I recently spent two weeks in Lisbon, Portugal. It was the end of an incredibly busy semester, and I had recently finished reading Bianca Williams’ breathtaking ethnography, The Pursuit of Happiness: Black Women, Diasporic Dreams, and the Politics of Emotional Transnationalism. I was reminded of how international travel offers an opportunity to fully immerse oneself in another environment. Despite being in Lisbon for work, I felt free and unencumbered. I was able to enjoy a temporary respite from the headlines of school shootings and police violence against unarmed black people that seem to occur every other day in the U.S. In this way, I was not unlike the self-proclaimed “Jamaicaholics” of Girlfriend Tours (GFT) Williams describes who travel to Jamaica to escape from the racism and sexism that they experience in the U.S.

This fascinating ethnography brings together studies of race and affect with literature on transnationalism, black feminism, and diaspora to explore the affective dimensions of African American women’s transnational pursuits of happiness. With engaging ethnographic storytelling, Williams illustrates how Girlfriends’ dreams of diasporic kinship and imagined communities are disrupted by cross-class tensions, respectability politics, and American privilege. This book makes an important and timely intervention by centering the often-overlooked experiences of happiness, pleasure, and leisure in the lives of middle-aged African American women.

The chapters in the book are interspersed with captivating interludes that provide personal insights about her interactions in Jamaica, and teachable moments about the nature of ethnographic research.

Written in an accessible and engaging way, this book can appeal to a broad and general audience of tourists, travelers, and globe-trotters, but particularly for black women and women of color from all walk of life who have particular racialized and gendered experiences while traveling. Moreover, this book is also well-suited for students and scholars of anthropology, African Diaspora Studies, and Women and Gender Studies.  There is a great deal that we can learn from this book about the practices and politics of ethnographic research. For 22 months between 2003 and 2007, she used methods of participant observation in group activities and interviews in Jamaica and the U.S. Rather than embed herself in one location, Williams embarked on a multi-sited project in which she immersed herself in the Girlfriend Tours community, following its members on their vacations in Negril and Ocho Rios to their hometowns in Atlanta, Washington, DC, Memphis, Ft. Lauderdale. She combined this with four years of virtual fieldwork on the www.Jamaicans.com site, paying close attention to the trip reports section of the tourist and travel discussion forums.

In the first two chapters, Williams makes two significant theoretical interventions in her discussion of “emotional transnationalism” and traveling with “diasporic heart.” Chapter 1 frames Girlfriends’ pursuits of happiness as acts of resistance and theorizes “emotional transnationalism” (Wolf 1997) as that which connects girlfriends’ emotional lives with their transnational mobility. Notably, in true #citeblackwomen fashion, Williams gives credit to Audre Lorde for her groundbreaking theorizations of shame and anger that predated the “affective turn” in scholarly literature. Chapter 2 describes how African American women tourists to Jamaica traveled with “diasporic heart” by engaging in strategic forms of “tourist consumption and spending practices” to maximize the impact their US dollars would have on Jamaican lives (69). Some of these strategies included opting to stay in locally owned hotels and patronizing locally-owned businesses. While Jamaicans often assumed they were wealthy, Girlfriends were actually lower middle-class women who made great sacrifices to be able to afford their trips.

In Chapter 2 Williams also builds upon Mary Louise Pratt’s concept of “contact zones” to describe “diasporic contact zones,” places like airports, hotels, restaurants, and the beach that “test the elasticity of shared notions of blackness” and interrogate “power differentials within African diasporic relationships” (65). There were lots of crossed signals between Jamaicans and African American women. While African American women traveled in search of diasporic kinship and belonging, they lamented their inability to connect with Jamaican women. They did not realize that Jamaican women of a similar age and class status rarely entered tourist sectors. Thus, Williams concludes that “sisterhood in tourist spaces and service relationships complicated diasporic belonging and the Girlfriends’ pursuit of happiness” (151).

Chapter 3 describes how African American women saw Jamaica as a black paradise that was close to the United States – familiar yet foreign. This chapter encourages scholars to apply theories of transnationalism to tourism, which is an under-studied subject in anthropology. Williams understands tourism as a “rich site for understanding how consumption practices and processes of identity formation (such as racialization) are being reshaped” (105).

