Bearing in mind that many sociocultural anthropologists conceive their task as a kind of translation from other cultures to ours, the views of a linguist described as “perhaps the leading American authority on translation” (Berlin and Kay 1969:159) were quite influential:
The segmentation of experience by speech symbols is essentially arbitrary. The different sets of words for color in various languages are perhaps the best ready evidence for such arbitrariness. For example, in a high percentage of African languages there are only three “color words,” corresponding to our white, black and red, which nevertheless divide up the entire spectrum. In the Tarahumara language of Mexico, there are five basic color words, and here “blue” and “green” are subsumed under a single term. (Nida 1959:13, italics in original)
This conception of the relationship between language and color was not confined to anthropologists and linguists. Berlin and Kay (1969:160) quote “an experimental social psychologist addressing a general audience of humanists” in a popular scientific journal: “Our partitioning of the spectrum consists of the arbitrary imposition of a category system on a continuous physical domain” (Krause 1968:268). Nor was the conception confined to color terms. “The non-existence, in principle, of semantic universals” had “become a dominant article of faith in much of social science” (Berlin and Kay 1969:160).
On the basis of their experience with the relative ease of translation between color terms in a variety of unrelated languages, Berlin and Kay began to doubt the validity of the doctrine of extreme relativism. They did not doubt that “to understand the full range of meaning of a word in any language, each new language must be approached in its own terms, without a priori theories of semantic universals” (1969:1), but they did not think this necessarily meant there were no semantic universals.
To test the doctrine of extreme relativism in the categorization of colors Berlin and Kay assembled lists of color terms from informants speaking 98 different languages representing a wide selection of unrelated major linguistic stocks. Although the number of color terms in each language did vary, they found that no more than eleven colors accounted for the basic color terms found in each language. The main defining features of a basic color term are that it is monolexemic (containing a single irreducible unit of meaning, such as “red,” not two or more lexemes as in “reddish” or “dark blue”), is not included in another color term, is general in application, and is psychologically salient to its users. The eleven basic colors are white, black, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, purple, pink, orange, and gray. Nonbasic colors, such as “pumpkin-colored,” “like the tail of a peacock,” “bluish,” “bluish-purple,” and the like were excluded from analysis.
Once the basic color terms for each language had been determined, native speakers of those languages were asked to outline the boundaries of the colors on a color chart. The chart was composed of 329 color chips arranged along one axis in order of hue (the spectrum of colors) and along the other axis in order of brightness (brighter colors at the top, dimmer at the bottom; all at maximum saturation). To the side of the main chart were nine more chips of neutral hue, grading from white through gray to black. The informants drew a line around the chips that fit each of their basic color categories and designated the chip that was its best or most typical representative (the focal point of the color term).
Although the boundaries of color terms vary—by and large, the fewer the terms the wider their bounds—the focal point of each basic color is substantially the same from one language to another. For example, people whose languages contain only two basic color terms tend to include the darker hues with their “black,” and the lighter hues with their “white.” Given the broad designation of these terms, they might just as well be glossed as “dark” and “light,” but their focal points are the black and white chips. When “red” is added, to make a classification with just three basic terms, the third category typically includes some oranges, yellows, browns, pinks, and purples along with the red chips that are the focus of the category. As each basic term is added—moving to languages with four, five, six basic terms, and so on—less and less of the chart remains without a basic color term label and each of the areas designated by the new terms still tends to have a common focal point from one language to another. Considerable areas of the chart remain without designations in terms of basic colors. This definitively falsified the doctrine of total arbitrariness of color classification: color classification does not arbitrarily slice a continuum.
