John Derek Freeman (15 August 1916 – 6 July 2001)[1] was a New Zealand anthropologist known[2] for his criticism of Margaret Mead's work on Samoan society, as described in her 1928 ethnography Coming of Age in Samoa.

After entering the New Zealand Naval Reserve in World War II, he did graduate training with British social anthropologists Meyer Fortes and Raymond Firth at London School of Economics.

This experience profoundly altered his view of anthropology, changing his interests to looking at the ways in which human behavior is influenced by universal psychological and biological foundations.

From then on Freeman argued strongly for a new approach to anthropology which integrated insights from evolutionary theory and psychoanalysis, and he published works on the concepts of aggression and choice.

This research led him to take a strong cultural determinist stance, even publishing an article in the student publication "Salient" stating that "the aims and desire which determine behavior are all constituted by the social environment".

[5] Also during this period he met Jiddu Krishnamurti who instilled in Freeman an interest in free will and choice as a counterpoint to the forces of social and cultural conditioning.

Freeman also collected Samoan artefacts of material culture, which was later deposited in the Otago Museum of Dunedin, New Zealand, of which he was made an honorary curator of ethnology.

He served in Europe and the far east during the war, and in September and October 1945 while his ship was accepting the surrender of Japanese troops in Borneo, Freeman came into contact with the Iban people.

In 1946 he received a Rehabilitation Bursary of the New Zealand government, he did two years of post-graduate studies with Raymond Firth at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

In 1947 he gave a lecture series at Oxford University on Samoan social structure, this brought him into contact with Meyer Fortes who became a significant influence on his doctoral research.

In November 1948, he married Monica Maitland, and shortly after the couple left for Sarawak where Freeman would spend the next 30 months doing fieldwork among the Iban for his doctoral dissertation.

In 1955, he was offered and accepted the appointment of Senior Fellow in the Research School of Pacific (and Asian) Studies at the Australian National University in Canberra, where he stayed until his death.

[10][11] The student (who was later described by Freeman as an impostor with fake credentials) had been subject to verbal abuse and humiliation by Tom Harrisson, Government Ethnologist and Curator of the Sarawak Museum, and this event had threatened his relationship with the Kajang people that he was studying.

[10][12] Doubting his own mental health Freeman left Borneo for England intent to see a friend who was a psychiatrist, but during a stop-over in Karachi where he met with officials from London, he decided instead to return to Canberra.

Freeman himself described the events in Kuching as a "conversion" and an "abreaction" through which he acquired a new level of awareness, including the sudden realization that most of the basic assumptions of cultural anthropology were inadequate.

[10][11] The events also affected Freeman's career by making the Malaysian government declare him persona non grata in Borneo, the place which had been his primary research site.

Freeman privately presented Mead with most of the critique of her work that he would later publish after her death, and at a public meeting they had a heated discussion about the importance of female virginity in Samoan culture.

Freeman later admitted that he did feel intimidated by Mead even as he was administering his harsh verbal critique of her work, and he described her as a "castrator of men" to whose power he did not want to succumb.

Samoan witnesses ascribed the incident to spirit possession, some Americans thought of it as evidence of psychological problems, but Freeman himself dismissed those speculations attributing it to fatigue from research and possible symptoms of dengue fever.

In 1979 Freeman also sparked a public controversy in Canberra when he protested against the Mexican government's gift of a copy of the Aztec calendar stone to the Australian National University.

[20] The event caused public debate, with commentators accusing Freeman of exhibiting a double standard as he did not speak out against a model of the Roman Colosseum in the Classics Museum at the Australian National University, and that he had never spoken similarly out against practices of human sacrifice and cannibalism amongst the Bornean and Samoan people he had studied.

[26] In 1996 Martin Orans examined Mead's notes preserved at the Library of Congress, and credits her for leaving all of her recorded data available to the general public.

[28] Freeman's obituary in The New York Times stated that "His challenge was initially greeted with disbelief or anger, but gradually won wide -- although not complete -- acceptance," but further said that "many anthropologists have agreed to disagree over the findings of one of the science's founding mothers, acknowledging both Mead's pioneering research and the fact that she may have been mistaken on details.