COMING OF AGE
IN SAMOA
_A Psychological Study of Primitive
Youth for Western Civilisation_
_By_
MARGARET MEAD
_Assistant Curator of Ethnology
American Museum of
Natural History_
[Signet]
_Foreword by Franz Boas_
_Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University_
WILLIAM MORROW & COMPANY
NEW YORK MCMXXVIII
COMING OF AGE
IN SAMOA
[Signet]
[Illustration: _With Hibiscus in her hair_]
+To the Girls of Taū+
THIS BOOK IS
DEDICATED
_’Ou te avatu
lenei tusitala
iā te ’outou
O Teineīti ma le Aualuma
o Taū_
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am indebted to the generosity of the Board of Fellowships in the
Biological Sciences of the National Research Council whose award of
a fellowship made this investigation possible. I have to thank my
father for the gift of my travelling expenses to and from the Samoan
Islands. To Prof. Franz Boas I owe the inspiration and the direction
of my problem, the training which prepared me to undertake such an
investigation, and the criticism of my results.
For a co-operation which greatly facilitated the progress of my work in
the Pacific, I am indebted to Dr. Herbert E. Gregory, Director of the
B. P. Bishop Museum and to Dr. E. C. S. Handy and Miss Stella Jones of
the Bishop Museum.
To the endorsement of my work by Admiral Stitt and the kindness of
Commander Owen Mink, U. S. N., I owe the co-operation of the medical
authorities in Samoa, whose assistance greatly simplified and expedited
my investigation. I have to thank Miss Ellen M. Hodgson, Chief Nurse,
the staff nurses, the Samoan nurses, and particularly G. F. Pepe
for my first contacts and my instruction in the Samoan language. To
the hospitality, generosity, and sympathetic co-operation of Mr.
Edward R. Holt, Chief Pharmacist Mate, and Mrs. Holt, I owe the four
months’ residence in their home which furnished me with an absolutely
essential neutral base from which I could study all the individuals
in the village and yet remain aloof from native feuds and lines of
demarcation.
The success of this investigation depended upon the co-operation and
interest of several hundred Samoans. To mention each one individually
would be impossible. I owe special thanks to County Chief Ufuti of
Vaitogi and to all the members of his household and to the Talking
Chief Lolo, who taught me the rudiments of the graceful pattern of
social relations which is so characteristic of the Samoans. I must
specially thank their excellencies, Tufele, Governor of Manu’a, and
County Chiefs Tui Olesega, Misa, Sotoa, Asoao, and Leui, the Chiefs
Pomele, Nua, Tialigo, Moa, Maualupe, Asi, and the Talking Chiefs Lapui
and Muao; the Samoan pastors Solomona and Iakopo, the Samoan teachers,
Sua, Napoleon, and Eti; Toaga, the wife of Sotoa, Fa’apua’a, the Taupo
of Fitiuta, Fofoa, Laula, Leauala, and Felofiaina, and the chiefs
and people of all the villages of Manu’a and their children. Their
kindness, hospitality, and courtesy made my sojourn among them a happy
one; their co-operation and interest made it possible for me to pursue
my investigation with peace and profit. The fact that no real names are
used in the course of the book is to shield the feelings of those who
would not enjoy such publicity.
For criticism and assistance in the preparation of this manuscript
I am indebted to Dr. R. F. Benedict, Dr. L. S. Cressman, Miss M. E.
Eichelberger, and Mrs. M. L. Loeb.
M. M.
_The American Museum of Natural History,
March, 1928._
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGE
FOREWORD BY FRANZ BOAS xiii
CHAPTER
I INTRODUCTION 1
II A DAY IN SAMOA 14
III THE EDUCATION OF THE SAMOAN CHILD 20
IV THE SAMOAN HOUSEHOLD 39
V THE GIRL AND HER AGE GROUP 59
VI THE GIRL IN THE COMMUNITY 74
VII FORMAL SEX RELATIONS 86
VIII THE RÔLE OF THE DANCE 110
IX THE ATTITUDE TOWARDS PERSONALITY 122
X THE EXPERIENCE AND INDIVIDUALITY OF THE AVERAGE GIRL 131
XI THE GIRL IN CONFLICT 158
XII MATURITY AND OLD AGE 185
XIII OUR EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS IN THE LIGHT OF SAMOAN
CONTRASTS 195
XIV EDUCATION FOR CHOICE 234
APPENDIX
I _Notes to Chapters_ 249
II _Methodology of This Study_ 259
III _Samoan Civilisation as It Is To-day_ 266
IV _The Mentally Defective and the Mentally Diseased_ 278
V _Materials upon Which the Analysis Is Based_ 282
a. Sample Record Sheet
b. Table I. Showing Menstrual History, Sex Experience
and Residence in Pastor’s Household
c. Table II. Family Structure, and Analysis of Table
d. Intelligence Tests Used
e. Check List Used in Investigation of Each Girl’s
Experience.
_Glossary of Native Terms Used in the Text_ 295
ILLUSTRATIONS
WITH HIBISCUS IN HER HAIR _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
THE “HOUSE TO MEET THE STRANGER” 18
REBUILDING THE VILLAGE AFTER A HURRICANE 18
A CHIEF’S DAUGHTER AND THE BABY OF THE HOUSEHOLD WHOSE YELLOW
HAIR WILL SOME DAY MAKE A CHIEF’S HEADDRESS 52
THE LOCAL PARLIAMENT IS CONVENED 80
A DANCING COSTUME FOR EUROPEAN TASTES 112
BY NAME “HOUSE OF MIDNIGHT DARKNESS” 112
A SPIRIT OF THE WOOD 122
IN THE BARK CLOTH COSTUME OF LONG AGO 160
DRESSED UP IN HER BIG SISTER’S DANCING SKIRT 160
A TALKING CHIEF—THE NATIVE MASTER OF CEREMONIES 190
A FAMOUS MAKER OF BARK CLOTH 190
FOREWORD
Modern descriptions of primitive people give us a picture of their
culture classified according to the varied aspects of human life.
We learn about inventions, household economy, family and political
organisation, and religious beliefs and practices. Through a
comparative study of these data and through information that tells us
of their growth and development, we endeavour to reconstruct, as well
as may be, the history of each particular culture. Some anthropologists
even hope that the comparative study will reveal some tendencies of
development that recur so often that significant generalisations
regarding the processes of cultural growth will be discovered.
To the lay reader these studies are interesting on account of the
strangeness of the scene, the peculiar attitudes characteristic of
foreign cultures that set off in strong light our own achievements and
behaviour.
However, a systematic description of human activities gives us very
little insight into the mental attitudes of the individual. His
thoughts and actions appear merely as expressions of rigidly defined
cultural forms. We learn little about his rational thinking, about
his friendships and conflicts with his fellowmen. The personal side
of the life of the individual is almost eliminated in the systematic
presentation of the cultural life of the people. The picture is
standardised, like a collection of laws that tell us how we should
behave, and not how we behave; like rules set down defining the style
of art, but not the way in which the artist elaborates his ideas
of beauty; like a list of inventions, and not the way in which the
individual overcomes technical difficulties that present themselves.
And yet the way in which the personality reacts to culture is a matter
that should concern us deeply and that makes the studies of foreign
cultures a fruitful and useful field of research. We are accustomed to
consider all those actions that are part and parcel of our own culture,
standards which we follow automatically, as common to all mankind. They
are deeply ingrained in our behaviour. We are moulded in their forms so
that we cannot think but that they must be valid everywhere.
Courtesy, modesty, good manners, conformity to definite ethical
standards are universal, but what constitutes courtesy, modesty, good
manners, and ethical standards is not universal. It is instructive to
know that standards differ in the most unexpected ways. It is still
more important to know how the individual reacts to these standards.
In our own civilisation the individual is beset with difficulties which
we are likely to ascribe to fundamental human traits. When we speak
about the difficulties of childhood and of adolescence, we are thinking
of them as unavoidable periods of adjustment through which every one
has to pass. The whole psycho-analytic approach is largely based on
this supposition.
The anthropologist doubts the correctness of these views, but up to
this time hardly any one has taken the pains to identify himself
sufficiently with a primitive population to obtain an insight into
these problems. We feel, therefore, grateful to Miss Mead for having
undertaken to identify herself so completely with Samoan youth that
she gives us a lucid and clear picture of the joys and difficulties
encountered by the young individual in a culture so entirely different
from our own. The results of her painstaking investigation confirm the
suspicion long held by anthropologists, that much of what we ascribe to
human nature is no more than a reaction to the restraints put upon us
by our civilisation.
+Franz Boas.+
COMING OF AGE
IN SAMOA
[Signet]
I
INTRODUCTION
During the last hundred years parents and teachers have ceased to take
childhood and adolescence for granted. They have attempted to fit
education to the needs of the child, rather than to press the child
into an inflexible educational mould. To this new task they have been
spurred by two forces, the growth of the science of psychology, and
the difficulties and maladjustments of youth. Psychology suggested
that much might be gained by a knowledge of the way in which children
developed, of the stages through which they passed, of what the adult
world might reasonably expect of the baby of two months or the child
of two years. And the fulminations of the pulpit, the loudly voiced
laments of the conservative social philosopher, the records of juvenile
courts and social agencies all suggested that something must be done
with the period which science had named adolescence. The spectacle of
a younger generation diverging ever more widely from the standards
and ideals of the past, cut adrift without the anchorage of respected
home standards or group religious values, terrified the cautious
reactionary, tempted the radical propagandist to missionary crusades
among the defenceless youth, and worried the least thoughtful among us.
In American civilisation, with its many immigrant strains, its dozens
of conflicting standards of conduct, its hundreds of religious sects,
its shifting economic conditions, this unsettled, disturbed status of
youth was more apparent than in the older, more settled civilisation of
Europe. American conditions challenged the psychologist, the educator,
the social philosopher, to offer acceptable explanations of the growing
children’s plight. As to-day in post-war Germany, where the younger
generation has even more difficult adjustments to make than have our
own children, a great mass of theorising about adolescence is flooding
the book shops; so the psychologist in America tried to account for
the restlessness of youth. The result was works like that of Stanley
Hall on “Adolescence,” which ascribed to the period through which the
children were passing, the causes of their conflict and distress.
Adolescence was characterised as the period in which idealism flowered
and rebellion against authority waxed strong, a period during which
difficulties and conflicts were absolutely inevitable.
The careful child psychologist who relied upon experiment for his
conclusions did not subscribe to these theories. He said, “We have no
data. We know only a little about the first few months of a child’s
life. We are only just learning when a baby’s eyes will first follow
a light. How can we give definite answers to questions of how a
developed personality, about which we know nothing, will respond to
religion?” But the negative cautions of science are never popular. If
the experimentalist would not commit himself, the social philosopher,
the preacher and the pedagogue tried the harder to give a short-cut
answer. They observed the behaviour of adolescents in our society,
noted down the omnipresent and obvious symptoms of unrest, and
announced these as characteristics of the period. Mothers were warned
that “daughters in their teens” present special problems. This, said
the theorists, is a difficult period. The physical changes which are
going on in the bodies of your boys and girls have their definite
psychological accompaniments. You can no more evade one than you can
the other; as your daughter’s body changes from the body of a child to
the body of a woman, so inevitably will her spirit change, and that
stormily. The theorists looked about them again at the adolescents in
our civilisation and repeated with great conviction, “Yes, stormily.”
Such a view, though unsanctioned by the cautious experimentalist,
gained wide currency, influenced our educational policy, paralysed
our parental efforts. Just as the mother must brace herself against
the baby’s crying when it cuts its first tooth, so she must fortify
herself and bear with what equanimity she might the unlovely, turbulent
manifestations of the “awkward age.” If there was nothing to blame the
child for, neither was there any programme except endurance which
might be urged upon the teacher. The theorist continued to observe the
behaviour of American adolescents and each year lent new justification
to his hypothesis, as the difficulties of youth were illustrated and
documented in the records of schools and juvenile courts.
But meanwhile another way of studying human development had been
gaining ground, the approach of the anthropologist, the student of man
in all of his most diverse social settings. The anthropologist, as he
pondered his growing body of material upon the customs of primitive
people, grew to realise the tremendous rôle played in an individual’s
life by the social environment in which each is born and reared. One
by one, aspects of behaviour which we had been accustomed to consider
invariable complements of our humanity were found to be merely a result
of civilisation, present in the inhabitants of one country, absent in
another country, and this without a change of race. He learned that
neither race nor common humanity can be held responsible for many of
the forms which even such basic human emotions as love and fear and
anger take under different social conditions.
So the anthropologist, arguing from his observations of the behaviour
of adult human beings in other civilisations, reaches many of
the same conclusions which the behaviourist reaches in his work
upon human babies who have as yet no civilisation to shape their
malleable humanity. With such an attitude towards human nature the
anthropologist listened to the current comment upon adolescence.
He heard attitudes which seemed to him dependent upon social
environment—such as rebellion against authority, philosophical
perplexities, the flowering of idealism, conflict and struggle—ascribed
to a period of physical development. And on the basis of his knowledge
of the determinism of culture, of the plasticity of human beings, he
doubted. Were these difficulties due to being adolescent or to being
adolescent in America?
