, with ethnology, the study of cultural variation of customs, and descriptive linguistics, the study of unwritten indigenous languages, Boas created the four field subdivision of anthropology which became prominent in American anthropology in the 20th century.[6]

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