On my first evening, sweating under the mosquito net, I quickly learned tourist brochure appearances could be deceiving! Or at least not fully revealing....! (And I had not yet heard of Freeman, let alone read his critique of Mead....!)

On the one hand, I later developed a little sympathy for Mead on re-reading some of her early letters:

"If I had lived in Samoan house with a Samoan family...such advantage would be more than offset by the loss in efficiency due to the food and the nervewracking conditions of living with a half a dozen people in the same room in a house without walls, always sitting on the floor and sleeping in the constant expectation of having a pig or a chicken thrust itself upon one's notice. This is not an easy climate to work in...." (M. Mead, Letters from the Field 1925-1975, New York, 1977: p. 29)

One the other hand, it becomes clear (in her confidentially written letters) that Mead kept a distance bordering on disdain for a number of aspects of Samoan culture. Not much danger of "going native"--she longed to get back to New York publicization as soon as possible! She ended up staying in a rented room at the chief phamacist's mate of the US naval medical dispensary (during an era of considerable nationalist resistance to western occupation.) In her 9 month stay, she had to learn the language from start, as a woman was culturally prohibited from gaining access to chiefly assemblies (regarding [only!?] economic, political, ceremonial, and religious life), and her work (which relied largely on informants composed of a couple of dozen girls at the local pastor's church school dormitory) was further disrupted by a major hurricane.