Paradigms in Collision: The Far-Reaching Controversy Over the Samoan Researches of Margaret Mead and its Significance for the Human Sciences

In September of 1983, Victor Turner, a gifted British social anthropologist who had become Professor of Anthropology in the University of Virginia, published an historic essay entitled ‘Body, Brain and Culture’. I say ‘historic’ because it was Victor Turner’s last essay, and because in it, drawing on the researches of the evolutionary neuroscientist Paul MacLean, Turner radically questioned the principal assumption that he and other anthropologists of the 20th century had been ‘taught to hallow’ the assumption that ‘all human behavior is the result of social conditioning’. Earlier that year, Harvard University Press had published a book of mine in