In spite of Hempenstall’s sympathetic efforts, the murk surrounding Freeman’s critical appraisals of Mead’s Samoan work remains. In a new book about Freeman, Truth’s Fool: Derek Freeman and the War over Cultural Anthropology, Peter Hempenstall uses what he calls “a biographer’s perspective and historians’ tools” in order to “excavate the muddy waters of the Freeman–Mead debates.” But any attempt at excavating waters, muddy or clear, is probably doomed by their tendency to rush back in and find their own level. I often had the feeling that he was trying to intimidate me.

At seven o’clock in the morning, as I was struggling to get my brain into gear, his enthusiasm for his subject and the gusto with which he expressed himself were sometimes alarming. So convinced was he that it would transform anthropology and demolish Mead’s reputation as a serious scholar of Samoan life that he sometimes became euphoric. We would chat briefly, almost invariably about Freeman’s forthcoming book, Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth. In 1981, when I was writing my doctoral thesis at ANU’s Research School of Pacific Studies and he was professor emeritus in anthropology, Derek Freeman and I often arrived at our offices before any other staff or students. Truth’s Fool: Derek Freeman and the War over Cultural Anthropologyīy Peter Hempenstall | University of Wisconsin Press | US$34.95 | 336 pages

The Murder Wheel by Tom Mead