Questions of sexual agency and autonomy are also central to this project, and they come to the fore in Chapter 4, which explores the emotional entanglements of romance tourism. Reflecting on the impact of the film, How Stella got her Groove Back, Williams describes how the “specter of sex and romance tourism haunts this text and their happiness pursuits” (16). While some GFT members had established long term, long-distance partnerships with Jamaican men, others went to Jamaica with the intention of having short-term liaisons. Interestingly, Williams notes that regardless of their intentions, almost all of the Girlfriends “hoped and desired to be the subject of a Jamaican man’s appreciative gaze and seductive lyrics, even if they did not take them up on the proposition” (129). Williams is to be commended for the nuanced way that she treats this topic – one that is often dealt with in a sensationalistic way. The Pursuit of Happiness makes a significant contribution to scholarship on the sexual and intimate economies of tourism.

Chapter 5 focuses on the “online diasporic contact zones” of the www.Jamaicans.com website, revealing how media allows people to create and maintain emotional connections that give them a sense of diasporic belonging and emotional satisfaction. Williams makes a significant contribution to the study of race and the Internet, as well as to theorizing virtual media and its role in the construction of racialized subjectivities.  She discusses how “boardites” constructed virtual selves through their engagement with the website, and often used the Internet to facilitate face to face connections in meetings IRL (“in real life”). Ultimately, Williams concluded that African American women experienced “a new sense of themselves during these virtual and travel interactions” (23).

In the Epilogue, Williams reflects on the lessons of fieldwork, which included the challenges of being seen as an insider-outsider, the importance of relationship-building, the emotional labor of ethnography, the complicated nature of extricating oneself from the field, particularly when it involves digital technologies, and what happens when participants return the ethnographic gaze. Interestingly, some Girlfriends were uncomfortable discussing their relationships with Williams because they saw her as a “daughter-figure” or “play niece” who was too young and innocent to be privy to this information.  Williams learned valuable lessons from the Girlfriends about black women’s agency and the importance of creating space for intergenerational conversations among black women. Ultimately, Williams’ finds that relationships are the key to black women’s collective survival (190), and that pursuing happiness is a political project for Black women –a way to privilege self-care and wellness in a country that “consistently fights to misrecognize or deny the fullness of their humanity” (32). Simply reading this book felt like an act of self-care for me – a breath of fresh air. I look forward to teaching it to Spelman College students in my first-year colloquium course, Going Global: From Travelogues to Black Travel Blogs.

Erica Lorraine Williams is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia. She earned her Ph.D and M.A. in Cultural Anthropology from Stanford University, and her B.A. in Anthropology and Africana Studies from New York University. Her research has focused on the cultural and sexual politics of the transnational tourism industry, and Afro-Brazilian feminist activism in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. Her first book, Sex Tourism in Bahia: Ambiguous Entanglements (2013), won the National Women’s Studies Association/University of Illinois Press First Book Prize. She is also the co-editor of African American Pioneers in Anthropology: The Next Generation, 1950-1970, which will be published by the University of Illinois Press in November 2018.

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I didn’t know at the time that anthropology was in the middle of a major debate in which the kiwi anthropologist Derek Freeman set about trashing Margaret Mead’s reputation. Instead, I went on to graduate school to study cognatic kinship in Papua New Guinea. My next major encounter with the Mead-Freeman debate occured at UC San Diego, home of the world-famous Melanesian Archive. This was back in the day when if you wanted to read a book, you actually had to go to a library. My visit to the archive was incredibly important to me, since it was one of the few places in the world where I could access the historical and specialist literature on my topic.

So when I got taken out to coffee by Don Tuzin, professor who founded the archive, I wanted to make a good impression. And, I was told, this might not be easy: Don could be difficult. He was imposing, tall, and with eyebrows that seemed particularly intimidating  somehow. The topic of Derek Freeman came up and I said that I thought his article “On The Concept of the Kindred” was brilliant and one of the best things ever written on kinship — something I still think to this day. His face transformed. A wide smile broke out on it and suddenly, I was in. I had no idea at the time, but I was speaking with Freeman’s most loyal student — a man who was practically his hanai son. I spent just a little time with Don, but I remember his help and support warmly. I had, apparently, chosen Freeman in the Freeman-Mead debate.

I didn’t grow up a Meadian, then. Quite the contrary. Even the few people I knew who did study Mead, such as Lise Dobrin and Ira Bashkow, who did fieldwork in the same location as Mead, seemed far more impressed with Reo Fortune’s fieldwork than with Mead’s.

I was shocked to discover, then, how completely convinced I was by Paul Shankman’s superb volume The Trashing of Margaret Mead. The book carefully and patiently described the true value of Mead’s work and poked holes in Freeman’s critique. Even more, it provided a pretty authoritative account of Freeman’s own mental dysfunction, which literally involved him being removed from his field site in a straightjacket.