But Berlin and Kay found a further surprising result. The order in which basic color categories enter languages is not arbitrary either. If a language has only two colors—and all languages have at least two—they are always white and black; if a language has three colors, the one added is red; if a fourth is added, it will be either green or yellow; when a fifth is added, it will then include both green and yellow; the sixth added is blue; the seventh added is brown; and if an eighth or more terms are added, it or they will be purple, pink, orange, or gray. Considerable subsequent research on color classification has necessitated modifications in this sequence, yet basic color terms apparently evolve in a largely universal pattern (Witkowski and Brown 1978). Berlin and Kay (1969:159) dismiss “extreme linguistic-cultural relativism,” at least with respect to basic color terms, as a “myth created by linguists and anthropologists.”
Berlin and Kay’s findings have been placed “among the most remarkable discoveries of anthropological science” (Sahlins 1976:1). Much of what makes them remarkable is the effect they have had on anthropological prejudices and the new channels for research they made sensible. For example, the psychological saliency of basic color terms has been explored cross-culturally in a variety of ways (Bolton 1978; Heider 1972), attempts have been made to explain why humans perceive colors uniformly (e.g., Ratliff 1976; Boynton and Olson 1987), studies of the classification of botanical and zoological life forms have revealed evolutionary sequences similar to those that Berlin and Kay found in the classification of basic colors (Brown 1977b, 1979; Witkowski and Brown 1978), and the discovery of cross-culturally stable focal points for color (and other) categories gave rise to new conceptions of how humans categorize and reason (Rosch 1975, 1983).
Samoan Adolescence
Coming of Age in Samoa was Margaret Mead’s most famous book. It was written to provide part of the answer to the questions “What is human nature? How flexible is human nature?” (Mead 1928:ix). Mead, her mentor Franz Boas, and other anthropologists,1 suspected that “much of what we ascribe to human nature is no more than a reaction to the restraints put upon us by our civilisation” (Boas 1928:n.p.). More specifically, Mead and Boas suspected that the difficulties of adolescence were not inherent. These difficulties, Mead thought, were less due to “being adolescent” than to “being adolescent in America” (1928:5). To put her ideas to the test, in 1925–26 Mead studied young women in three villages in Samoa, among whom there were 25 adolescents. She found that for them adolescence was neither stressful nor marked by abrupt changes other than the purely physiological. She concluded that “adolescence is not necessarily a time of stress and strain, but that cultural conditions [may] make it so” (1928:234). There was, thus, nothing natural about the American or Western conception of adolescence. She explained the stress-free character of adolescence in Samoa in terms of the differing cultural and social arrangements of the Samoans, in particular a “general casualness”:
For Samoa is a place where no one plays for very high stakes, no one pays very heavy prices, no one suffers for his convictions or fights to the death for special ends. Disagreements between parent and child are settled by the child’s moving across the street, between a man and his village by the man’s removal to the next village, between a husband and his wife’s seducer by a few fine mats.… No implacable gods, swift to anger and strong to punish, disturb the even tenor of their days. Wars and cannibalism are long since passed away and now the greatest cause for tears, short of
death itself, is a journey of a relative to another island. No one is hurried along in life or punished harshly for slowness of development.… And in personal relations, caring is slight. Love and hate, jealousy and revenge, sorrow and bereavement, are all matters of weeks. From the first month of its life, when the child is handed carelessly from one woman’s hands to another’s, the lesson is learned of not caring for one person greatly, not setting high hopes on any one relationship. (1928:198–199)
Most important was the “lack of deep feeling” that was the “very framework” of Samoan “attitudes toward life.” Samoa was “kind to those who… learned the lesson of not caring, and hard upon those few individuals who…failed to learn it.” The latter were “delinquent, unhappy misfits” (1928:199, 200).
Also to the advantage of the Samoan adolescent was a casual sexual code, limited only for the daughters and wives of chiefs. (It is not clear whether Mead is referring to “chiefs” in general, whose wives and “daughters” would include almost all women, or only high-ranking chiefs. Though she appears to say the former, it would vitiate her argument [Tim O’Meara, personal communication].) Missionaries were not supporters of any such casualness, but their protests were “unimportant” (1928:202). The Samoan Church (London Missionary Society) took a “laissez faire attitude” and did not press youth too hard for participation that would curb their sexual freedom. The less bewildering choices of creeds and careers in Samoa made adolescence less stressful too, as did the slower pace of sociocultural change.