For the biologist who doubts an old hypothesis or wishes to test out a
new one, there is the biological laboratory. There, under conditions
over which he can exercise the most rigid control, he can vary the
light, the air, the food, which his plants or his animals receive,
from the moment of birth throughout their lifetime. Keeping all the
conditions but one constant, he can make accurate measurement of the
effect of the one. This is the ideal method of science, the method
of the controlled experiment, through which all hypotheses may be
submitted to a strict objective test.
Even the student of infant psychology can only partially reproduce
these ideal laboratory conditions. He cannot control the pre-natal
environment of the child whom he will later subject to objective
measurement. He can, however, control the early environment of the
child, the first few days of its existence, and decide what sounds
and sights and smells and tastes are to impinge upon it. But for
the student of the adolescent there is no such simplicity of working
conditions. What we wish to test is no less than the effect of
civilisation upon a developing human being at the age of puberty.
To test it most rigorously we would have to construct various sorts
of different civilisations and subject large numbers of adolescent
children to these different environments. We would list the influences
the effects of which we wished to study. If we wished to study the
influence of the size of the family, we would construct a series of
civilisations alike in every respect except in family organisation.
Then if we found differences in the behaviour of our adolescents we
could say with assurance that size of family had caused the difference,
that, for instance, the only child had a more troubled adolescence than
the child who was a member of a large family. And so we might proceed
through a dozen possible situations—early or late sex knowledge, early
or late sex-experience, pressure towards precocious development,
discouragement of precocious development, segregation of the sexes
or coeducation from infancy, division of labour between the sexes or
common tasks for both, pressure to make religious choices young or
the lack of such pressure. We would vary one factor, while the others
remained quite constant, and analyse which, if any, of the aspects of
our civilisation were responsible for the difficulties of our children
at adolescence.
Unfortunately, such ideal methods of experiment are denied to us when
our materials are humanity and the whole fabric of a social order. The
test colony of Herodotus, in which babies were to be isolated and the
results recorded, is not a possible approach. Neither is the method of
selecting from our own civilisation groups of children who meet one
requirement or another. Such a method would be to select five hundred
adolescents from small families and five hundred from large families,
and try to discover which had experienced the greatest difficulties of
adjustment at adolescence. But we could not know what were the other
influences brought to bear upon these children, what effect their
knowledge of sex or their neighbourhood environment may have had upon
their adolescent development.
What method then is open to us who wish to conduct a human experiment
but who lack the power either to construct the experimental conditions
or to find controlled examples of those conditions here and there
throughout our own civilisation? The only method is that of the
anthropologist, to go to a different civilisation and make a study of
human beings under different cultural conditions in some other part of
the world. For such studies the anthropologist chooses quite simple
peoples, primitive peoples, whose society has never attained the
complexity of our own. In this choice of primitive peoples like the
Eskimo, the Australian, the South Sea islander, or the Pueblo Indian,
the anthropologist is guided by the knowledge that the analysis of a
simpler civilisation is more possible of attainment.
In complicated civilisations like those of Europe, or the higher
civilisations of the East, years of study are necessary before the
student can begin to understand the forces at work within them. A
study of the French family alone would involve a preliminary study of
French history, of French law, of the Catholic and Protestant attitudes
towards sex and personal relations. A primitive people without a
written language present a much less elaborate problem and a trained
student can master the fundamental structure of a primitive society in
a few months.
Furthermore, we do not choose a simple peasant community in Europe
or an isolated group of mountain whites in the American South, for
these people’s ways of life, though simple, belong essentially to the
historical tradition to which the complex parts of European or American
civilisation belong. Instead, we choose primitive groups who have had
thousands of years of historical development along completely different
lines from our own, whose language does not possess our Indo-European
categories, whose religious ideas are of a different nature, whose
social organisation is not only simpler but very different from our
own. From these contrasts, which are vivid enough to startle and
enlighten those accustomed to our own way of life and simple enough
to be grasped quickly, it is possible to learn many things about the
effect of a civilisation upon the individuals within it. So, in order
to investigate the particular problem, I chose to go not to Germany or
to Russia, but to Samoa, a South Sea island about thirteen degrees from
the Equator, inhabited by a brown Polynesian people. Because I was a
woman and could hope for greater intimacy in working with girls rather
than with boys, and because owing to a paucity of women ethnologists
our knowledge of primitive girls is far slighter than our knowledge of
boys, I chose to concentrate upon the adolescent girl in Samoa.
But in concentrating, I did something very different from what I would
do if I concentrated upon a study of the adolescent girl in Kokomo,
Indiana. In such a study, I would go right to the crux of the problem;
I would not have to linger long over the Indiana language, the table
manners or sleeping habits of my subjects, or make an exhaustive study
of how they learned to dress themselves, to use the telephone, or what
the concept of conscience meant in Kokomo. All these things are the
general fabric of American life, known to me as investigator, known to
you as readers.
But with this new experiment on the primitive adolescent girl the
matter was quite otherwise. She spoke a language the very sounds of
which were strange, a language in which nouns became verbs and verbs
nouns in the most sleight-of-hand fashion. All of her habits of life
were different. She sat cross-legged on the ground, and to sit upon a
chair made her stiff and miserable. She ate with her fingers from a
woven plate; she slept upon the floor. Her house was a mere circle of
pillars, roofed by a cone of thatch, carpeted with water-worn coral
fragments. Her whole material environment was different. Cocoanut palm,
breadfruit, and mango trees swayed above her village. She had never
seen a horse, knew no animals except the pig, dog and rat. Her food was
taro, breadfruit and bananas, fish and wild pigeon and half-roasted
pork, and land crabs. And just as it was necessary to understand this
physical environment, this routine of life which was so different from
ours, so her social environment in its attitudes towards children,
towards sex, towards personality, presented as strong a contrast to the
social environment of the American girl.
I concentrated upon the girls of the community. I spent the greater
part of my time with them. I studied most closely the households
in which adolescent girls lived. I spent more time in the games of
children than in the councils of their elders. Speaking their language,
eating their food, sitting barefoot and cross-legged upon the pebbly
floor, I did my best to minimise the differences between us and to
learn to know and understand all the girls of three little villages on
the coast of the little island of Taū, in the Manu’a Archipelago.
Through the nine months which I spent in Samoa, I gathered many
detailed facts about these girls, the size of their families, the
position and wealth of their parents, the number of their brothers
and sisters, the amount of sex experience which they had had. All of
these routine facts are summarised in a table in the appendix. They
are only the barest skeleton, hardly the raw materials for a study
of family situations and sex relations, standards of friendship, of
loyalty, of personal responsibility, all those impalpable storm centres
of disturbances in the lives of our adolescent girls. And because
these less measurable parts of their lives were so similar, because
one girl’s life was so much like another’s, in an uncomplex, uniform
culture like Samoa, I feel justified in generalising although I studied
only fifty girls in three small neighbouring villages.
In the following chapters I have described the lives of these girls,
the lives of their younger sisters who will soon be adolescent, of
their brothers with whom a strict taboo forbids them to speak, of their
older sisters who have left puberty behind them, of their elders,
the mothers and fathers whose attitudes towards life determine the
attitudes of their children. And through this description I have tried
to answer the question which sent me to Samoa: Are the disturbances
which vex our adolescents due to the nature of adolescence itself or to
the civilisation? Under different conditions does adolescence present a
different picture?
Also, by the nature of the problem, because of the unfamiliarity of
this simple life on a small Pacific island, I have had to give a
picture of the whole social life of Samoa, the details being selected
always with a view to illuminating the problem of adolescence. Matters
of political organisation which neither interest nor influence the
young girl are not included. Minutiæ of relationship systems or
ancestor cults, genealogies and mythology, which are of interest only
to the specialist, will be published in another place. But I have tried
to present to the reader the Samoan girl in her social setting, to
describe the course of her life from birth until death, the problems
she will have to solve, the values which will guide her in her
solutions, the pains and pleasures of her human lot cast on a South Sea
island.
Such a description seeks to do more than illuminate this particular
problem. It should also give the reader some conception of a different
and contrasting civilisation, another way of life, which other members
of the human race have found satisfactory and gracious. We know that
our subtlest perceptions, our highest values, are all based upon
contrast; that light without darkness or beauty without ugliness would
lose the qualities which they now appear to us to have. And similarly,
if we would appreciate our own civilisation, this elaborate pattern of
life which we have made for ourselves as a people and which we are at
such pains to pass on to our children, we must set our civilisation
over against other very different ones. The traveller in Europe returns
to America, sensitive to nuances in his own manners and philosophies
which have hitherto gone unremarked, yet Europe and America are parts
of one civilisation. It is with variations within one great pattern
that the student of Europe to-day or the student of our own history
sharpens his sense of appreciation. But if we step outside the stream
of Indo-European culture, the appreciation which we can accord our
civilisation is even more enhanced. Here in remote parts of the world,
under historical conditions very different from those which made
Greece and Rome flourish and fall, groups of human beings have worked
out patterns of life so different from our own that we cannot venture
any guess that they would ever have arrived at our solutions. Each
primitive people has selected one set of human gifts, one set of human
values, and fashioned for themselves an art, a social organisation,
a religion, which is their unique contribution to the history of the
human spirit.
Samoa is only one of these diverse and gracious patterns, but as the
traveller who has been once from home is wiser than he who has never
left his own door step, so a knowledge of one other culture should
sharpen our ability to scrutinise more steadily, to appreciate more
lovingly, our own.
And, because of the particular problem which we set out to answer,
this tale of another way of life is mainly concerned with education,
with the process by which the baby, arrived cultureless upon the human
scene, becomes a full-fledged adult member of his or her society. The
strongest light will fall upon the ways in which Samoan education,
in its broadest sense, differs from our own. And from this contrast
we may be able to turn, made newly and vividly self-conscious and
self-critical, to judge anew and perhaps fashion differently the
education we give our children.
II
A DAY IN SAMOA
The life of the day begins at dawn, or if the moon has shown until
daylight, the shouts of the young men may be heard before dawn from
the hillside. Uneasy in the night, populous with ghosts, they shout
lustily to one another as they hasten with their work. As the dawn
begins to fall among the soft brown roofs and the slender palm trees
stand out against a colourless, gleaming sea, lovers slip home from
trysts beneath the palm trees or in the shadow of beached canoes,
that the light may find each sleeper in his appointed place. Cocks
crow, negligently, and a shrill-voiced bird cries from the breadfruit
trees. The insistent roar of the reef seems muted to an undertone for
the sounds of a waking village. Babies cry, a few short wails before
sleepy mothers give them the breast. Restless little children roll out
of their sheets and wander drowsily down to the beach to freshen their
faces in the sea. Boys, bent upon an early fishing, start collecting
their tackle and go to rouse their more laggard companions. Fires
are lit, here and there, the white smoke hardly visible against the
paleness of the dawn. The whole village, sheeted and frowsy, stirs,
rubs its eyes, and stumbles towards the beach. “Talofa!” “Talofa!”
“Will the journey start to-day?” “Is it bonito fishing your lordship
is going?” Girls stop to giggle over some young ne’er-do-well who
escaped during the night from an angry father’s pursuit and to venture
a shrewd guess that the daughter knew more about his presence than she
told. The boy who is taunted by another, who has succeeded him in his
sweetheart’s favour, grapples with his rival, his foot slipping in the
wet sand. From the other end of the village comes a long drawn-out,
piercing wail. A messenger has just brought word of the death of some
relative in another village. Half-clad, unhurried women, with babies
at their breasts, or astride their hips, pause in their tale of Losa’s
outraged departure from her father’s house to the greater kindness in
the home of her uncle, to wonder who is dead. Poor relatives whisper
their requests to rich relatives, men make plans to set a fish trap
together, a woman begs a bit of yellow dye from a kinswoman, and
through the village sounds the rhythmic tattoo which calls the young
men together. They gather from all parts of the village, digging sticks
in hand, ready to start inland to the plantation. The older men set off
upon their more lonely occupations, and each household, reassembled
under its peaked roof, settles down to the routine of the morning.
Little children, too hungry to wait for the late breakfast, beg lumps
of cold taro which they munch greedily. Women carry piles of washing
to the sea or to the spring at the far end of the village, or set off
inland after weaving materials. The older girls go fishing on the
reef, or perhaps set themselves to weaving a new set of Venetian blinds.
In the houses, where the pebbly floors have been swept bare with
a stiff long-handled broom, the women great with child and the
nursing mothers, sit and gossip with one another. Old men sit apart,
unceasingly twisting palm husk on their bare thighs and muttering
old tales under their breath. The carpenters begin work on the new
house, while the owner bustles about trying to keep them in a good
humour. Families who will cook to-day are hard at work; the taro, yams
and bananas have already been brought from inland; the children are
scuttling back and forth, fetching sea water, or leaves to stuff the
pig. As the sun rises higher in the sky, the shadows deepen under the
thatched roofs, the sand is burning to the touch, the hibiscus flowers
wilt on the hedges, and little children bid the smaller ones, “Come
out of the sun.” Those whose excursions have been short return to the
village, the women with strings of crimson jelly fish, or baskets of
shell fish, the men with cocoanuts, carried in baskets slung on a
shoulder pole. The women and children eat their breakfasts, just hot
from the oven, if this is cook day, and the young men work swiftly in
the midday heat, preparing the noon feast for their elders.
