Passage 3

Questions 11 to 15 are based on the. following passage

Magaret Mead, an American scholar, went to Eastern Sanoa in 1925 to spend nine months studying child rearing patterns and adolescent behavior. She sought to answer these questions: Are the adolescent problems due to the nature of adolescence itself or to the civilization? Does adolescence present a different picture under different conditions?" She observed and interviewed fifty adolescent girls of three different villages." Her conclusion was that, unlike the typical experience in the United States, children in Samoa grew up in a relaxed and happy atmosphere. As young adolescents, they made a sexually free and unrepressed(不受压抑的) transition to adulthooD.These findings had a major impact on thinking about child rearing in North America, prompting attempts at more relaxed forms of child rearing in the hope of raising less stressed adolescents.

In 1983, five years after Mead's death (at which point she had no chance for response), Derek Freeman, an Australian scholar, published a strong criticism of Mead's work on SamoA.Freeman said that Mead's findings on adolescence were wrong. Freeman, a biological determinist, believes that universal adolescents are driven by hormonal (荷尔蒙的) changes that cause social and psychological problems. He claims that Mead's work was flawed in two major ways. First, he says her fieldwork was inadequate because she spent a relatively short time in the field and she had insufficient knowledge of the Samoan language. Second, he says that her theoretical bias against biological determinists led her to overlook evidence that was contrary to her interests. He compares rates of adolescent crimes in Samoa and England and finds that they are similar in both cultures. On the basis of this result, he argues that sexual and social- repression also characterized Samoan adolescence. In other words, Samoa is not so different from the West with its supposedly pervasive adolescent problems.

Because of Mead's reputation, Freeman's criticism prompted a vigorous response from scholars, most in defense of MeaD.One response in defense of Mead came from Eleanor Leacock, an expert on how colonialism affects native cultures. Leacock claimed that Freeman's position failed to take history into account; Mead's findings applied to Samoa of the 1920s while Freeman's analysis was based on data from the 1960s. By the 1960s, Samoan society had gone through radical cultural changes due to the influence of World War I and intensive exposure to Western influences. Freeman's data, in her view, do not contradict Mead's because they are from a different period.