IT was an irresistible image. Sexy South Seas girls going out at dusk with all the boys they fancied; parents looking on indulgently at the tropical pre-marriage shenanigans.
And when it was published in 1928, Margaret Mead's Coming Of Age In Samoa gave America, and later the world, an extraordinary fantasy. If adolescent girls in even one place in the world could sow their wild oats without shame then the world was a more bizarre, more fantastic place than 1920s America could imagine.
The book became - and probably remains - the best-selling anthropological text ever. At the same time, academics argued it was proof of 'cultural determinism'. Led by Franz Boas (Mead's mentor and someone she only half jokingly called 'papa'), the school of thought wanted everything - knowledge, assumptions, emotions - to stem from our social life.
It was that old nature vs nurture debate, and in Mead's work, the former won most resoundingly.
Nowadays, human behaviour is deemed to be the result of both biological and social influences. We are also in an age where, in the West at least, adolescent girls are fairly free to do what they want. We do not need Coming Of Age any more, and here, in the dramatically titled The Fateful Hoaxing Of Margaret Mead, Australian anthropologist Derek Freeman debunks it.
He tried to do the same thing 16 years ago in his book Margaret Mead And Samoa: The Making And Unmaking Of An Anthropological Myth, which showed how irreconcilable Mead's laissez-faire teenage orgies were with the virgin-celebrating society he had studied.
But this time round Freeman has incorporated a critical new witness, Fa'apua'a Fa'amu, whom he discovered in 1987 when he visited the island of Ta'u to make a film about Mead. The woman was one of the two adolescents who had confided tales of nightly adventures to Mead.