These differences between Samoan and Western civilizations paid off not only for adolescents but for Samoans in general: according to Mead, Samoans lacked the neuroses we have in great numbers and in particular lacked frigidity and psychic impotence. Mead thought that child-rearing practices and attitudes toward sex accounted for much of this. Particularly important was the presence in the household of numerous adults (and numerous children too) so that children did not form such close attachments to their own parents. Also important was the greater knowledge of sexuality, birth, and death that Samoan adolescents readily acquired. The definition of the “normal” in sexuality was wider among the Samoans, and a “satisfactory sex adjustment in marriage” was always attainable (Mead 1928:223). Sexual jealousy was all but absent; rape, as we understand it, was foreign to Samoan thought.
Another factor in producing the well-adjusted Samoan was a tendency to penalize the precocious child and pace activities to the standards of the “laggard” or “inept” (Mead 1928:223). This toned down individualism and minimized the jealousy and rivalry so productive of difficulty for Westerners.
Mead’s book was published in the midst of a debate over the relative importance of biological and cultural determinants of behavior—the nature-nurture controversy—and was hailed as a definitive demonstration of the importance of culture or nurture. It was an immediate success and became one of the best selling anthropological books of all time, having almost incalculable influence (Freeman 1983). In subsequent publications Mead not only repeated the points made above but often stated them in starker terms or embroidered them. Mead’s study of Samoa and the conclusions drawn from it have been cited approvingly in almost all anthropological texts for a long period (see, e.g., Aceves and King 1978; Barnouw 1978; Benderly et al. 1977; Haviland 1983; Hoebel 1972; Honigmann 1959).
Mead’s book was based on nine months of fieldwork in Samoa, conducted when she was 23 years old. Derek Freeman, who conducted six years of fieldwork in Samoa, mostly in the 1940s and 1960s, finds Mead wrong on many points, certainly in her main conclusion. His book, which he describes as a “study of a major twentieth-century myth,” is a formal refutation of Mead’s. Although Freeman’s work was done some time after Mead’s, a number of factors allow him insight into the Samoa of her time and much earlier.
To begin, Samoa is an unusually well documented society, having been carefully observed and reported upon from early in the nineteenth century. The islands Mead lived on were administered by the United States, so that various reports and archival sources describe Samoa of the 1920s. Persons alive when Mead worked in Samoa were still alive when Freeman did his research and could well remember the 1920s. Finally, a number of anthropologists besides Freeman worked in Samoa in the post–World War II period, and they provide alternative views of Samoan society. From these various sources it is obvious that Mead’s principal conclusion, and much else in her description of Samoa, is seriously wrong.
Her picture of Samoan adolescence as a stressless period is contradicted by her own data. Four of Mead’s 25 female adolescent informants were delinquent, by her own account. Two of them committed acts of delinquency during Mead’s brief visit. What Mead failed to realize was that this percentage of delinquents and frequency of delinquent acts was actually quite high. The rate of delinquent acts, for example, was “ten times higher than that which existed among female adolescents in England and Wales in 1965” (Freeman 1983:258). Since Mead classified three further girls as “deviants upwards” (those who constructively sought to escape from traditional patterns), the percentage of maladjusted adolescents was even greater than is indicated by the delinquents. Freeman’s informants denied that adolescence was free of stress, and comparative statistics, generally from more recent times, show a cross-culturally typical pattern of first convictions for criminal offenses in Samoa to peak in the adolescent years.
