Manti Te’o, meet Margaret Mead

Like global warming, junk science and hoaxes pervade academia and reporting to please theorist in authority, write sexy, lazy, stories and get fast money. m/r

Manti Te’o, meet Margaret Mead
1-30-13
Exclusive: Jack Cashill compares girlfriend hoax to Samoan 'sexual paradise' ruse


In the last few weeks, the media have scrutinized Notre Dame All-American linebacker Manti Te’o's imaginary girlfriends more thoroughly than they have the very real terrorists who killed four Americans in Benghazi.

To those who care, the question that remains is whether Te’o conspired to fabricate his seemingly tragic relationship with imaginary girlfriend Lennay Kekua or whether he is a victim of a cruel hoax.

If he has been hoaxed, Te’o will not be the first victim of traditional Polynesian trickery, nor the most consequential. That latter honor belongs to culture-changing anthropologist Margaret Mead.

“What we do know is that in every Polynesian community there is the waha nui,” wrote Hawaiian historian Herb Kawainui Kāne to a mutual friend in an email, “the self-appointed spokesman and tale teller, who has a talent for anticipating what a visitor wants to hear and can invent a story on the spot.”

Unfortunately, Herb Kawainui Kāne is no longer around to shed light on the Te’o case. The celebrated author died two years ago at 82.

But he had a good deal to say about Mead, the “youth with romantic ideas” who “found the information she was looking for in Samoa.” The reason she found it? Teenage girls “had invented tales to suit their visitor.”

In the fall of 1922, Mead took a course from Franz Boas, her mentor at Columbia University and the godfather of modern anthropology. Boas taught that “social conditioning” was responsible for the complete molding of the individual, and Mead believed what Boas preached. ...

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2013/01/manti-teo-meet-margaret-mead/#qxPtTdd3dA03qdFr.99