These days the Mead-Freeman controversy is ancient history, with Shankman’s 2009 volume serving as the official summary of the debate. Until now, that is. Peter Hempenstall’s new book, Truth’s Fool: Derek Freeman and the War Over Cultural Anthroplogy is a new entry into this debate. The first full-length biography of Freeman, it also includes a long and careful walk through the bibliography of the debate.

There is a lot in Truth’s Fool to recommend it. For me, it brings a kind of closure. Don Tuzin had always planned to write a book like this, and did extensive research reading Freeman’s diaries and interviewing him and his family. But Don passed away with his biography unfinished in 2007. Reading this book, which is dedicated to Don and which draws so heavily on his research, I feel a chapter of history has finally been closed.

The book deserves accolades for other reasons. It is clearly and briskly written, never getting bogged down in details or lost in the minutae of contexts. It goes down easy — I finished it in a weekend. The research is very solid, based on a liftetime of exeperience as a Pacific historian and deep research, including interviews with people who knew Freeman.

Best of all, Truth’s Fool is an unabashedly partisan book which actively seeks to rehabilitate Freeman’s public reputation. This is not intellectual history: Freeman’s sanity and decency are, in fact, the central issue of the book while his ideas are secondary. Freeman and his opponents frickin’ loathed each other and their scholarly exchanges were radioactive. It’s therefore particularly impressive that Hempenstall takes a measured, judicious tone and carefully sifts fact from fiction, allegation from reality. When Freeman is in the wrong, Hempenstall says so. When Freeman’s opponents are mistaken, Hempenstall insists on this as well. We couldn’t ask for a more judicious approach to this most unjudicious debate.

Freeman has gotten the biographer he deserved, then. Or perhaps one even better than he deserved. I expected to come out of this book with a deeper appreciation for Derek Freeman. Instead, I came away with a deep appreciation for Peter Hempenstall. But in fact, reading the volume convinced me more than ever that Freeman was monster, and crawling around inside of his head for three hundred pages made my soul feel dirty. I do not exaggerate. I literally mean that.

So what is the image that we see of Freeman in this book?

At the center of Hempenstall’s book is the claim that it is wrong to call Freeman crazy. Accusations of mental illness, he says, are stigmatizing — an argument that many critical medical anthropologists will recognize. Freeman had an intense personality, Hempenstall suggests, and he had moments of ’emotional abreaction’ (as Freeman called them), but these were often fruitful and therapeutic, opening up new intellectual and emotional vistas for Freeman. To call him ‘mad’ relies on a hegemonic definition of normal, and a bright and clear boundary between sanity and insanity which probably does not exist.

And yet despite these caveats Hempenstall is too careful to be able to avoid saying that Freeman was a deeply disturbed individual. Consider, for instance, this passage:

“It is fair to argue that he experienced ‘mental health issues’ in the form of a bipolar condition that was clinically diagnosed, was medically treated, and may have waned. A milder form of mania may have been responsible for some of his responses… He also experienced several delusional episodes… Were these ‘psychotic’ episodes?… the answer is a qualified yes.”

Passages like this don’t exactly score points against Freeman’s opponents. In fact, I think Hempenstall makes a wrong move claiming that Freeman was merely eccentric rather than mentally ill. Freeman’s actions, recounted here in never-before-seen detail, seem profoundly disgusting me. Freeman emerges as someone capable only of hurting himself and the people around him. Hempenstall’s exculpatory account ends up being worse than Shankman’s portrayl of Freeman in Trashing. If Freeman was sane enough to take responsibility for his actions, then that makes him an even worse person than someone who was simply too mentally ill to be held to account.

Hempenstall also attempts to ameliorate perceptions of Freeman’s performance in the Mead debate, but here too he is less than successful. Hempenstall insists that Freeman was deeply injured by the negativity that got thrown at him in the debate, not a monster who honey badgered his way through. This is good to know, but it makes one wonder why Freeman would act in a way that would be so hurtful to himself, much less others. There is also a lot of tu quoque in the book, pointing out that Freeman was not the only bad actor in the debates. But of course this excuses no one.

Hempenstall’s biography gets down in the weeds — deep, deep in the weeds — of Freeman’s inner life. But it never undertakes the deep analysis of Freeman’s psyche which Freeman himself often did. The book is psychologically deep, but Hempenstall doesn’t really give a careful analysis of Freeman a go. For instance, Hempenstall laments the fact that Freeman’s campaign against Mead kept him from finishing his biocultural synthesis. But to me, this seemed to be the point of the Mead campaign.

