We Need to Tell Our Own Stories

[Music] What makes us human? [Music] We are found by connected as human beings. What makes us human? Let's find out. Sapiens. A podcast for everything human. [Music] Margaret Mead arrived here. Her ship would have pulled up. She would have disembarked and then made her way to Sadie Thompson's hotel. So let's go on in and continue in Mead's footsteps. [Music] Deja vu? Yes. This is how we started our last episode. But we didn't tell you the whole story about what happened next. After Chip Colwell, editor and chief of Sapiens magazine, went inside the Sadie Thompson Inn. Is it a hotel? I'm a bit of a backstory there. Chip was about to share the name of the short story about William Somerset Mom that featured the character Sadie Thompson. When a patient of the hotel bar passing by called it out. Rain. Rain. Thank you. Rain. You know it. And we wondered what else might that guy know? I mean, it could be interesting to wander. Let's wander and see if people want to talk. [Music] So Chip went up to him, got his name. [Music] [Music] And my chief titled his "Free Mom." And asked him about Margaret Mead. She did a research asking the young Samon women on how they feel about six. And the data was free of shit. I can imagine that what way do you think she's full of shit? The cheese at that time sold the young girls. Please give her a nice reply. If she wants a good answer, please say yes. And that's how the data screwed up. This is a pretty prevalent view about Mead Across the Islands. And there's a reason for it. In the 1980s, another anthropologist, Derek Freeman, came out with a binding critique of Mead's work. He even said she'd been hoaxed. And things got heated. We'll get into that later this season. But here's the thing about Mead's 1920 book, "Come You of Aging Samoa." It was all about Samoans and their lives, their personal lives. But it was filtered, interpreted, and described to the American audience by an American woman in her 20s. You would feel very bad about somebody coming in and saying something bad and wrong about your country and your people. And it put trees a bad mirror of what Samoans are really like. We're devoting this episode to what Samoans have to say about Margaret Mead. And what she said about them in her book that helped cattle pull her to international fame. We'll hear discussed, amusement, and opinions about not just what she got wrong, but why. She interpreted the things that she saw her own way, but she did the best she could. You don't want that type of information that's misleading and just not appropriate. Like you had no business writing the way that you wrote, lady. It wasn't acceptable during that time. So I think it conflicted with what she was saying. What I was seeing and what she was saying. Samoan perspectives. Not everyone, naturally, but a few voices that we hope will give a sense of the strong flavors of opinions about Margaret Mead that still coerced through the Samoan Archipelago in 2023. Today, on the problems with coming of age, we need to tell our own stories. Full of shit or not, Mead's research has left its mark here in Samoan. For many, it stands as one of the most important documents of Margaret about this place. That's actually how I had my first encounter with Mead. Through her book in the public library. I was desperately trying to find my identity, my Samoan identity, especially growing up in San Francisco. I shared some memories with my producers about what it was like growing up Samoan. I don't know what made me like finally realize I was Samoan, other than I was 6 feet tall and everybody was little. Because everybody was the only Samoan in the school I went to. I was looking for a book and that's the only book I found in the index at that age in San Francisco. Deep in the stacks, I thought I found it. Coming of age in Samoan, a psychological study primitive youth for Western civilization by Margaret Mead. Flipping through the pages, I didn't pay much attention to the words. I was too busy trying to look for pictures. Then when I was 15, I revisited good old Margaret again. I was about the same age as those young girls who informed Mead's ethnography. I remember just laughing and thinking about our people as these sex monsters. I didn't realize at the time just how much of an effect the words of a ball on your woman, that is, a white woman from outside San Mar had had on my people. She came in with a particular perspective about studying us. People like Pulotu Betta Sulepa. Sulepa is the founder, producer and director of the Samoan Ajaz and Arts Festival of Tucson Wars. Sulepa grew up in New Zealand as an anti-racist and an anti-colonialist. No wonder when I mentioned coming of age and the name Margaret Mead and she recalled her first encounter with the book. Those same powerful feelings erupted to the surface. I was furious. I was absolutely furious. As an undergrad at Victoria University, she first came across Margaret Mead and coming of age for an assignment for her anthropology