It is high noon. The sand burns the feet of the little children, who
leave their palm leaf balls and their pin-wheels of frangipani blossoms
to wither in the sun, as they creep into the shade of the houses.
The women who must go abroad carry great banana leaves as sun-shades
or wind wet cloths about their heads. Lowering a few blinds against
the slanting sun, all who are left in the village wrap their heads
in sheets and go to sleep. Only a few adventurous children may slip
away for a swim in the shadow of a high rock, some industrious woman
continues with her weaving, or a close little group of women bend
anxiously over a woman in labour. The village is dazzling and dead; any
sound seems oddly loud and out of place. Words have to cut through the
solid heat slowly. And then the sun gradually sinks over the sea.
A second time, the sleeping people stir, roused perhaps by the cry of
“a boat,” resounding through the village. The fishermen beach their
canoes, weary and spent from the heat, in spite of the slaked lime
on their heads, with which they have sought to cool their brains and
redden their hair. The brightly coloured fishes are spread out on the
floor, or piled in front of the houses until the women pour water over
them to free them from taboo. Regretfully, the young fishermen separate
out the “Taboo fish,” which must be sent to the chief, or proudly they
pack the little palm leaf baskets with offerings of fish to take to
their sweethearts. Men come home from the bush, grimy and heavy laden,
shouting as they come, greeted in a sonorous rising cadence by those
who have remained at home. They gather in the guest house for their
evening kava drinking. The soft clapping of hands, the high-pitched
intoning of the talking chief who serves the kava echoes through the
village. Girls gather flowers to weave into necklaces; children, lusty
from their naps and bound to no particular task, play circular games in
the half shade of the late afternoon. Finally the sun sets, in a flame
which stretches from the mountain behind to the horizon on the sea,
the last bather comes up from the beach, children straggle home, dark
little figures etched against the sky; lights shine in the houses, and
each household gathers for its evening meal. The suitor humbly presents
his offering, the children have been summoned from their noisy play,
perhaps there is an honoured guest who must be served first, after the
soft, barbaric singing of Christian hymns and the brief and graceful
evening prayer. In front of a house at the end of the village, a father
cries out the birth of a son. In some family circles a face is missing,
in others little runaways have found a haven! Again quiet settles upon
the village, as first the head of the household, then the women and
children, and last of all the patient boys, eat their supper.
After supper the old people and the little children are bundled off
to bed. If the young people have guests the front of the house is
yielded to them. For day is the time for the councils of old men and
the labours of youth, and night is the time for lighter things. Two
kinsmen, or a chief and his councillor, sit and gossip over the day’s
events or make plans for the morrow. Outside a crier goes through the
village announcing that the communal breadfruit pit will be opened
in the morning, or that the village will make a great fish trap. If it
is moonlight, groups of young men, women by twos and threes, wander
through the village, and crowds of children hunt for land crabs or
chase each other among the breadfruit trees. Half the village may go
fishing by torchlight and the curving reef will gleam with wavering
lights and echo with shouts of triumph or disappointment, teasing
words or smothered cries of outraged modesty. Or a group of youths may
dance for the pleasure of some visiting maiden. Many of those who have
retired to sleep, drawn by the merry music, will wrap their sheets
about them and set out to find the dancing. A white-clad, ghostly
throng will gather in a circle about the gaily lit house, a circle from
which every now and then a few will detach themselves and wander away
among the trees. Sometimes sleep will not descend upon the village
until long past midnight; then at last there is only the mellow thunder
of the reef and the whisper of lovers, as the village rests until dawn.
[Illustration: _The “House to meet the Stranger”_]
[Illustration: _Rebuilding the village after a hurricane_]
III
THE EDUCATION OF THE SAMOAN CHILD
Birthdays are of little account in Samoa. But for the birth itself of
the baby of high rank, a great feast will be held, and much property
given away. The first baby must always be born in the mother’s village
and if she has gone to live in the village of her husband, she must go
home for the occasion. For several months before the birth of the child
the father’s relatives have brought gifts of food to the prospective
mother, while the mother’s female relatives have been busy making pure
white bark cloth for baby clothes and weaving dozens of tiny pandanus
mats which form the layette. The expectant mother goes home laden
with food gifts and when she returns to her husband’s family, her
family provide her with the exact equivalent in mats and bark cloth
as a gift to them. At the birth itself the father’s mother or sister
must be present to care for the new-born baby while the midwife and
the relatives of the mother care for her. There is no privacy about a
birth. Convention dictates that the mother should neither writhe, nor
cry out, nor inveigh against the presence of twenty or thirty people
in the house who sit up all night if need be, laughing, joking, and
playing games. The midwife cuts the cord with a fresh bamboo knife
and then all wait eagerly for the cord to fall off, the signal for a
feast. If the baby is a girl, the cord is buried under a paper mulberry
tree (the tree from which bark cloth is made) to ensure her growing up
to be industrious at household tasks; for a boy it is thrown into the
sea that he may be a skilled fisherman, or planted under a taro plant
to give him industry in farming. Then the visitors go home, the mother
rises and goes about her daily tasks, and the new baby ceases to be of
much interest to any one. The day, the month in which it was born, is
forgotten. Its first steps or first word are remarked without exuberant
comment, without ceremony. It has lost all ceremonial importance and
will not regain it again until after puberty; in most Samoan villages
a girl will be ceremonially ignored until she is married. And even
the mother remembers only that Losa is older than Tupu, and that her
sister’s little boy, Fale, is younger than her brother’s child, Vigo.
Relative age is of great importance, for the elder may always command
the younger—until the positions of adult life upset the arrangement—but
actual age may well be forgotten.
Babies are always nursed, and in the few cases where the mother’s milk
fails her, a wet nurse is sought among the kinsfolk. From the first
week they are also given other food, papaya, cocoanut milk, sugar-cane
juice; the food is either masticated by the mother and then put into
the baby’s mouth on her finger, or if it is liquid, a piece of bark
cloth is dipped into it and the child allowed to suck it, as shepherds
feed orphaned lambs. The babies are nursed whenever they cry and there
is no attempt at regularity. Unless a woman expects another child, she
will nurse a baby until it is two or three years old, as the simplest
device for pacifying its crying. Babies sleep with their mothers as
long as they are at the breast; after weaning they are usually handed
over to the care of some younger girl in the household. They are bathed
frequently with the juice of a wild orange and rubbed with cocoanut oil
until their skins glisten.
The chief nurse-maid is usually a child of six or seven who is not
strong enough to lift a baby over six months old, but who can carry
the child straddling the left hip, or on the small of the back. A
child of six or seven months of age will assume this straddling
position naturally when it is picked up. Their diminutive nurses do
not encourage children to walk, as babies who can walk about are more
complicated charges. They walk before they talk, but it is impossible
to give the age of walking with any exactness, though I saw two babies
walk whom I knew to be only nine months old, and my impression is
that the average age is about a year. The life on the floor, for all
activities within a Samoan house are conducted on the floor, encourages
crawling, and children under three or four years of age optionally
crawl or walk.
From birth until the age of four or five a child’s education is
exceedingly simple. They must be house-broken, a matter made more
difficult by an habitual indifference to the activities of very small
children. They must learn to sit or crawl within the house and never
to stand upright unless it is absolutely necessary; never to address
an adult in a standing position; to stay out of the sun; not to
tangle the strands of the weaver; not to scatter the cut-up cocoanut
which is spread out to dry; to keep their scant loin cloths at least
nominally fastened to their persons; to treat fire and knives with
proper caution; not to touch the kava bowl, or the kava cup; and,
if their father is a chief, not to crawl on his bed-place when he
is by. These are really simply a series of avoidances, enforced by
occasional cuffings and a deal of exasperated shouting and ineffectual
conversation.
The weight of the punishment usually falls upon the next oldest child,
who learns to shout, “Come out of the sun,” before she has fully
appreciated the necessity of doing so herself. By the time Samoan girls
and boys have reached sixteen or seventeen years of age these perpetual
admonitions to the younger ones have become an inseparable part of
their conversation, a monotonous, irritated undercurrent to all their
comments. I have known them to intersperse their remarks every two
or three minutes with, “Keep still,” “Sit still,” “Keep your mouths
shut,” “Stop that noise,” uttered quite mechanically although all of
the little ones present may have been behaving as quietly as a row
of intimidated mice. On the whole, this last requirement of silence
is continually mentioned and never enforced. The little nurses are
more interested in peace than in forming the characters of their small
charges and when a child begins to howl, it is simply dragged out of
earshot of its elders. No mother will ever exert herself to discipline
a younger child if an older one can be made responsible.
If small families of parents and children prevailed in Samoa, this
system would result in making half of the population solicitous and
self-sacrificing and the other half tyrannous and self-indulgent.
But just as a child is getting old enough so that its wilfulness is
becoming unbearable, a younger one is saddled upon it, and the whole
process is repeated again, each child being disciplined and socialised
through responsibility for a still younger one.
This fear of the disagreeable consequences resulting from a child’s
crying, is so firmly fixed in the minds of the older children that long
after there is any need for it, they succumb to some little tyrant’s
threat of making a scene, and five-year-olds bully their way into
expeditions on which they will have to be carried, into weaving parties
where they will tangle the strands, and cook houses where they will
tear up the cooking leaves or get thoroughly smudged with the soot
and have to be washed—all because an older boy or girl has become so
accustomed to yielding any point to stop an outcry. This method of
giving in, coaxing, bribing, diverting the infant disturbers is only
pursued within the household or the relationship group, where there
are duly constituted elders in authority to punish the older children
who can’t keep the babies still. Towards a neighbour’s children or in
a crowd the half-grown girls and boys and even the adults vent their
full irritation upon the heads of troublesome children. If a crowd of
children are near enough, pressing in curiously to watch some spectacle
at which they are not wanted, they are soundly lashed with palm leaves,
or dispersed with a shower of small stones, of which the house floor
always furnishes a ready supply. This treatment does not seem actually
to improve the children’s behaviour, but merely to make them cling
even closer to their frightened and indulgent little guardians. It
may be surmised that stoning the children from next door provides a
most necessary outlet for those who have spent so many weary hours
placating their own young relatives. And even these bursts of anger are
nine-tenths gesture. No one who throws the stones actually means to hit
a child, but the children know that if they repeat their intrusions
too often, by the laws of chance some of the flying bits of coral
will land in their faces. Even Samoan dogs have learned to estimate
the proportion of gesture that there is in a Samoan’s “get out of the
house.” They simply stalk out between one set of posts and with equal
dignity and all casualness stalk in at the next opening. By the time a
child is six or seven she has all the essential avoidances well enough
by heart to be trusted with the care of a younger child. And she also
develops a number of simple techniques. She learns to weave firm square
balls from palm leaves, to make pin-wheels of palm leaves or frangipani
blossoms, to climb a cocoanut tree by walking up the trunk on flexible
little feet, to break open a cocoanut with one firm well-directed blow
of a knife as long as she is tall, to play a number of group games and
sing the songs which go with them, to tidy the house by picking up the
litter on the stony floor, to bring water from the sea, to spread out
the copra to dry and to help gather it in when rain threatens, to roll
the pandanus leaves for weaving, to go to a neighbouring house and
bring back a lighted fagot for the chief’s pipe or the cook-house fire,
and to exercise tact in begging slight favours from relatives.
But in the case of the little girls all of these tasks are merely
supplementary to the main business of baby-tending. Very small boys
also have some care of the younger children, but at eight or nine years
of age they are usually relieved of it. Whatever rough edges have not
been smoothed off by this responsibility for younger children are worn
off by their contact with older boys. For little boys are admitted to
interesting and important activities only so long as their behaviour
is circumspect and helpful. Where small girls are brusquely pushed
aside, small boys will be patiently tolerated and they become adept at
making themselves useful. The four or five little boys who all wish to
assist at the important business of helping a grown youth lasso reef
eels, organise themselves into a highly efficient working team; one
boy holds the bait, another holds an extra lasso, others poke eagerly
about in holes in the reef looking for prey, while still another tucks
the captured eels into his _lavalava_. The small girls, burdened with
heavy babies or the care of little staggerers who are too small to
adventure on the reef, discouraged by the hostility of the small boys
and the scorn of the older ones, have little opportunity for learning
the more adventurous forms of work and play. So while the little boys
first undergo the chastening effects of baby-tending and then have many
opportunities to learn effective co-operation under the supervision
of older boys, the girls’ education is less comprehensive. They
have a high standard of individual responsibility but the community
provides them with no lessons in co-operation with one another. This
is particularly apparent in the activities of young people; the boys
organise quickly; the girls waste hours in bickering, innocent of any
technique for quick and efficient co-operation.
And as the woman who goes fishing can only get away by turning the
babies over to the little girls of the household, the little girls
cannot accompany their aunts and mothers. So they learn even the simple
processes of reef fishing much later than do the boys. They are kept at
the baby-tending, errand-running stage until they are old enough and
robust enough to work on the plantations and carry foodstuffs down to
the village.
A girl is given these more strenuous tasks near the age of puberty,
but it is purely a question of her physical size and ability to take
responsibility, rather than of her physical maturity. Before this time
she has occasionally accompanied the older members of the family to the
plantations if they were willing to take the babies along also. But
once there, while her brothers and cousins are collecting cocoanuts and
roving happily about in the bush, she has again to chase and shepherd
and pacify the ubiquitous babies.