Freeman imagined himself a master thinker with three monumental contributions to make to humanity: a biocultural synthesis, a definitive work on Sāmoa, and a definitive work on the Iban. If he tried and failed to write any of these books, or if they were not masterpieces, Freeman would have been forced to pay a tremendous psychic price. It was infinitely safer to be someone who could write them, but chose not to. Is it really surprising, therefore, that Freeman found a cause which kept him too busy to complete his life’s mission? I think not. The Mead campaign, the endless reading lists, the articles announcing (but not carrying out) a new research paradigm… did these not do the important work of keeping him from having to test whether he was a prometheus or, instead, just another academic?

Over time, Freeman developed a theory that Mead was not to be blamed for misunderstanding Sāmoa because she had been ‘hoaxed’ by her informants. It’s fascinating to speculate about the work this did for Freeman’s psyche. Whatever this claim’s truth, we should note that way it allowed Freeman to blame and persecute Mead without actually blaming and persecuting her — a move that enabled him to have his cake of domination and eat it too. And of course, as someone driven to perform bad actions by forces he could not control, it’s not hard to see how Freeman would project this structure of guilt and absolution on to Mead herself.

‘Domination’ is one of the key themes in Freeman’s life, and his diaries express an uncontrollable need to dominate others, combined with a profound sense of regret and disappointment that he cannot keep from hurting others. Hempenstall documents this at length. But I was surprised that gender recieves so little attention in the book. ‘Domination’ is mentioned, but never ‘masculinity’. This is surprising since, these days, Freeman seems the prototypical dude troll, straight out of the depths of some disturbing Reddit subthread or alt-right ‘men’s lives matter’ movement. Moreover, the psychodynamics of masculinity were a central focus of Don Tuzin’s work, such as his brilliant but troubling The Cassowary’s Revenge.

Indeed, while Hempenstall occasionally remarks on the difference between Freeman and Mead’s gender, I was hoping for a more detailed discussion of Freeman as a man, and particularly what masculinity meant to a kiwi of his age and social position. Freeman’s quoting of poetry seems to invoke to me a sort of Byronic self-understanding, one possibly tied to social class in places like Australia and New Zealand, where romantic intellectualism may have been looked down on as ‘pommy’ even as it instilled anxiety in other commonwealthers about their social position.

Shifting now to Freeman’s thought, I have to say that I was disappointed here as well. Darwin and Freud are the two great thinkers who shook humanity’s faith in objectivity and progress, and yet somehow Freeman used them to construct a theory of himself as a scientist who was 1) completely objective due to introspection and 2) was moving science Forward. Who undertakes therapy, as Freeman did, and comes out of the experience believing objectivity is easy and achievable? Someone for whom the psychic costs of admitting otherwise are too high, that’s who. And in the end, this view of humankind owes more to the evolutionary thought of Spencer, who emphasized the inevitability of progress, than Darwin and the new synthesis.

Although Freeman flirted with E.O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins and others undertaking an acultural synthesis that saw complex behaviors determined by the genome, he ultimately relented. I also didn’t realize how much Freeman’s “Anthropology of choice” involved reinventing the basic assumptions of Boasian anthropology. Human beings evolved to allow agency and behavioral plasticity? To many of us, that’s not news. Perhaps the final irony is that although Freeman was interested in the explanatory potential of ethology when applied to humans, these days animal ethologists see animals as increasingly like humans and not vice versa: capable of learning, emotion, some degree of intersubjectivity, and so forth.

In the end, then, Hempenstall has given us the kindest possible portrayal of Freeman. It’s a welcome corrective to the literature, and he deserves credit for producing a well-written, phlegmatic book about a decidedly choleric personality. But Hempenstall does not rescue the reputation of Freeman in the book. Some may regard Freeman as a man too sick to be blamed for his actions, while others may find him even more culpable than before. Regardless of the substantive issues in the Mead-Freeman debate, Truth’s Fool will probably ensure that Freeman’s reputation is that of a damaged, hurtful man: anthropology’s original dude troll.

Rex

Alex Golub is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. His book “Leviathans at the Gold Mine” won the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology book award. He is interested in political anthropology, the anthropology of virtual worlds, the history of anthropology, and public anthropology and open access scholarship.

alex.golub.name/

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