course. As I looked more into the book, her coming of age in Samoa, and I was absolutely disgusted. And just the notion of promiscuity of our young woman growing up in a Samoan family. Despite Sulepa's strong reaction, her tutor pushed her to reference Mead in her paper. Betta wouldn't have it. She searched for alternatives. But since there weren't many published Pacific Island anthropologists, she decided to write about her own lived experience instead. She failed that assignment. But I didn't mind. I didn't actually mind. I was not going to use a work written by a young woman who was about the same age as me back then. Who was writing about my people purely from her cultural perspective. She didn't have any awareness of us as a people. And then so she's applying her view of the world and making some very, very. What I felt were quite insulting statements about someone youth, someone woman. This experience with Mead further soured her feelings for the field of anthropology. Eventually, Sulepa left the discipline altogether. Coming of age in Samoa, I left Sulepa with a particularly bitter taste. I was affronted by the use of the word primitive. In coming of age in Samoa, Mead used it 32 times. Even the word primitive, to me, is racist from my perspective. And that's my opinion. Let me qualify when I say the word racist. It's when a particular culture uses its understanding and its notions of what is normal to interpret somebody else's culture from the outside, because essentially they're observers. And they position it as if it is true. And then the rest of the world jumps on and goes, "Yes!" Sulepa is not alone. We spoke to numerous Samoans who took issue with Mead using the word primitive. But I should note, that Mead wasn't alone in using language considered offensive and harmful today. These racist ideas weren't new. And they were pretty baked into academia in the early 20th century. The field of anthropology was no exception. Franz Boas, the father of modern American anthropology, and Mead's mentor, studied the idea of cultural relativism, which means that cultures can't be ranked, and one isn't better than another. Rather, he believed that cultures should be analyzed according to their own set of ideals. But despite their efforts to counterpervailing racist ideologies through this work, both Mead and Boas were still using the language and social hierarchies of their time. The words they used helped unconscious bias and created a sense of hierarchy by ranking the racist, the West and everyone else. And it's hard to read that language today. Sulepa is one of many who left the field of anthropology due to a history of institutionalized racism in academic circles. You're all take great exception to it. because I know that we were one of the greatest, greatest navigators in history. We navigated the Pacific Ocean by the stars. You know the ocean is two thirds of the world's surface for goodness sakes. And so primitive by whose perspective? So I throw that word back. Yeah. We were highly sophisticated. We had our own notions of spirituality, we had our own culture. And she didn't even understand any of that. And so she's making, she's following a particular pathway in her research. That's already predetermined by her own value system. Have you ever wanted to reread the book or. I'm not interested in reading her book. I mean, who elevated her? It wasn't us. I'm interested more in a sarmone writing about us. We need to tell our own stories. We need to articulate our reality from our own experience. And you know, I've grown up in mainstream society where there are lots of commentaries about us. And it happens all over the world. So I have arrived at a position in my life where. I don't necessarily have to participate, adhere to. And I'm more interested in what's coming out from our own people. After the break, we hear from our own people. Welcome back to the problems with coming of age. A few months back, the production team went to Alina, a small village along the South Coast of America in Sarmone. I have a problem with foreigners telling a story. Big problem with that. Because they're not telling it from my eyes and my heart. Nobody ever interviews us and asks us our opinion of ourselves, our history, who we are. She's a family who lives in Alina, a small village along the South Coast of America in Sarmone. For her, Muno is never even on her radar, nor coming of age in Sarmone. We didn't know that when the story is written, it's going to be a permanent history. That's going to define who we are forever and ever in the eyes of the scholars and all the people learning about culture. So this is why I can't. If I really want to tell a story, because when we tell our story, we talk about things that are real. Femuli owns an oceanfront barn ecologe, where she serves a traditional Sarmone feast cooked in an umu, a ground oven. Food is heated on volcanic rock and covered with banana leaves to trap the heat. I want nature to win, and that means I build my life around