As soon as the girls are strong enough to carry heavy loads, it pays
the family to shift the responsibility for the little children to the
younger girls and the adolescent girls are released from baby-tending.
It may be said with some justice that the worst period of their lives
is over. Never again will they be so incessantly at the beck and
call of their elders, never again so tyrannised over by two-year-old
tyrants. All the irritating, detailed routine of housekeeping, which
in our civilisation is accused of warping the souls and souring the
tempers of grown women, is here performed by children under fourteen
years of age. A fire or a pipe to be kindled, a call for a drink,
a lamp to be lit, the baby’s cry, the errand of the capricious
adult—these haunt them from morning until night. With the introduction
of several months a year of government schools these children are
being taken out of their homes for most of the day. This brings about
a complete disorganisation of the native households which have no
precedents for a manner of life where mothers have to stay at home and
take care of their children and adults have to perform small routine
tasks and run errands.
Before their release from baby-tending the little girls have a very
limited knowledge of any of the more complicated techniques. Some of
them can do the simpler work in preparing food for cooking, such as
skinning bananas, grating cocoanuts, or scraping taro. A few of them
can weave the simple carrying basket. But now they must learn to weave
all their own baskets for carrying supplies; learn to select taro
leaves of the right age for cooking, to dig only mature taro. In the
cook-house they learn to make _palusami_, to grate the cocoanut meat,
season it with hot stones, mix it with sea water and strain out the
husks, pour this milky mixture into a properly made little container
of taro leaves from which the aromatic stem has been scorched off,
wrap these in a breadfruit leaf and fasten the stem tightly to make
a durable cooking jacket. They must learn to lace a large fish into
a palm leaf, or roll a bundle of small fish in a breadfruit leaf; to
select the right kind of leaves for stuffing a pig, to judge when
the food in the oven of small heated stones is thoroughly baked.
Theoretically the bulk of the cooking is done by the boys and where a
girl has to do the heavier work, it is a matter for comment: “Poor
Losa, there are no boys in her house and always she must make the
oven.” But the girls always help and often do a great part of the work.
Once they are regarded as individuals who can devote a long period
of time to some consecutive activity, girls are sent on long fishing
expeditions. They learn to weave fish baskets, to gather and arrange
the bundles of fagots used in torch-light fishing, to tickle a devil
fish until it comes out of its hole and climbs obediently upon the
waiting stick, appropriately dubbed a “come hither stick”; to string
the great rose-coloured jellyfish, _lole_, a name which Samoan children
give to candy also, on a long string of hibiscus bark, tipped with a
palm leaf rib for a needle; to know good fish from bad fish, fish that
are in season from fish which are dangerous at some particular time of
the year; and never to take two octopuses, found paired on a rock, lest
bad luck come upon the witless fisher.
Before this time their knowledge of plants and trees is mainly a play
one, the pandanus provides them with seeds for necklaces, the palm tree
with leaves to weave balls; the banana tree gives leaves for umbrellas
and half a leaf to shred into a stringy “choker”; cocoanut shells cut
in half, with cinet strings attached, make a species of stilt; the
blossoms of the _Pua_ tree can be sewed into beautiful necklaces. Now
they must learn to recognise these trees and plants for more serious
purposes; they must learn when the pandanus leaves are ready for the
cutting and how to cut the long leaves with one sure quick stroke;
they must distinguish between the three kinds of pandanus used for
different grades of mats. The pretty orange seeds which made such
attractive and also edible necklaces must now be gathered as paint
brushes for ornamenting bark cloth. Banana leaves are gathered to
protect the woven platters, to wrap up puddings for the oven, to bank
the steaming oven full of food. Banana bark must be stripped at just
the right point to yield the even, pliant, black strips, needed to
ornament mats and baskets. Bananas themselves must be distinguished as
to those which are ripe for burying, or the golden curved banana ready
for eating, or bananas ready to be sun-dried for making fruit-cake
rolls. Hibiscus bark can no longer be torn off at random to give a
raffia-like string for a handful of shells; long journeys must be made
inland to select bark of the right quality for use in weaving.
In the house the girl’s principal task is to learn to weave. She has
to master several different techniques. First, she learns to weave
palm branches where the central rib of the leaf serves as a rim to
her basket or an edge to her mat and where the leaflets are already
arranged for weaving. From palm leaves she first learns to weave
a carrying basket, made of half a leaf, by plaiting the leaflets
together and curving the rib into a rim. Then she learns to weave the
Venetian blinds which hang between the house posts, by laying one-half
leaf upon another and plaiting the leaflets together. More difficult
are the floor mats, woven of four great palm leaves, and the food
platters with their intricate designs. There are also fans to make,
simple two-strand weaves which she learns to make quite well, more
elaborate twined ones which are the prerogative of older and more
skilled weavers. Usually some older woman in the household trains a
girl to weave and sees to it that she makes at least one of each kind
of article, but she is only called upon to produce in quantity the
simpler things, like the Venetian blinds. From the pandanus she learns
to weave the common floor mats, one or two types of the more elaborate
bed mats, and then, when she is thirteen or fourteen, she begins her
first fine mat. The fine mat represents the high point of Samoan
weaving virtuosity. Woven of the finest quality of pandanus which has
been soaked and baked and scraped to a golden whiteness and paper-like
thinness, of strands a sixteenth of an inch in width, these mats take
a year or two years to weave and are as soft and pliable as linen.
They form the unit of value, and must always be included in the dowry
of the bride. Girls seldom finish a fine mat until they are nineteen
or twenty, but the mat has been started, and, wrapped up in a coarser
one, it rests among the rafters, a testimony to the girl’s industry
and manual skill. She learns the rudiments of bark cloth making; she
can select and cut the paper mulberry wands, peel off the bark, beat
it after it has been scraped by more expert hands. The patterning of
the cloth with a pattern board or by free hand drawing is left for the
more experienced adult.
Throughout this more or less systematic period of education, the girls
maintain a very nice balance between a reputation for the necessary
minimum of knowledge and a virtuosity which would make too heavy
demands. A girl’s chances of marriage are badly damaged if it gets
about the village that she is lazy and inept in domestic tasks. But
after these first stages have been completed the girl marks time
technically for three or four years. She does the routine weaving,
especially of the Venetian blinds and carrying baskets. She helps
with the plantation work and the cooking, she weaves a very little on
her fine mat. But she thrusts virtuosity away from her as she thrusts
away every other sort of responsibility with the invariable comment,
“Laititi a’u” (“I am but young”). All of her interest is expended on
clandestine sex adventures, and she is content to do routine tasks as,
to a certain extent, her brother is also.
But the seventeen-year-old boy is not left passively to his own
devices. He has learned the rudiments of fishing, he can take a dug-out
canoe over the reef safely, or manage the stern paddle in a bonito
boat. He can plant taro or transplant cocoanut, husk cocoanuts on a
stake and cut the meat out with one deft quick turn of the knife. Now
at seventeen or eighteen he is thrust into the _Aumaga_, the society
of the young men and the older men without titles, the group that
is called, not in euphemism but in sober fact, “the strength of the
village.” Here he is badgered into efficiency by rivalry, precept
and example. The older chiefs who supervise the activities of the
_Aumaga_ gaze equally sternly upon any backslidings and upon any undue
precocity. The prestige of his group is ever being called into account
by the _Aumaga_ of the neighbouring villages. His fellows ridicule
and persecute the boy who fails to appear when any group activity is
on foot, whether work for the village on the plantations, or fishing,
or cooking for the chiefs, or play in the form of a ceremonial call
upon some visiting maiden. Furthermore, the youth is given much more
stimulus to learn and also a greater variety of occupations are open
to him. There is no specialisation among women, except in medicine and
mid-wifery, both the prerogatives of very old women who teach their
arts to their middle-aged daughters and nieces. The only other vocation
is that of the wife of an official orator, and no girl will prepare
herself for this one type of marriage which demands special knowledge,
for she has no guarantee that she will marry a man of this class.
For the boy it is different. He hopes that some day he will hold a
_matai_ name, a name which will make him a member of the _Fono_, the
assembly of headmen, which will give him a right to drink kava with
chiefs, to work with chiefs rather than with the young men, to sit
inside the house, even though his new title is only of “between the
posts” rank, and not of enough importance to give him a right to a post
for his back. But very seldom is he absolutely assured of getting such
a name. Each family hold several of these titles which they confer
upon the most promising youths in the whole family connection. He has
many rivals. They also are in the _Aumaga_. He must always pit himself
against them in the group activities. There are also several types
of activities in one of which he must specialise. He must become a
house-builder, a fisherman, an orator or a wood carver. Proficiency
in some technique must set him off a little from his fellows. Fishing
prowess means immediate rewards in the shape of food gifts to offer
to his sweetheart; without such gifts his advances will be scorned.
Skill in house-building means wealth and status, for a young man who
is a skilled carpenter must be treated as courteously as a chief and
addressed with the chief’s language, the elaborate set of honorific
words used to people of rank. And with this goes the continual demand
that he should not be too efficient, too outstanding, too precocious.
He must never excel his fellows by more than a little. He must neither
arouse their hatred nor the disapproval of his elders who are far
readier to encourage and excuse the laggard than to condone precocity.
And at the same time he shares his sister’s reluctance to accept
responsibility, and if he should excel gently, not too obviously,
he has good chances of being made a chief. If he is sufficiently
talented, the _Fono_ itself may deliberate, search out a vacant title
to confer upon him and call him in that he may sit with the old men and
learn wisdom. And yet so well recognised is the unwillingness of the
young men to respond to this honour, that the provision is always made,
“And if the young man runs away, then never shall he be made a chief,
but always he must sit outside the house with the young men, preparing
and serving the food of the _matais_ with whom he may not sit in the
_Fono_.” Still more pertinent are the chances of his relationship group
bestowing a _matai_ name upon the gifted young man. And a _matai_ he
wishes to be, some day, some far-off day when his limbs have lost
a little of their suppleness and his heart the love of fun and of
dancing. As one chief of twenty-seven told me: “I have been a chief
only four years and look, my hair is grey, although in Samoa grey
hair comes very slowly, not in youth, as it comes to the white man.
But always, I must act as if I were old. I must walk gravely and with
a measured step. I may not dance except upon most solemn occasions,
neither may I play games with the young men. Old men of sixty are my
companions and watch my every word, lest I make a mistake. Thirty-one
people live in my household. For them I must plan, I must find them
food and clothing, settle their disputes, arrange their marriages.
There is no one in my whole family who dares to scold me or even to
address me familiarly by my first name. It is hard to be so young and
yet to be a chief.” And the old men shake their heads and agree that it
is unseemly for one to be a chief so young.
The operation of natural ambition is further vitiated by the fact that
the young man who is made a _matai_ will not be the greatest among his
former associates, but the youngest and greenest member of the _Fono_.
And no longer may he associate familiarly with his old companions; a
_matai_ must associate only with _matais_, must work beside them in the
bush and sit and talk quietly with them in the evening.
And so the boy is faced by a far more difficult dilemma than the girl.
He dislikes responsibility, but he wishes to excel in his group; skill
will hasten the day when he is made a chief, yet he receives censure
and ridicule if he slackens his efforts; but he will be scolded if he
proceeds too rapidly; yet if he would win a sweetheart, he must have
prestige among his fellows. And conversely, his social prestige is
increased by his amorous exploits.
So while the girl rests upon her “pass” proficiency, the boy is spurred
to greater efforts. A boy is shy of a girl who does not have these
proofs of efficiency and is known to be stupid and unskilled; he is
afraid he may come to want to marry her. Marrying a girl without
proficiency would be a most imprudent step and involve an endless
amount of wrangling with his family. So the girl who is notoriously
inept must take her lovers from among the casual, the jaded, and the
married who are no longer afraid that their senses will betray them
into an imprudent marriage.
But the seventeen-year-old girl does not wish to marry—not yet. It is
better to live as a girl with no responsibility, and a rich variety
of emotional experience. This is the best period of her life. There
are as many beneath her whom she may bully as there are others above
her to tyrannise over her. What she loses in prestige, she gains in
freedom. She has very little baby-tending to do. Her eyes do not ache
from weaving nor does her back break from bending all day over the tapa
board. The long expeditions after fish and food and weaving materials
give ample opportunities for rendezvous. Proficiency would mean more
work, more confining work, and earlier marriage, and marriage is the
inevitable to be deferred as long as possible.
IV
THE SAMOAN HOUSEHOLD
A Samoan village is made up of some thirty to forty households, each
of which is presided over by a headman called a _matai_. These headmen
hold either chiefly titles or the titles of talking chiefs, who are
the official orators, spokesmen and ambassadors of chiefs. In a formal
village assembly each _matai_ has his place, and represents and is
responsible for all the members of his household. These households
include all the individuals who live for any length of time under the
authority and protection of a common _matai_. Their composition varies
from the biological family consisting of parents and children only,
to households of fifteen and twenty people who are all related to the
_matai_ or to his wife by blood, marriage or adoption, but who often
have no close relationship to each other. The adopted members of a
household are usually but not necessarily distant relatives.
Widows and widowers, especially when they are childless, usually
return to their blood relatives, but a married couple may live with
the relatives of either one. Such a household is not necessarily a
close residential unit, but may be scattered over the village in three
or four houses. No one living permanently in another village is
counted as a member of the household, which is strictly a local unit.
