While proclaiming that his only goal is the truth, he has piggybacked on Mead’s fame.Freeman does show that Mead’s research relied more on hunch than on rigour. Her close relationship with her professor, Franz Boas, did induce Mead to tailor her findings to his hypothesis: that adolescent behaviour was subject to cultural variables, rather than genetically determined. Boas, meanwhile, was over-indulgent towards a book written with Mead’s enchanting literary facility.Amusingly, Freeman records how Mead skimped on the focused research she had promised Boas because it required spending time with (in her words) “socially unimportant adolescents”. Staying in US Navy premises for most of her fieldwork, she was treated as one of the governing elite from America and took on the persona of a visiting taupou or ceremonial virgin (concealing the fact that she had married two years previously).Freeman’s new material is partly based on a reconstitution from archives of Mead’s itinerary, and partly on testimony sworn in the late Eighties by an old lady called Fa’apua’a, one of Mead’s closest Samoan friends.

She confessed that she and a girlfriend had engaged in recreational lying when they told Margaret that they spent their nights with boys.Freeman builds an edifice upon one evening, 13 March 1926, when Mead is supposed to have been gulled by this teasing. But Fa’apua’a was a taupou herself and Mead knew quite well that a taupou’s virtue was carefully protected. Moreover, Fa’apua’a and her friend were in their mid-20s, as Mead was – not adolescents. Freeman shows literary flair himself in persuading the reader that he is building up a watertight case, and he has succeeded in convincing some eminent natural scientists. But he remains a prosecuting attorney rather than an impartial historian.It may well be that Mead’s informants told her what they thought she wanted to hear, and that she did not cross-check the story.

But many Samoans have come to resent their culture’s reputation for sexual looseness, and this may have slanted Fa’apua’a’s evidence in the Eighties Also, America in the Twenties was quite strait-laced. Mead may have sussed out the reality of private sexual norms in Samoa, and confused these with public rules. In fact, Samoa seems to have been neither especially permissive nor especially restrictive.Freeman concedes that Mead and Boas were not deliberately deceitful (they allowed extensive archives to be preserved) so much as “cognitively deluded”. Though he oversimplifies Boas’s position, Freeman has a point in criticising those anthropologists who think that culture somehow overrides biology. His own pleas for a reintegration of cultural anthropology and evolutionary biology are fine words, but he does not explain how the Samoan debate bears on the theoretical problems of today.Mead insisted that her best-seller, Coming of Age in Samoa, should not be revised.

It will survive as a literary rather than a scientific classic. And if she was duped? The mistakes people make at the age of 24 acquire public notoriety only if they later become famous.There was nothing in her of the curmudgeon In life, she was serially married to three anthropologists. Freeman, having found the key to her weak spot, has hyphenated himself to her as an endlessly replicating duo in the afterlife of publicity. A feature film must impend: Derek and Margaret, perhaps?Jonathan BenthallThe reviewer is director of the Royal Anthropological Institution.

IT IS a peculiarly British disease. Hundreds of millions of pounds in lottery proceeds come tumbling into the arts and the critics dub it “the biggest disaster ever to befall arts funding in this country”. The reality is different: the majority of our capital projects are yet to be completed, but we are on the brink of nothing less than a transformation of the landscape for arts infrastructure in this country – thanks to the lottery. Yes, capital projects can be fraught with risk, but this is the case with all developments – whether commercial or subsidised, lottery-backed or non-lottery-backed But the successes speak for themselves. Next month, Sheffield’s National Centre for Popular Music opens with pounds 9.5m of lottery funding. Sunderland’s National Glass Centre – pounds 5.9m – has already proved a triumph.