nature and not the other way around. And if the time comes when nature wants me out of here, I'll gladly leave. Femuli was born in Raisin, Alina. When her grandfather cut himself off from the village, it isolated Femuli's family from the larger community. She grew up working in the land, removed from the rest of the village. Then, after many years of living fairly isolated from everyday Sarmone society, at age 45, she traveled to Sava'i, the largest island in the Sarmone archipelago, to visit with a friend of hers. One night after dinner, she had an experience, now seared into her memory. So now we're going for a walk in the evening, right? and I could not believe the kind of things that I was experiencing walking through the village. Stinget. Oh, so Gaiver. Oh, anyway, so he. So so, I'm like, "Okay. I'm just okay." "Okay, okay. I'm making sense of Gaiver. My mother's a bull." So long! I mean, I'm walking with girls and "Hey, come on! I want to do you a sweetheart. This have sex. Come and kiss me. I love you." I mean, these were all thrown at me. And I was shocked because I never heard that before. So this fascinating, immediately, it was like, "Whoa, so, I wonder, immediately thought about my good meet. I wonder if that's what happened. Did this segment, because I started questioning all this controversy behind my Grammy, because of what I was experiencing in the village. It was dark. And it felt really, it felt, I don't know, it felt exciting because what other mischief is under there is the way I saw it. It's like, "Ooh, who's that? Where is it going from? Oh, they're under the bush. Oh my God. Okay. I wonder what they look like. You see, I mean, all these things are going on in your mind when you're a young person. And that was the moment I kept thinking about my good meet. And I still think about it because that is a mystery I want to solve. Is it really true? Did that really happen? Or didn't it happen? Who's telling the truth here? Femuli says that in the West, this cat claim might seem like inappropriate harassment. But in that moment, for her, it cracked open and understanding of the cultural norms within her own community. And I didn't feel offended by it. It's fascinating with it. Because of my good meet. And I'm trying to verify, is this what she meant? Did she feel this way? And she was there by herself. Meet's family wasn't there. And her friends had to join her either. She had no one to go in, run, and hide. Oh my God. She had no one. [Music] When I've spent my life split between living inside and outside of Sama, I can say that this type of playfulness among Samaans is common. Of course, many places can act like fools in certain situations around their friends. Cat calling pretty women on the street. But Samaans view sex differently than Americans. Culturally, they don't discuss matters of sex out and open. And suffice to say, the musings of me didn't capture or emphasize the importance of these ideals within Samaan society. [Music] This is yet another reason why mead interpretation of adolescence could have been deeply misunderstood. She explained how Samaan girls were treated like that back then. I had the chance to speak with Albert Pachi Selina, a cousin of the novelist CFL. His family opened their beautiful warm home. And the pleasant aroma of his wife's cooking floated through the air. Right or wrong, I mean, Samaan girls, they just had fun. You know what it's like when you guys talk about a boy and stuff like that. Yeah, he's so beautiful. He's got a nice ass in it. Yeah, isn't he cute? That kind of thing. You know, it's the same thing as what the Samaans went through, except to different language. And people are people all over. Selina had his first encounter with me much like myself, outside of Samaan, when he was first in high school in Carson, California. One day, upon receiving an anthropology assignment, he flipped the pages of Kamiya Bayjin Samaan family library for the very first time. And Selina kicked his own conclusion. But, you know, nobody's correct all the time. So we just got to take the historical part of what it is. Because it's history. I mean, how can you destroy history? Something that, you know, somebody has written about Samaan, that's go with it. That's go with the history that's been written right or wrong. I didn't find Margaret Mead very offensive, but my grandma did. Why is that? Why do you think your grandma found it offensive? Well, my grandma was, she was a pastor's daughter. And there were pastors in Oloxenga. And they traveled from Oloxenga to Umo for the time. And, you know, when they hear about what Margaret Mead was asking about, mostly sexual stuff like that, you know, never sure. It's been far more than, yeah, yeah. You know, that girl, that lady's soul, so stupid asking those type of questions. You know, you're not supposed to say those type of things. You know, we're young girls, young ladies. But that's how she seemed to rest the whole issue of Margaret Mead. I think that's how she looked at it, you