Economically, the household is also a unit, for all work upon the
plantations under the supervision of the _matai_ who in turn parcels
out to them food and other necessities.
Within the household, age rather than relationship gives disciplinary
authority. The _matai_ exercises nominal and usually real authority
over every individual under his protection, even over his father
and mother. This control is, of course, modified by personality
differences, always carefully tempered, however, by a ceremonious
acknowledgment of his position. The newest baby born into such a
household is subject to every individual in it, and his position
improves no whit with age until a younger child appears upon the scene.
But in most households the position of youngest is a highly temporary
one. Nieces and nephews or destitute young cousins come to swell the
ranks of the household and at adolescence a girl stands virtually in
the middle with as many individuals who must obey her as there are
persons to whom she owes obedience. Where increased efficiency and
increased self-consciousness would perhaps have made her obstreperous
and restless in a differently organised family, here she has ample
outlet for a growing sense of authority.
This development is perfectly regular. A girl’s marriage makes a
minimum of difference in this respect, except in so far as her own
children increase most pertinently the supply of agreeably docile
subordinates. But the girls who remain unmarried even beyond their
early twenties are in nowise less highly regarded or less responsible
than their married sisters. This tendency to make the classifying
principle age, rather than married state, is reinforced outside the
home by the fact that the wives of untitled men and all unmarried girls
past puberty are classed together in the ceremonial organisation of the
village.
Relatives in other households also play a rôle in the children’s lives.
Any older relative has a right to demand personal service from younger
relatives, a right to criticise their conduct and to interfere in their
affairs. Thus a little girl may escape alone down to the beach to bathe
only to be met by an older cousin who sets her washing or caring for
a baby or to fetch some cocoanut to scrub the clothes. So closely is
the daily life bound up with this universal servitude and so numerous
are the acknowledged relationships in the name of which service can be
exacted, that for the children an hour’s escape from surveillance is
almost impossible.
This loose but demanding relationship group has its compensations also.
Within it a child of three can wander safely and come to no harm, can
be sure of finding food and drink, a sheet to wrap herself up in for
a nap, a kind hand to dry casual tears and bind up her wounds. Any
small children who are missing when night falls, are simply “sought
among their kinsfolk,” and a baby whose mother has gone inland to work
on the plantation is passed from hand to hand for the length of the
village.
The ranking by age is disturbed in only a few cases. In each village
one or two high chiefs have the hereditary right to name some girl of
their household as its _taupo_, the ceremonial princess of the house.
The girl who at fifteen or sixteen is made a _taupo_ is snatched
from her age group and sometimes from her immediate family also and
surrounded by a glare of prestige. The older women of the village
accord her courtesy titles, her immediate family often exploits her
position for their personal ends and in return show great consideration
for her wishes. But as there are only two or three _taupos_ in a
village, their unique position serves to emphasise rather than to
disprove the general status of young girls.
Coupled with this enormous diffusion of authority goes a fear of
overstraining the relationship bond, which expresses itself in an
added respect for personality. The very number of her captors is the
girl’s protection, for does one press her too far, she has but to
change her residence to the home of some more complacent relative. It
is possible to classify the different households open to her as those
with hardest work, least chaperonage, least scolding, largest or least
number of contemporaries, fewest babies, best food, etc. Few children
live continuously in one household, but are always testing out other
possible residences. And this can be done under the guise of visits
and with no suggestion of truancy. But the minute that the mildest
annoyance grows up at home, the possibility of flight moderates the
discipline and alleviates the child’s sense of dependency. No Samoan
child, except the _taupo_, or the thoroughly delinquent, ever has to
deal with a feeling of being trapped. There are always relatives to
whom one can flee. This is the invariable answer which a Samoan gives
when some familial impasse is laid before him. “But she will go to
some _other_ relative.” And theoretically the supply of relatives is
inexhaustible. Unless the vagrant has committed some very serious
offence like incest, it is only necessary formally to depart from the
bosom of one’s household. A girl whose father has beaten her over
severely in the morning will be found living in haughty sanctuary,
two hundred feet away, in a different household. So cherished is
this system of consanguineous refuge, that an untitled man or a man
of lesser rank will beard the nobler relative who comes to demand
a runaway child. With great politeness and endless expressions of
conciliation, he will beg his noble chief to return to his noble home
and remain there quietly until his noble anger is healed against his
noble child.
The most important relationships[1] within a Samoan household which
influence the lives of the young people are the relationships between
the boys and girls who call each other “brother” and “sister,” whether
by blood, marriage or adoption, and the relationship between younger
and older relatives. The stress upon the sex difference between
contemporaries and the emphasis on relative age are amply explained by
the conditions of family life. Relatives of opposite sex have a most
rigid code of etiquette prescribed for all their contacts with each
other. After they have reached years of discretion, nine or ten years
of age in this case, they may not touch each other, sit close together,
eat together, address each other familiarly, or mention any salacious
matter in each other’s presence. They may not remain in any house,
except their own, together, unless half the village is gathered there.
They may not walk together, use each other’s possessions, dance on the
same floor, or take part in any of the same small group activities.
This strict avoidance applies to all individuals of the opposite sex
within five years above or below one’s own age with whom one was reared
or to whom one acknowledges relationship by blood or marriage. The
conformance to this brother and sister taboo begins when the younger
of the two children feels “ashamed” at the elder’s touch and continues
until old age when the decrepit, toothless pair of old siblings may
again sit on the same mat and not feel ashamed.
[1] See Appendix, page 249.
_Tei_, the word for younger relative, stresses the other most
emotionally charged relationship. The first maternal enthusiasm of a
girl is never expended upon her own children but upon some younger
relative. And it is the girls and women who use this term most,
continuing to cherish it after they and the younger ones to whom
it is applied are full grown. The younger child in turn expends its
enthusiasm upon a still younger one without manifesting any excessive
affection for the fostering elders.
The word _aiga_ is used roughly to cover all relationships by blood,
marriage and adoption, and the emotional tone seems to be the same
in each case. Relationship by marriage is counted only as long as
an actual marriage connects two kinship groups. If the marriage is
broken in any way, by desertion, divorce, or death, the relationship
is dissolved and members of the two families are free to marry each
other. If the marriage left any children, a reciprocal relationship
exists between the two households as long as the child lives, for the
mother’s family will always have to contribute one kind of property,
the father’s family another, for occasions when property must be given
away in the name of the child.
A relative is regarded as some one upon whom one has a multitude of
claims and to whom one owes a multitude of obligations. From a relative
one may demand food, clothing, and shelter, or assistance in a feud.
Refusal of such a demand brands one as stingy and lacking in human
kindness, the virtue most esteemed among the Samoans. No definite
repayment is made at the time such services are given, except in the
case of the distribution of food to all those who share in a family
enterprise. But careful count of the value of the property given and
of the service rendered is kept and a return gift demanded at the
earliest opportunity. Nevertheless, in native theory the two acts
are separate, each one in turn becoming a “beggar,” a pensioner upon
another’s bounty. In olden times, the beggar sometimes wore a special
girdle which delicately hinted at the cause of his visit. One old chief
gave me a graphic description of the behaviour of some one who had come
to ask a favour of a relative. “He will come early in the morning and
enter quietly, sitting down in the very back of the house, in the place
of least honour. You will say to him, ‘So you have come, be welcome!’
and he will answer, ‘I have come indeed, saving your noble presence.’
Then you will say, ‘Are you thirsty? Alas for your coming, there is
little that is good within the house.’ And he will answer, ‘Let it
rest, thank you, for indeed I am not hungry nor would I drink.’ And
he will sit and you will sit all day long and no mention is made of
the purpose of his coming. All day he will sit and brush the ashes out
of the hearth, performing this menial and dirty task with very great
care and attention. If some one must go inland to the plantation to
fetch food, he is the first to offer to go. If some one must go fishing
to fill out the crew of a canoe, surely he is delighted to go, even
though the sun is hot and his journey hither has been long. And all day
you sit and wonder, ‘What can it be that he has come for? Is it that
largest pig that he wants, or has he heard perhaps that my daughter has
just finished a large and beautiful piece of tapa? Would it perhaps
be well to send that tapa, as I had perhaps planned, as a present to
my talking chief, to send it now, so that I may refuse him with all
good faith?’ And he sits and studies your countenance and wonders if
you will be favourable to his request. He plays with the children but
refuses the necklace of flowers which they have woven for him and
gives it instead to your daughter. Finally night comes. It is time to
sleep and still he has not spoken. So finally you say to him, ‘Lo, I
would sleep. Will you sleep also or will you be returning whence you
have come?’ And only then will he speak and tell you the desire in his
heart.”
So the intrigue, the needs, the obligations of the larger relationship
group which threads its carefully remembered way in and out of many
houses and many villages, cuts across the life of the household. One
day it is the wife’s relatives who come to spend a month or borrow a
fine mat; the next day it is the husband’s; the third, a niece who is a
valued worker in the household may be called home by the illness of her
father. Very seldom do all of even the small children of a biological
family live in one household and while the claims of the household are
paramount, in the routine of everyday life, illness or need on the part
of the closer relative in another household will call the wanderers
home again.
Obligations either to give general assistance or to give specific
traditionally required service, as in a marriage or at a birth, follow
relationship lines, not household lines. But a marriage of many years’
duration binds the relationship groups of husband and wife so closely
together that to all appearances it is the household unit which gives
aid and accedes to a request brought by the relative of either one.
Only in families of high rank where the distaff side has priority in
decisions and in furnishing the _taupo_, the princess of the house,
and the male line priority in holding the title, does the actual blood
relationship continue to be a matter of great practical importance;
and this importance is lost in the looser household group constituted
as it is by the three principles of blood, marriage and adoption, and
bound together by common ties of everyday living and mutual economic
dependence.
The _matai_ of a household is theoretically exempt from the performance
of small domestic tasks, but he is seldom actually so except in the
case of a chief of high rank. However, the leading rôle is always
accorded to him in any industrial pursuit; he dresses the pig for
the feasts and cuts up the cocoanuts which the boys and women have
gathered. The family cooking is done by the men and women both, but the
bulk of the work falls upon the boys and young men. The old men spin
the cocoanut fibre, and braid it into the native cord which is used for
fish lines, fish nets, to sew canoe parts together and to bind all the
different parts of a house in place. With the old women who do the bulk
of the weaving and making of bark cloth, they supervise the younger
children who remain at home. The heavy routine agricultural work falls
upon the women who are responsible for the weeding, transplanting,
gathering and transportation of the food, and the gathering of the
paper mulberry wands from which bark will be peeled for making tapa,
of the hibiscus bark and pandanus leaves for weaving mats. The older
girls and women also do the routine reef fishing for octopuses, sea
eggs, jelly fish, crabs, and other small fry. The younger girls carry
the water, care for the lamps (to-day except in times of great scarcity
when the candle nut and cocoanut oil are resorted to, the natives use
kerosene lamps and lanterns), and sweep and arrange the houses. Tasks
are all graduated with a fair recognition of abilities which differ
with age, and except in the case of individuals of very high rank, a
task is rejected because a younger person has skill enough to perform
it, rather than because it is beneath an adult’s dignity.
Rank in the village and rank in the household reflect each other, but
village rank hardly affects the young children. If a girl’s father is
a _matai_, the _matai_ of the household in which she lives, she has
no appeal from his authority. But if some other member of the family
is the _matai_, he and his wife may protect her from her father’s
exactions. In the first case, disagreement with her father means
leaving the household and going to live with other relatives; in the
second case it may mean only a little internal friction. Also in the
family of a high chief or a high talking chief there is more emphasis
upon ceremonial, more emphasis upon hospitality. The children are
better bred and also much harder worked. But aside from the general
quality of a household which is dependent upon the rank of its head,
households of very different rank may seem very similar to young
children. They are usually more concerned with the temperament of those
in authority than with their rank. An uncle in another village who is
a very high chief is of much less significance in a child’s life than
some old woman in her own household who has a frightful temper.
Nevertheless, rank not of birth but of title is very important in
Samoa. The status of a village depends upon the rank of its high chief,
the prestige of a household depends upon the title of its _matai_.
Titles are of two grades, chiefs and talking chiefs, each title carries
many other duties and prerogatives besides the headship of a household.
And the Samoans find rank a never-failing source of interest. They have
invented an elaborate courtesy language which must be used to people of
rank; complicated etiquette surrounds each rank in society. Something
which concerns their elders so nearly cannot help being indirectly
reflected in the lives of some of the children. This is particularly
true of the relationship of children to each other in households which
hold titles to which some of them will one day attain. How these
far-away issues of adult life affect the lives of children and young
people can best be understood by following their influence in the
lives of particular children.
In the household of a high chief named Malae lived two little girls,
Meta, twelve, and Timu, eleven. Meta was a self-possessed, efficient
little girl. Malae had taken her from her mother’s house—her mother
was his cousin—because she showed unusual intelligence and precocity.
