But Shankman's new analysis -- following his excellent 2009 book, The Trashing of Margaret Mead: Anatomy of an Anthropological Controversy -- shows that Freeman manipulated "data" in ways so egregious that it might be time for Freeman's publishers to issue formal retractions.

Some background: In her popular 1928 book, Coming of Age in Samoa, Mead presented Samoan culture as a social system that, without much fuss, allowed many adolescents to fool around before marriage. Contemporary scholars of Mead's work agree that, in her presentation of Samoa to American readers, Mead was motivated by a particular political agenda. As a sexually progressive individual, Mead saw (and portrayed) in Samoa the possibility of loosening social strictures on sexuality -- something she suggested could lead to more pleasure, and less pain and suffering.

In 1983, Freeman published Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth with Harvard University Press, a book quickly celebrated in the mainstream press. In this and later work, Freeman appeared to conduct precise scholarship showing that Mead was just too gullible to realize that two supposedly "key informants" were pulling her leg about teenage sexual antics -- kidding the none-the-wiser Margaret Mead. In Freeman's words, "Never can giggly fibs have had such far-reaching consequences in the groves of Academe."

As early as 1996, in his book Not Even Wrong: Margaret Mead, Derek Freeman, and the Samoans, the anthropologist Martin Orans used Mead's own field notes to show "that such humorous fibbing could not be the basis of Mead's understanding. Freeman asks us to imagine that the joking of two women, pinching each other as they put Mead on about their sexuality and that of adolescents, was of more significance than the detailed information she had collected throughout her fieldwork."

Now Shankman has delved even deeper into the sources; in 2011, he obtained from Freeman's archives the first key interview with one of the supposed "joshing" informants, a woman named Fa'apua'a. This interview, conducted in 1987, allegedly bolstered Freeman's contention that Mead had based her "erroneous" portrait of Samoan sexuality on what Fa'apua'a and her friend Fofoa had jokingly told Mead back in the 1920s.

But Shankman shows that the interview was conducted and then represented in deeply problematic ways. The 1987 interview with Fa'apua'a was arranged and carried out by Fofoa's son, a Samoan Christian of high rank who was convinced that Mead had besmirched the reputation of Samoans by portraying his mother, her friend Fa'apua'a, and other Samoans as sexually licentious.

Indeed, Shankman finds that Fofoa's son told Fa'apua'a "that the purpose of the interview was to correct 'the lies she [Mead] wrote in her book, lies that insult you all.'" Fofoa's son also told Fa'apua'a -- falsely -- that Mead had reported in her work that, as young women, Fa'apua'a and Fofoa had been "out at night, all night, every night," with unmarried men. This amounted to a particularly scandalous claim about Fa'apua'a, who had been a ceremonial virgin.