know. But I didn't have any qualms about that. It was like, God, this lady talks about asking sexual questions about this. This is really fun. This is interesting. So that's how I took it. Do you remember being happy, mad? What was your memory of it? Did you have conversations? Yes, because it was me and my sister were in the same grade. Because we were introduced to the same school at the same time. So when the teacher gave us assignments, we went home and we looked all over my dad's books. And we found it and we talked about it and we read a little bit about it. And we started laughing. We weren't even mad about it. It was like a funny reaction to it. I mean, to think about it, some ones are weird people. Especially when a palangi person comes from the US or comes to study some ones way of life. Of course, they're going to say something true through. But then they always make fun of us. And then they say, "It's like a little bit of a little lie or something like that." And they're spicing the whole conversation. I think I felt the same way when I read Coming of Age in Samoa at 15. I know our Samoa and sense of humor. It's one of the ways we deal with awkward or uncomfortable topics. And I too wonder if that's what the Informant means book we're doing. Oh, let's trick this balling lady that's coming and give her some kind of craziness. Two Samoans, these kinds of jokes about sex are ridiculous because they're so outrageous and far from reality. What happened behind closed doors was your own business. And if it violated any cultural norms, it wasn't appropriate to talk about in public. So for an anthropologist like Mead stepping in from the outside, she may have been blind to the playful dynamics that exists within the Samoans society. Oh, sure. I remember when I was young living in this village. I mean, this is a new house, but we had an older house. So we had a Palangu kid that lives the next corner down there. His name was Ralph. And Ralph was his dad was Palangi, mom was someone, but he found out or he learned how to speak Samoan a little bit. Of course, he learned Samoan, but you know, us Samoan kids, we still make fun of poor Ralph and talk behind his back and stuff like that. So when Ralph always come around, me and my brothers would make stories up and tell Ralph, you know, stuff like that. So Lingann and his friends would make up little lies to mess around with him. Not an uncommon joke around Samoans too. In this instance, Ralph, there's a girl that likes you and she wants your number. What Ralph Mead and other ballings didn't fully grasp is that context is key. It's not that mead was the butt of the joke, but rather in the mix of regular teasing and joking. And all those jokes may have flown over her head. But understanding and settling into a new place or culture, even to this day requires nuance communication and cross cultural engagement. And Ralph would go, look, he'd come back, you know, say, "Beatle, you know, see, you guys lie all the time, you know." And we didn't like to you Ralph, but that's how I perceived the conversation that Margaret got to hear for some of the girls, you know. It wasn't everything true, so it was a little bit, "Oh yeah, I met my boyfriend last night. We had great sex." You know, that kind of thing, you know, I think, I think, oh, Margaret got taken a little bit. Yeah, poor lady. [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] We dedicate this episode to Rp. Celina, who recently passed. We interviewed him in Fangai Tuah, and his infectious life and kindness will be greatly missed. [Music] The episode was written and produced by Ruth Hujeganov, Ashraya Gupta and Ari Daniel. This season was hosted by Kate Ellis and me, Doris Tullyfow. From Sapiens, we were supported by Chip Colwell, Tanya Volentras, Esteban Gomez, C.E. Figel, Salamassina Figel, Sophie Muro and Christine Weber. The season's humanities advisors were Daniel and Rutherford, Lisa Uperessa, Nancy Kates, David M. Lipset, Nancy Lutka House, Augustine Fuentes, Don Culec and Paul Shankman. And Fuffatai to the more than three dozen people, we interviewed an American Samoa and Samoa for helping to shape our understanding of this story. The executive producer of PierreExproductions is Jocelyn Gonzalez. The project manager of PierreExproductions is Edwin Ochoa. The business manager is Morgan Church. Dan Tallahpapum McMollan created the season's cover art. Celina T. Schau was the fact-checkter. Audio Mastering by Terence Bernardo. Music by APM with additional tracks by Malofa Amal-Sili recorded at Apple the Studio, as well as songs kindly provided by Bobby Allu. Sapiens is part of the American Anthropological Association Podcast Library. And Sapiens is an editorally independent podcast funded by the Winter Grand Foundation, which has provided vital support. Our thanks to the Foundation's entire staff, board and advisory council. Season 6 of the Sapiens Podcast was made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. I'm Doris Tullivo. And I'm Kate Allis.