Timu, on the other hand, was an abnormally shy, backward child, below
her age group in intelligence. But Meta’s mother was only a distant
cousin of Malae. Had she not married into a strange village where Malae
was living temporarily, Meta might never have come actively to the
notice of her noble relative. And Timu was the only daughter of Malae’s
dead sister. Her father had been a quarter caste which served to mark
her off and increase her self-consciousness. Dancing was an agony to
her. She fled precipitately from an elder’s admonitory voice. But Timu
would be Malae’s next _taupo_, princess. She was pretty, the principal
recognised qualification, and she came from the distaff side of the
house, the preferred descent for a _taupo_. So Meta, the more able in
every way, was pushed to the wall, and Timu, miserable over the amount
of attention she received, was dragged forward. The mere presence
of another more able and enterprising child would probably have
emphasised Timu’s feeling of inferiority, but this publicity stressed
it painfully. Commanded to dance on every occasion, she would pause
whenever she caught an onlooker’s eye and stand a moment wringing her
hands before going on with the dance.
In another household, this same title of Malae’s _taupo_ played a
different rôle. This was in the household of Malae’s paternal aunt who
lived with her husband in Malae’s guest house in his native village.
Her eldest daughter, Pana, held the title of _taupo_ of the house of
Malae. But Pana was twenty-six, though still unmarried. She must be
wedded soon and then another girl must be found to hold the title.
Timu would still be too young. Pana had three younger sisters who
by birth were supremely eligible to the title. But Mele, the eldest
of twenty, was lame, and Pepe of fourteen was blind in one eye and
an incorrigible tomboy. The youngest was even younger than Timu. So
all three were effectually barred from succession. This fact reacted
favourably upon the position of Filita. She was a seventeen-year-old
niece of the father of the other children with no possible claims on a
title in the house of Malae, but she had lived with her cousins since
childhood. Filita was pretty, efficient, adequate, neither lame like
Mele nor blind and hoydenish like Pepe. True she could never hope to be
_taupo_, but neither could they, despite their superior birth, so peace
and amity reigned because of her cousins’ deficiencies. Still another
little girl came within the circle of influence of the title. This was
Pula, another little cousin in a third village. But her more distant
relationship and possible claims were completely obscured by the
fact that she was the only granddaughter of the highest chief in her
own village and her becoming the _taupo_ of that title was inevitable
so that her life was untouched by any other possibility. Thus six girls
in addition to the present _taupo_, were influenced for good or evil
by the possibility of succession to the title. But as there are seldom
more than one or two _taupos_ in a village, these influences are still
fairly circumscribed when compared with the part which rank plays in
the lives of boys, for there are usually one or more _matai_ names in
every relationship group.
[Illustration: _A chief’s daughter and the baby of the household whose
yellow hair will some day make a chief’s headdress_]
Rivalry plays a much stronger part here. In the choice of the _taupo_
and the _manaia_ (the titular heir-apparent) there is a strong
prejudice in favour of blood relationship and also for the choice
of the _taupo_ from the female and the _manaia_ from the male line.
But in the interests of efficiency this scheme had been modified, so
that most titles were filled by the most able youth from the whole
relationship and affinity group. So it was in Alofi. Tui, a chief of
importance in the village, had one son, an able intelligent boy. Tui’s
brothers were dull and inept, no fit successors to the title. One of
them had an ill-favoured young son, a stupid, unattractive youngster.
There were no other males in the near relationship group. It was
assumed that the exceedingly eligible son would succeed his father.
And then at twenty he died. The little nephew hardly gave promise of a
satisfactory development, and so Tui had his choice of looking outside
his village or outside of his near relationship group. Village feeling
runs high in Tui’s village. Tui’s blood relatives lived many villages
away. They were strangers. If he did not go to them and search for a
promising youth whom he could train as his successor, he must either
find an eligible young husband for his daughter or look among his
wife’s people. Provisionally he took this last course, and his wife’s
brother’s son came to live in his household. In a year, his new father
promised the boy, he might assume his dead cousin’s name if he showed
himself worthy.
In the family of high chief Fua a very different problem presented
itself. His was the highest title in the village. He was over sixty and
the question of succession was a moot one. The boys in his household
consisted of Tata, his eldest son who was illegitimate, Molo and Nua,
the sons of his widowed sister, Sisi, his son by his first legal wife
(since divorced and remarried on another island), and Tuai, the husband
of his niece, the sister of Molo and Nua. And in the house of Fua’s
eldest brother lived his brother’s daughter’s son, Alo, a youth of
great promise. Here then were enough claimants to produce a lively
rivalry. Tuai was the oldest, calm, able, but not sufficiently hopeful
to be influenced in his conduct except as it made him more ready to
assert the claims of superior age over his wife’s younger brothers
whose claims were better than his. Next in age came Tata, the sour,
beetle-browed bastard, whose chances were negligible as long as there
were those of legitimate birth to dispute his left-handed claims. But
Tata did not lose hope. Cautious, tortuous-minded, he watched and
waited. He was in love with Lotu, the daughter of a talking chief of
only medium rank. For one of Fua’s sons, Lotu would have been a good
match. But as Fua’s bastard who wished to be chief, he must marry high
or not at all. The two nephews, Molo and Nua, played different hands.
Nua, the younger, went away to seek his fortune as a native marine
at the Naval Station. This meant a regular income, some knowledge of
English, prestige of a sort. Molo, the elder brother, stayed at home
and made himself indispensable. He was the _tamafafine_, the child
of the distaff side, and it was his rôle to take his position for
granted, the _tamafafine_ of the house of Fua, what more could any one
ask in the way of immediate prestige. As for the future—his manner
was perfect. All of these young men, and likewise Alo, the great
nephew, were members of the _Aumaga_, grown up and ready to assume
adult responsibilities. Sisi, the sixteen-year-old legitimate son, was
still a boy, slender, diffident, presuming far less upon his position
as son and heir-apparent than did his cousin. He was an attractive,
intelligent boy. If his father lived until Sisi was twenty-five or
thirty, his succession seemed inevitable. Even should his father die
sooner, the title might have been held for him. But in this latter
possibility there was one danger. Samala, his father’s older brother,
would have a strong voice in the choice of a successor to the title.
And Alo was Samala’s adored grandson, the son of his favourite
daughter. Alo was the model of all that a young man should be. He
eschewed the company of women, stayed much at home and rigorously
trained his younger brother and sister. While the other young men
played cricket, he sat at Samala’s feet and memorised genealogies. He
never forgot that he was the son of Sāfuá, the house of Fua. More able
than Molo, his claim to the title was practically as good, although
within the family group Molo as the child of the distaff side would
always outvote him. So Alo was Sisi’s most dangerous rival, provided
his father died soon. And should Fua live twenty years longer, another
complication threatened his succession. Fua had but recently remarried,
a woman of very high rank and great wealth who had a five-year-old
illegitimate son, Nifo. Thinking always of this child, for she and
Fua had no children, she did all that she could to undermine Sisi’s
position as heir-apparent and there was every chance that as her
ascendency over Fua increased with his advancing age, she might have
Nifo named as his successor. His illegitimacy and lack of blood tie
would be offset by the fact that he was child of the distaff side in
the noblest family in the island and would inherit great wealth from
his mother.
Of a different character was the problem which confronted Sila,
the stepdaughter of Ono, a _matai_ of low rank. She was the eldest
in a family of seven children. Ono was an old man, decrepit and
ineffective. Lefu, Sila’s mother and his second wife, was worn out,
weary from bearing eleven children. The only adult males in the
household were Laisa, Ono’s brother, an old man like himself, and
Laisa’s idle shiftless son, a man of thirty, whose only interest in
life was love affairs. He was unmarried and shied away from this
responsibility as from all others. The sister next younger than Sila
was sixteen. She had left home and lived, now here, now there, among
her relatives. Sila was twenty-two. She had been married at sixteen
and against her will to a man much older than herself who had beaten
her for her childish ways. After two years of married life, she had
run away from her husband and gone home to live with her parents,
bringing her little two-year-old boy, who was now five years old,
with her. At twenty she had had a love affair with a boy of her own
village, and borne a daughter who had lived only a few months. After
her baby died her lover had deserted her. Sila disliked matrimony. She
was conscientious, sharp-tongued, industrious. She worked tirelessly
for her child and her small brothers and sisters. She did not want to
marry again. But there were three old people and six children in her
household with only herself and her idle cousin to provide for them.
And so she said despondently: “I think I will get married to that boy.”
“Which boy, Sila?” I asked. “The father of my baby who is dead.” “But
I thought you said you did not want him for a husband?” “No more do I.
But I must find some one to care for my family.” And indeed there was
no other way. Her stepfather’s title was a very low one. There were no
young men within the family to succeed to it. Her lover was industrious
and of even lower degree. The bait of the title would secure a worker
for the family.
And so within many households the shadow of nobility falls upon the
children, sometimes lightly, sometimes heavily, often long before they
are old enough to understand the meaning of these intrusions from the
adult world.
V
THE GIRL AND HER AGE GROUP
Until a child is six or seven at least she associates very little with
her contemporaries. Brothers and sisters and small cousins who live in
the same household, of course, frolic and play together, but outside
the household each child clings closely to its older guardian and only
comes in contact with other children in case the little nursemaids
are friends. But at about seven years of age, the children begin to
form larger groups, a kind of voluntary association which never exists
in later life, that is, a group recruited from both relationship and
neighbourhood groups. These are strictly divided along sex lines and
antagonism between the small girls and the small boys is one of the
salient features of the group life. The little girls are just beginning
to “be ashamed” in the presence of older brothers, and the prohibition
that one small girl must never join a group of boys is beginning to be
enforced. The fact that the boys are less burdened and so can range
further afield in search of adventure, while the girls have to carry
their heavy little charges with them, also makes a difference between
the sexes. The groups of small children which hang about the fringes of
some adult activity often contain both girls and boys, but here the
association principle is simply age discrimination on the part of their
elders, rather than voluntary association on the children’s part.
These age gangs are usually confined to the children who live in
eight or ten contiguous households.[2] They are flexible chance
associations, the members of which manifest a vivid hostility towards
their contemporaries in neighbouring villages and sometimes towards
other gangs within their own village. Blood ties cut across these
neighbourhood alignments so that a child may be on good terms with
members of two or three different groups. A strange child from another
group, provided she came alone, could usually take refuge beside a
relative. But the little girls of Siufaga looked askance at the little
girls of Lumā, the nearest village and both looked with even greater
suspicion at the little girls from Faleasao, who lived twenty minutes’
walk away. However, heart burnings over these divisions were very
temporary affairs. When Tua’s brother was ill, her entire family moved
from the far end of Siufaga into the heart of Lumā. For a few days Tua
hung rather dolefully about the house, only to be taken in within a
week by the central Lumā children with complete amiability. But when
she returned some weeks later to Siufaga, she became again “a Siufaga
girl,” object elect of institutionalised scorn and gibes to her recent
companions.
[2] See Neighbourhood Maps. Appendix I, page 251.
No very intense friendships are made at this age. The relationship and
neighbourhood structure of the group overshadows the personalities
within it. Also the most intense affection is always reserved for near
relatives and pairs of little sisters take the place of chums. The
Western comment, “Yes, Mary and Julia are such good friends as well as
sisters!” becomes in Samoa, “But she is a relative,” if a friendship is
commented upon. The older ones fend for the younger, give them their
spoils, weave them flower necklaces and give them their most treasured
shells. This relationship aspect is the only permanent element in the
group and even this is threatened by any change of residence. The
emotional tone attached to the inhabitants of a strange village tends
to make even a well-known cousin seem a little strange.
Of the different groups of little girls there was only one which
showed characteristics which would make it possible to classify it as
a gang. An accident of residence accounts for the most intense group
development being in the centre of Lumā, where nine little girls of
nearly the same age and with abundant relationship ties lived close
together. The development of a group which played continually together
and maintained a fairly coherent hostility towards outsiders, seems to
be more of a function of residence than of the personality of any child
particularly endowed with powers of leadership. The nine little girls
in this group were less shy, less suspicious, more generous towards one
another, more socially enterprising than other children of the same
age and in general reflected the socialising effects of group life.
Outside this group, the children of this age had to rely much more upon
their immediate relationship group reinforced perhaps by the addition
of one or two neighbours. Where the personality of a child stood out
it was more because of exceptional home environment than a result of
social give-and-take with children of her own age.
Children of this age had no group activities except play, in direct
antithesis to the home life where the child’s only function was
work—baby-tending and the performance of numerous trivial tasks and
innumerable errands. They foregathered in the early evening, before
the late Samoan supper, and occasionally during the general siesta
hour in the afternoon. On moonlight nights they scoured the villages
alternately attacking or fleeing from the gangs of small boys, peeking
through drawn shutters, catching land crabs, ambushing wandering
lovers, or sneaking up to watch a birth or a miscarriage in some
distant house. Possessed by a fear of the chiefs, a fear of small boys,
a fear of their relatives and by a fear of ghosts, no gang of less than
four or five dared to venture forth on these nocturnal excursions. They
were veritable groups of little outlaws escaping from the exactions
of routine tasks. Because of the strong feeling for relationship and
locality, the part played by stolen time, the need for immediately
executed group plans, and the punishment which hung over the heads
of children who got too far out of earshot, the Samoan child was as
dependent upon the populousness of her immediate locality, as is the
child in a rural community in the West. True her isolation here was
never one-eighth of a mile in extent, but glaring sun and burning
sands, coupled with the number of relatives to be escaped from in the
day or the number of ghosts to be escaped from at night, magnified
this distance until as a barrier to companionship it was equivalent
to three or four miles in rural America. Thus there occurred the
phenomenon of the isolated child in a village full of children of her
own age. Such was Luna, aged ten, who lived in one of the scattered
houses belonging to a high chief’s household. This house was situated
at the very end of the village where she lived with her grandmother,
her mother’s sister Sami, Sami’s husband and baby, and two younger
maternal aunts, aged seventeen and fifteen. Luna’s mother was dead. Her
other brothers and sisters lived on another island with her father’s
people. She was ten, but young for her age, a quiet, listless child,
reluctant to take the initiative, the sort of child who would always
need an institutionalised group life. Her only relatives close by were
two girls of fourteen, whose long legs and absorption in semi-adult
tasks made them far too grown-up companions for her. Some little girls
of fourteen might have tolerated Luna about, but not Selu, the younger
of the cousins, whose fine mat was already three feet under way. In
the next house, a stone’s throw away, lived two little girls, Pimi and
Vana, aged eight and ten. But they were not relatives and being chief
baby-tenders to four younger children, they had no time for exploring.