These observations alone dispose of Mead’s main conclusion, but Freeman also shows that the various reasons Mead gave for the stress-free character of Samoan adolescence were more often than not equally groundless. The Samoans do not have a casual attitude toward sex; in fact, they have a rather extreme double standard. As Mead herself noted, the Samoans possessed a cult of virginity. She reconciled this with their supposed pattern of adolescent free love by arguing, as was mentioned earlier, that only a relatively small number of high-status girls needed to remain virgins; even if they didn’t, it was simple to fake the blood of a ruptured hymen. Freeman shows that not only was the cult of virginity a prominent element in traditional Samoan culture, but that it had been further encouraged by Samoan Christianity. In early times a girl who was expected to be a virgin but who failed to be one might be beaten to death. In Christian times, formal church membership—and, contrary to Mead, adolescent girls were strongly urged to join—strictly forbids fornication.
On the other hand, to obtain a virgin is a strong male goal, and Samoan males are not above achieving their goal by illegal means. Freeman describes two culturally prescribed patterns of Samoan rape, one surreptitious (“sleep crawling”), the other forceful. Mead was aware of the former pattern but treated it as an abnormality in which a boy might deceptively pass himself off as a lover who was expected in the dark; to Mead it added “zest to the surreptitious love-making” conducted in girls’ homes (1928:95–96). In the surreptitious pattern of rape a boy or man tries to sneak up on a sleeping virgin and thrust two fingers into her vagina (this was the standard, public method of deflowering virgins in traditional Samoa). Thus despoiled, the girl is then expected to have no alternative but to elope with her rapist. Those who attempted this form of getting a virgin might be violently dealt with by the girl’s kin, and of course it was a crime. In forceful rape the rapist attempted to knock his victim out with a blow to the solar plexus; once unconscious she was deflowered in the usual way, and this might be followed by penile intromission. These patterns of rape have been described from early in the nineteenth century; rape was the third commonest crime in Samoa in the 1920s and was routinely reported in the press at that time. Freeman argues that the Samoans have one of the highest rates of rape in the world. He also argues that fear of rape produces the frigidity of Samoan women that another anthropologist (Holmes 1958:55) reports is sometimes the source of familial strain.
It is beyond the scope of this essay to retrace all of Freeman’s refutations, showing that Samoans do and have fought for strongly held beliefs, do show completely expectable sexual je
alousy, do not and have not taken their religion lightly, and so on. But one further point must be discussed, because it is central to the stresses and strains of Samoan adolescence and to the formation of adult Samoan psyche and behavior. Samoans do not spare the rod; they punish their children severely. At an early age a child is forced to submit to severe corporal punishment from parents and elder siblings; the child is expected to sit and take the punishment without struggling or talking back. Harsh physical punishment may be meted out even to adults. Most children learn to restrain themselves when punished and grow up with the ability to be polite in front of authority figures while cursing them behind their backs. The price paid for outward politeness and submissiveness includes a not unexpected array of psychic problems and a tendency to violent behavior. This violence has been noted from early times to the present.
Given the discrepancies between Mead’s account and the realities of Samoan life, it is no surprise that her account has been pretty consistently condemned by Samoans, which Freeman has no difficulty documenting. One can only ask how Mead could have been so wrong. It is not easy to do justice to Freeman’s answers to that question. But the main outlines are as follows: First, Mead went to Samoa without a knowledge of the language and with unfortunate gaps in her familiarity with the extensive literature on Samoa. Since she had, in fact, a greater familiarity with the literature on other parts of Polynesia, such as Tahiti, where the patterns of religion and sexuality were very different, she probably had expectations that biased her from the start. When she reached Samoa she did not undertake a general study of the Samoan ethos and culture but launched directly into her study of adolescence.
Her informants were adolescent girls; neither boys nor adults were studied. Modern Samoans have for some time suspected that the girls amused themselves by pulling her leg—a suspicion confirmed by the recently recorded testimony of one of Mead’s original informants (Freeman 1989). This is a standard form of psychic aggression in Samoa, says Freeman.2 Since Mead chose not to live with a Samoan family, she limited her means of checking what her informants told her with the way people actually behaved or with what others might say.
Human Universals Page 3
