Hempenstall, Peter (Author)
University of Wisconsin Press
Physical Details: 336
Language: English
New Zealand anthropologist Derek Freeman ignited a ferocious controversy in 1983 when he denounced the research of Margaret Mead, a world-famous public intellectual who had died five years earlier. Freeman's claims caught the attention of popular media, converging with other vigorous cultural debates of the era. Many anthropologists, however, saw Freeman's strident refutation of Mead's best-selling Coming of Age in Samoa as the culmination of a forty-year vendetta. Others defended Freeman's critique, if not always his tone.Truth's Fool documents an intellectual journey that was much larger and more encompassing than Freeman's criticism of Mead's work. It peels back the prickly layers to reveal the man in all his complexity. Framing this story within anthropology's development in Britain and America, Peter Hempenstall recounts Freeman's mission to turn the discipline from its cultural-determinist leanings toward a view of human culture underpinned by biological and behavioral drivers. Truth's Fool engages the intellectual questions at the center of the Mead–Freeman debate and illuminates the dark spaces of personal, professional, and even national rivalries.
...MoreReview Gerald Sullivan (2019) Review of "Truth's Fool: Derek Freeman and the War over Cultural Anthropology". Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences (pp. 173-175).
Similar Citations
Article
Stefan Bargheer;
(2017)
Anthropology at War: Robert H. Lowie and the Transformation of the Culture Concept, 1904 to 1954
(/isis/citation/CBB276863173/)
Article
Shankman, Paul;
(2006)
Virginity and Veracity: Rereading Historical Sources in the Mead-Freeman Controversy
(/isis/citation/CBB000660233/)
Book
Bowman-Kruhm, Mary;
(2003)
Margaret Mead: A Biography
(/isis/citation/CBB001251425/)
Thesis
Miller, Ethan Zane;
(2010)
The Cultural Logics of the Liberal Self in Early 20th Century U.S. Anthropology
(/isis/citation/CBB001567200/)
Article
Francis Newman;
(2021)
Scientific ideologies on the move: Sino-British exchanges, scientific freedoms and the governance of science in Britain, 1961–1966
(/isis/citation/CBB098388047/)
Book
Oisín Wall;
(2017)
The British Anti-Psychiatrists: From Institutional Psychiatry to the Counter-Culture, 1960-1971
(/isis/citation/CBB248999877/)
Article
Nierenberg, Nicolas;
Tschinkel, Walter R.;
Tschinkel, Victoria J.;
(2010)
Early Climate Change Consensus at the National Academy: The Origins and Making of Changing Climate
(/isis/citation/CBB001022609/)
Article
Rudiak-Gould, Peter;
(2014)
Progress, Decline, and the Public Uptake of Climate Science
(/isis/citation/CBB001420054/)
Book
Edwards, David;
(2008)
Artscience: Creativity in the Post-Google Generation
(/isis/citation/CBB001020029/)
Article
Emmanuel Delille;
(2018)
Eric Wittkower and the foundation of Montréal’s Transcultural Psychiatry Research Unit after World War II
(/isis/citation/CBB250098432/)
Article
Agnes Arnold-Forster;
(2022)
The Social and Emotional World of Twentieth-Century Anglo-American Surgery: The James IV Association of Surgeons
(/isis/citation/CBB857365189/)
Article
Krige, John;
(2012)
Hybrid Knowledge: The Transnational Co-Production of the Gas Centrifuge for Uranium Enrichment in the 1960s
(/isis/citation/CBB001200071/)
Book
Munns, David P. D.;
(2013)
A Single Sky: How an International Community Forged the Science of Radio Astronomy
(/isis/citation/CBB001320933/)
Book
Nicolas Langlitz;
(2020)
Chimpanzee Culture Wars
(/isis/citation/CBB054916365/)
Book
Banchoff, Thomas F.;
(2011)
Embryo Politics: Ethics and Policy in Atlantic Democracies
(/isis/citation/CBB001212716/)
Article
Mbali, Mandisa;
(2014)
“A Matter of Conscience”: The Moral Authority of the World Medical Association and the Readmission of the South Africans, 1976--1994
(/isis/citation/CBB001422143/)
Book
DeJong-Lambert, William;
(2012)
The Cold War Politics of Genetic Research: An Introduction to the Lysenko Affair
(/isis/citation/CBB001213212/)
Article
Sullivan, Gerald;
(2004)
A Four-fold Humanity: Margaret Mead and Psychological Types
(/isis/citation/CBB000671308/)
Article
Remco Heesen;
(2019)
The credit incentive to be a maverick
(/isis/citation/CBB670510551/)
Article
Cailin O'Connor;
(2019)
The natural selection of conservative science
(/isis/citation/CBB638384021/)
Be the first to comment!