There were no common relatives to bring them together and so Luna lived
a solitary life, except when an enterprising young aunt of eleven
came home to her mother’s house. This aunt, Siva, was a fascinating
companion, a vivid and precocious child, whom Luna followed about in
open-mouthed astonishment. But Siva had proved too much of a handful
for her widowed mother, and the _matai_, her uncle, had taken her to
live in his immediate household at the other end of the village, on the
other side of the central Lumā gang. They formed far more attractive
companions and Siva seldom got as far as her mother’s house in her
occasional moments of freedom. So unenterprising Luna cared for her
little cousin, followed her aunt and grandmother about and most of the
time presented a very forlorn appearance.
In strong contrast was the fate of Lusi, who was only seven, too young
to be really eligible for the games of her ten- and eleven-year-old
elders. Had she lived in an isolated spot, she would have been merely
a neighbourhood baby. But her house was in a strategic position, next
door to that of her cousins, Maliu and Pola, important members of
the Lumā gang. Maliu, one of the oldest members of the group, had a
tremendous feeling for all her young relatives, and Lusi was her first
cousin. So tiny, immature Lusi had the full benefit of a group life
denied to Luna.
At the extreme end of Siufaga lived Vina, a gentle, unassuming girl of
fourteen. Her father’s house stood all alone in the centre of a grove
of palm trees, just out of sight and ear-shot of the nearest neighbour.
Her only companions were her first cousin, a reserved capable
eighteen-year-old and two cousins of seventeen and nineteen. There was
one little cousin of twelve also in the neighbourhood, but five younger
brothers and sisters kept her busy. Vina also had several brothers and
sisters younger than herself, but they were old enough to fend for
themselves and Vina was comparatively free to follow the older girls
on fishing expeditions. So she never escaped from being the little
girl, tagging after older ones, carrying their loads and running their
errands. She was a flurried anxious child, overconcerned with pleasing
others, docile in her chance encounters with contemporaries from long
habit of docility. A free give-and-take relationship within her own age
group had been denied to her and was now denied to her forever. For it
was only to the eight- to twelve-year-old girl that this casual group
association was possible. As puberty approached, and a girl gained
physical strength and added skill, her household absorbed her again.
She must make the oven, she must go to work on the plantation, she must
fish. Her days were filled with long tasks and new responsibilities.
Such a child was Fitu. In September she was one of the dominant
members of the gang, a little taller than the rest, a little lankier,
more strident and executive, but very much a harum-scarum little girl
among little girls, with a great baby always on her hip. But by April
she had turned the baby over to a younger sister of nine; the still
younger baby was entrusted to a little sister of five and Fitu worked
with her mother on the plantations, or went on long expeditions after
hibiscus bark, or for fish. She took the family washing to the sea and
helped make the oven on cooking days. Occasionally in the evening she
slipped away to play games on the green with her former companions but
usually she was too tired from the heavy unaccustomed work, and also
a slight strangeness had crept over her. She felt that her more adult
activities set her off from the rest of the group with whom she had
felt so much at home the fall before. She made only abortive attempts
to associate with the older girls in the neighbourhood. Her mother sent
her to sleep in the pastor’s house next door, but she returned home
after three days. Those girls were all too old, she said. “Laititi
a’u” (“I am but young”). And yet she was spoiled for her old group.
The three villages numbered fourteen such children, just approaching
puberty, preoccupied by unaccustomed tasks and renewed and closer
association with the adults of their families, not yet interested in
boys, and so forming no new alliances in accordance with sex interests.
Soberly they perform their household tasks, select a teacher from
the older women of their family, learn to bear the suffix, meaning
“little” dropped from the “little girl” which had formerly described
them. But they never again amalgamate into such free and easy groups as
the before-the-teens gang. As sixteen- and seventeen-year-old girls,
they will still rely upon relatives, and the picture is groupings of
twos or of threes, never more. The neighbourhood feelings drop out and
girls of seventeen will ignore a near neighbour who is an age mate
and go the length of the village to visit a relative. Relationship
and similar sex interests are now the deciding factor in friendships.
Girls also followed passively the stronger allegiance of the boys. If a
girl’s sweetheart has a chum who is interested in a cousin of hers, the
girls strike up a lively, but temporary, friendship. Occasionally such
friendships even go outside of the relationship group.
Although girls may confide only in one or two girl relatives, their
sex status is usually sensed by the other women of the village and
alliances shift and change on this basis, from the shy adolescent
who is suspicious of all older girls, to the girl whose first or
second love affair still looms as very important, to the girls who
are beginning to centre all their attention upon one boy and possibly
matrimony. Finally the unmarried mother selects her friends, when
possible, from those in like case with herself, or from women of
ambiguous marital position, deserted or discredited young wives.
Very few friendships of younger for older girls cut across these
groupings after puberty. The twelve-year-old may have a great affection
and admiration for her sixteen-year-old cousin (although any of these
enthusiasms for older girls are pallid matters compared to a typical
school girl “crush” in our civilisation). But when she is fifteen
and her cousin nineteen, the picture changes. All of the adult and
near-adult world is hostile, spying upon her love affairs in its more
circumspect sophistication, supremely not to be trusted. No one is
to be trusted who is not immediately engaged in similarly hazardous
adventures.
It may safely be said that without the artificial conditions
produced by residence in the native pastor’s household or in the
large missionary boarding school, the girls do not go outside their
relationship group to make friends. (In addition to the large girls’
boarding school which served all of American Samoa, the native pastor
of each community maintained a small informal boarding school for
boys and girls. To these schools were sent the girls whose fathers
wished to send them later to the large boarding school, and also girls
whose parents wished them to have three or four years of the superior
educational advantages and stricter supervision of the pastor’s home.)
Here unrelated girls live side by side sometimes for years. But as
one of the two defining features of a household is common residence,
the friendships formed between girls who have lived in the pastor’s
household are not very different psychologically from the friendship
of cousins or girls connected only by affinity who live in the same
family. The only friendships which really are different in kind from
those formed by common residence or membership in the same relationship
group, are the institutionalised relationships between the wives of
chiefs and the wives of talking chiefs. But these friendships can only
be understood in connection with the friendships among boys and men.
The little boys follow the same pattern as do the little girls,
running in a gang based upon the double bonds of neighbourhood and
relationship. The feeling for the ascendency of age is always much
stronger than in the case of girls because the older boys do not
withdraw into their family groups as do the girls. The fifteen- and
sixteen-year-old boys gang together with the same freedom as do the
twelve-year-olds. The borderline between small boys and bigger boys
is therefore a continually shifting one, the boys in an intermediate
position now lording it over the younger boys, now tagging obsequiously
in the wake of their elders. There are two institutionalised
relationships between boys which are called by the same name and
possibly were at one time one relationship. This is the _soa_, the
companion at circumcision and the ambassador in love affairs. Boys are
circumcised in pairs, making the arrangements themselves and seeking
out an older man who has acquired a reputation for skilfulness. There
seems to be here simply a logical inter-relationship of cause and
effect; a boy chooses a friend (who is usually also a relative) as his
companion and the experience shared binds them closer together. There
were several pairs of boys in the village who had been circumcised
together and were still inseparable companions, often sleeping together
in the house of one of them. Casual homosexual practices occurred in
such relationships. However, when the friendships of grown boys of the
village were analysed, no close correspondence with the adolescent
allegiance was found and older boys were as often found in groups of
three or four as in pairs.
When a boy is two or three years past puberty, his choice of a
companion is influenced by the convention that a young man seldom
speaks for himself in love and never in a proposal of marriage. He
accordingly needs a friend of about his age whom he can trust to sing
his praises and press his suit with requisite fervour and discretion.
For this office, a relative, or, if the affair be desperate, several
relatives are employed. A youth is influenced in his choice by his need
of an ambassador who is not only trustworthy and devoted but plausible
and insinuating as a procurer. This _soa_ relationship is often, but
not necessarily, reciprocal. The expert in love comes in time to
dispense with the services of an intermediary, wishing to taste to
the full the sweets of all the stages in courtship. At the same time
his services are much in demand by others, if they entertain any hope
at all of his dealing honourably by his principal. But the boys have
also other matters besides love-making in which they must co-operate.
Three are needed to man a bonito canoe; two usually go together to
lasso eels on the reef; work on the communal taro plantations demands
the labour of all the youths in the village. So that while a boy too
chooses his best friends from among his relatives, his sense of social
solidarity is always much stronger than that of a girl. The _Aualuma_,
the organisation of young girls and wives of untitled men, is an
exceedingly loose association gathered for very occasional communal
work, and still more occasional festivities. In villages where the
old intricacies of the social organisation are beginning to fall into
disuse, it is the _Aualuma_ which disappears first, while the _Aumaga_,
the young men’s organisation, has too important a place in the village
economy to be thus ignored. The _Aumaga_ is indeed the most enduring
social factor in the village. The _matais_ meet more formally and spend
a great deal of time in their own households, but the young men work
together during the day, feast before and after their labours, are
present as a serving group at all meetings of the _matais_, and when
the day’s work is over, dance and go courting together in the evening.
Many of the young men sleep in their friends’ houses, a privilege but
grudgingly accorded the more chaperoned girls.
Another factor which qualified men’s relationships is the reciprocal
relationship between chiefs and talking chiefs. The holders of these
two classes of titles are not necessarily related, although this is
often the case as it is considered an advantage to be related to both
ranks. But the talking chiefs are major domos, assistants, ambassadors,
henchmen, and councillors of their chiefs, and these relationships are
often foreshadowed among the young men, the heirs-apparent or the heirs
aspirant to the family titles.
Among women there are occasional close alliances between the _taupo_
and the daughter of her father’s principal talking chief. But these
friendships always suffer from their temporary character; the _taupo_
will inevitably marry into another village. And it is rather between
the wife of the chief and the wife of a talking chief that the
institutionalised and life-long friendship exists. The wife of the
talking chief acts as assistant, advisor, and mouthpiece for the
chief’s wife and in turn counts upon the chief’s wife for support and
material help. It is a friendship based upon reciprocal obligations
having their origins in the relationship between the women’s husbands,
and it is the only women’s friendship which oversteps the limits of
the relationship and affinity group. Such friendships based on an
accident of marriage and enjoined by the social structure should hardly
be classed as voluntary. And within the relationship group itself,
friendship is so patterned as to be meaningless. I once asked a young
married woman if a neighbour with whom she was always upon the most
uncertain and irritated terms was a friend of hers. “Why, of course,
her mother’s father’s father, and my father’s mother’s father were
brothers.” Friendship based on temperamental congeniality was a most
tenuous bond, subject to shifts of interest and to shifts of residence,
and a woman came to rely more and more on the associates to whose
society and interest blood and marriage entitled her.
Association based upon age as a principle may be said to have ceased
for the girls before puberty, due to the exceedingly individual nature
of their tasks and the need for secrecy in their amatory adventures.
In the case of the boys, greater freedom, a more compelling social
structure, and continuous participation in co-operative tasks, brings
about an age-group association which lasts through life. This grouping
is influenced but not determined by relationship, and distorted by the
influence of rank, prospective rank in the case of youth, equal rank
but disproportionate age in the case of older men.
VI
THE GIRL IN THE COMMUNITY
The community ignores both boys and girls from birth until they are
fifteen or sixteen years of age. Children under this age have no social
standing, no recognised group activities, no part in the social life
except when they are conscripted for the informal dance floor. But at
a year or two beyond puberty—the age varies from village to village
so that boys of sixteen will in one place still be classed as small
boys, in another as _taule’ale’as_, young men—both boys and girls are
grouped into a rough approximation of the adult groupings, given a name
for their organisation, and are invested with definite obligations and
privileges in the community life.
The organisation of young men, the _Aumaga_, of young girls and the
wives of untitled men and widows, the _Aualuma_, and of the wives of
titled men, are all echoes of the central political structure of the
village, the _Fono_, the organisation of _matais_, men who have the
titles of chiefs or of talking chiefs. The _Fono_ is always conceived
as a round house in which each title has a special position, must be
addressed with certain ceremonial phrases, and given a fixed place in
the order of precedence in the serving of the kava. This ideal house
has certain fixed divisions, in the right sector sit the high chief
and his special assistant chiefs; in the front of the house sit the
talking chiefs whose business it is to make the speeches, welcome
strangers, accept gifts, preside over the distribution of food and make
all plans and arrangements for group activities. Against the posts
at the back of the house sit the _matais_ of low rank, and between
the posts and at the centre sit those of so little importance that no
place is reserved for them. This framework of titles continues from
generation to generation and holds a fixed place in the larger ideal
structure of the titles of the whole island, the whole archipelago,
the whole of Samoa. With some of these titles, which are in the gift
of certain families, go certain privileges, a right to a house name,
a right to confer a _taupo_ name, a princess title, upon some young
girl relative and an heir-apparent title, the _manaia_, on some boy
of the household. Besides these prerogatives of the high chiefs, each
member of the two classes of _matais_, chiefs and talking chiefs, has
certain ceremonial rights. A talking chief must be served his kava with
a special gesture, must be addressed with a separate set of verbs and
nouns suitable to his rank, must be rewarded by the chiefs in tapa or
fine mats for his ceremonially rendered services. The chiefs must be
addressed with still another set of nouns and verbs, must be served
with a different and more honourable gesture in the kava ceremony, must
be furnished with food by their talking chiefs, must be honoured and
escorted by the talking chiefs on every important occasion. The name of
the village, the ceremonial name of the public square in which great
ceremonies are held, the name of the meeting house of the _Fono_, the
names of the principal chiefs and talking chiefs, the names of _taupo_
and _manaia_, of the _Aualuma_ and the _Aumaga_, are contained in a set
of ceremonial salutations called the _Fa’alupega_, or courtesy titles
of a village or district. Visitors on formally entering a village must
recite the _Fa’alupega_ as their initial courtesy to their hosts.
The _Aumaga_ mirrors this organisation of the older men. Here the
young men learn to make speeches, to conduct themselves with gravity
and decorum, to serve and drink the kava, to plan and execute group
enterprises. When a boy is old enough to enter the _Aumaga_, the
head of his household either sends a present of food to the group,
announcing the addition of the boy to their number, or takes him to
a house where they are meeting and lays down a great kava root as a
present. Henceforth the boy is a member of a group which is almost
constantly together. Upon them falls all the heavy work of the village
and also the greater part of the social intercourse between villages
which centres about the young unmarried people. When a visiting village
comes, it is the _Aumaga_ which calls in a body upon the visiting
_taupo_, taking gifts, dancing and singing for her benefit.
The organisation of the _Aualuma_ is a less formalised version of the
_Aumaga_. When a girl is of age, two or three years past puberty,
varying with the village practice, her _matai_ will send an offering of
food to the house of the chief _taupo_ of the village, thus announcing
that he wishes the daughter of his house to be henceforth counted
as one of the group of young girls who form her court. But while the
_Aumaga_ is centred about the _Fono_, the young men meeting outside or
in a separate house, but exactly mirroring the forms and ceremonies
of their elders, the _Aualuma_ is centred about the person of the
_taupo_, forming a group of maids of honour. They have no organisation
as have the _Aumaga_, and furthermore, they do hardly any work.
Occasionally the young girls may be called upon to sew thatch or gather
paper mulberry; more occasionally they plant and cultivate a paper
mulberry crop, but their main function is to be ceremonial helpers
for the meetings of the wives of _matais_, and village hostesses in
inter-village life. In many parts of Samoa the _Aualuma_ has fallen
entirely to pieces and is only remembered in the greeting words that
fall from the lips of a stranger. But if the _Aumaga_ should disappear,
Samoan village life would have to be entirely reorganised, for upon the
ceremonial and actual work of the young and untitled men the whole life
of the village depends.
Although the wives of _matais_ have no organisation recognised in the
_Fa’alupega_ (courtesy titles), their association is firmer and more
important than that of the _Aualuma_. The wives of titled men hold
their own formal meetings, taking their status from their husbands,
sitting at their husbands’ posts and drinking their husbands’ kava.
The wife of the highest chief receives highest honour, the wife of the
principal talking chief makes the most important speeches. The women
are completely dependent upon their husbands for their status in this
village group. Once a man has been given a title, he can never go back
to the _Aumaga_. His title may be taken away from him when he is old,
or if he is inefficient, but a lower title will be given him that he
may sit and drink his kava with his former associates. But the widow or
divorced wife of a _matai_ must go back into the _Aualuma_, sit with
the young girls outside the house, serve the food and run the errands,
entering the women’s _fono_ only as a servant or an entertainer.
The women’s _fonos_ are of two sorts: _fonos_ which precede or follow
communal work, sewing the thatch for a guest house, bringing the coral
rubble for its floor or weaving fine mats for the dowry of the _taupo_;
and ceremonial _fonos_ to welcome visitors from another village. Each
of these meetings was designated by its purpose, as a _falelalaga_, a
weaving bee, or an _’aiga fiafia tama’ita’i_, ladies’ feast. The women
are only recognised socially by the women of a visiting village but
the _taupo_ and her court are the centre of the recognition of both
men and women in the _malaga_, the traveling party. And these wives of
high chiefs have to treat their own _taupo_ with great courtesy and
respect, address her as “your highness,” accompany her on journeys,
use a separate set of nouns and verbs when speaking to her. Here then
is a discrepancy in which the young girls who are kept in strict
subjection within their households, outrank their aunts and mothers
in the social life between villages. This ceremonial undercutting of
the older women’s authority might seriously jeopardise the discipline
of the household, if it were not for two considerations. The first is
the tenuousness of the girls’ organisation, the fact that within the
village their chief _raison d’être_ is to dance attendance upon the
older women, who have definite industrial tasks to perform for the
village; the second is the emphasis upon the idea of service as the
chief duty of the _taupo_. The village princess is also the village
servant. It is she who waits upon strangers, spreads their beds and
makes their kava, dances when they wish it, and rises from her sleep
to serve either the visitors or her own chief. And she is compelled to
serve the social needs of the women as well as the men. Do they decide
to borrow thatch in another village, they dress their _taupo_ in her
best and take her along to decorate the _malaga_. Her marriage is a
village matter, planned and carried through by the talking chiefs and
their wives who are her counsellors and chaperons. So that the rank of
the _taupo_ is really a further daily inroad upon her freedom as an
individual, while the incessant chaperonage to which she is subjected
and the way in which she is married without regard to her own wishes
are a complete denial of her personality. And similarly, the slighter
prestige of her untitled sisters, whose chief group activity is waiting
upon their elders, has even less real significance in the daily life of
the village.
With the exception of the _taupo_, the assumption of whose title is
the occasion of a great festival and enormous distribution of property
by her chief to the talking chiefs who must hereafter support and
confirm her rank, a Samoan girl of good family has two ways of making
her début. The first, the formal entry into the _Aualuma_ is often
neglected and is more a formal fee to the community than a recognition
of the girl herself. The second way is to go upon a _malaga_, a formal
travelling party. She may go as a near relative of the _taupo_ in which
case she will be caught up in a whirl of entertainment with which the
young men of the host village surround their guests; or she may travel
as the only girl in a small travelling party in which case she will
be treated as a _taupo_. (All social occasions demand the presence
of a _taupo_, a _manaia_, and a talking chief; and if individuals
actually holding these titles are not present, some one else has to
play the rôle.) Thus it is in inter-village life, either as a member
of the _Aualuma_ who call upon and dance for the _manaia_ of the
visiting _malaga_, or as a visiting girl in a strange village, that the
unmarried Samoan girl is honoured and recognised by her community.
But these are exceptional occasions. A _malaga_ may come only once a
year, especially in Manu’a which numbers only seven villages in the
whole archipelago. And in the daily life of the village, at crises,
births, deaths, marriages, the unmarried girls have no ceremonial part
to play. They are simply included with the “women of the household”
whose duty it is to prepare the layette for the new baby, or carry
stones to strew on the new grave. It is almost as if the community
by its excessive recognition of the girl as a _taupo_ or member of the
_Aualuma_, considered itself exonerated from paying any more attention
to her.
[Illustration: _The local parliament is convened_]
This attitude is fostered by the scarcity of taboos. In many parts of
Polynesia, all women, and especially menstruating women, are considered
contaminating and dangerous. A continuous rigorous social supervision
is necessary, for a society can no more afford to ignore its most
dangerous members than it can afford to neglect its most valuable. But
in Samoa a girl’s power of doing harm is very limited. She cannot make
_tafolo_, a breadfruit pudding usually made by the young men in any
case, nor make the kava while she is menstruating. But she need retire
to no special house; she need not eat alone; there is no contamination
in her touch or look. In common with the young men and the older women,
a girl gives a wide berth to a place where chiefs are engaged in formal
work, unless she has special business there. It is not the presence
of a woman which is interdicted but the uncalled-for intrusion of any
one of either sex. No woman can be officially present at a gathering
of chiefs unless she is _taupo_ making the kava, but any woman may
bring her husband his pipe or come to deliver a message, so long as
her presence need not be recognised. The only place where a woman’s
femininity is in itself a real source of danger is in the matter of
fishing canoes and fishing tackle which she is forbidden to touch upon
pain of spoiling the fishing. But the enforcement of this prohibition
is in the hands of individual fishermen in whose houses the fishing
equipment is kept.
Within the relationship group matters are entirely different. Here
women are very specifically recognised. The oldest female progenitor
of the line, that is, the sister of the last holder of the title, or
his predecessor’s sister, has special rights over the distribution of
the dowry which comes into the household. She holds the veto in the
selling of land and other important family matters. Her curse is the
most dreadful a man can incur for she has the power to “cut the line”
and make the name extinct. If a man falls ill, it is his sister who
must first take the formal oath that she has wished him no harm, as
anger in her heart is most potent for evil. When a man dies, it is his
paternal aunt or his sister who prepares the body for burial, anointing
it with turmeric and rubbing it with oil, and it is she who sits beside
the body, fanning away the flies, and keeps the fan in her possession
ever after. And, in the more ordinary affairs of the household, in the
economic arrangements between relatives, in disputes over property or
in family feuds, the women play as active a part as the men.
The girl and woman repays the general social negligence which she
receives with a corresponding insouciance. She treats the lore
of the village, the genealogies of the titles, the origin myths
and local tales, the intricacies of the social organisation with
supreme indifference. It is an exceptional girl who can give her
great-grandfather’s name, the exceptional boy who cannot give his
genealogy in traditional form for several generations. While the boy
of sixteen or seventeen is eagerly trying to master the esoteric
allusiveness of the talking chief whose style he most admires, the girl
of the same age learns the minimum of etiquette. Yet this is in no wise
due to lack of ability. The _taupo_ must have a meticulous knowledge,
not only of the social arrangements of her own village, but also of
those of neighbouring villages. She must serve visitors in proper form
and with no hesitation after the talking chief has chanted their titles
and the names of their kava cups. Should she take the wrong post which
is the prerogative of another _taupo_ who outranks her, her hair will
be soundly pulled by her rival’s female attendants. She learns the
intricacies of the social organisation as well as her brother does.
Still more notable is the case of the wife of a talking chief. Whether
she is chosen for her docility by a man who has already assumed his
title, or whether, as is often the case, she marries some boy of her
acquaintance who later is made a talking chief, the _tausi_, wife of a
talking chief, is quite equal to the occasion. In the meetings of women
she must be a master of etiquette and the native rules of order, she
must interlard her speeches with a wealth of unintelligible traditional
material and rich allusiveness, she must preserve the same even voice,
the same lofty demeanour, as her husband. And ultimately, the wife
of an important talking chief must qualify as a teacher as well as a
performer, for it is her duty to train the _taupo_. But unless the
community thus recognises her existence, and makes formal demand
upon her time and ability, a woman gives to it a bare minimum of her
attention.
In like manner, women are not dealt with in the primitive penal code. A
man who commits adultery with a chief’s wife was beaten and banished,
sometimes even drowned by the outraged community, but the woman was
only cast out by her husband. The _taupo_ who was found not to be
a virgin was simply beaten by her female relatives. To-day if evil
befalls the village, and it is attributed to some unconfessed sin on
the part of a member of the community, the _Fono_ and the _Aumaga_ are
convened and confession is enjoined upon any one who may have evil
upon his conscience, but no such demand is made upon the _Aualuma_ or
the wives of the _matais_. This is in striking contrast to the family
confessional where the sister is called upon first.
In matters of work the village makes a few precise demands. It is the
women’s work to cultivate the sugar cane and sew the thatch for the
roof of the guest house, to weave the palm leaf blinds, and bring
the coral rubble for the floor. When the girls have a paper mulberry
plantation, the _Aumaga_ occasionally help them in the work, the girls
in turn making a feast for the boys, turning the whole affair into an
industrious picnic. But between men’s formal work and women’s formal
work there is a rigid division. Women do not enter into house-building
or boat-building activities, nor go out in fishing canoes, nor may men
enter the formal weaving house or the house where women are making tapa
in a group. If the women’s work makes it necessary for them to cross
the village, as is the case when rubble is brought up from the seashore
to make the floor of the guest house, the men entirely disappear,
either gathering in some remote house, or going away to the bush or to
another village. But this avoidance is only for large formal occasions.
If her husband is building the family a new cook-house, a woman may
make tapa two feet away, while a chief may sit and placidly braid cinet
while his wife weaves a fine mat at his elbow.
So, although unlike her husband and brothers a woman spends most of her
time within the narrower circle of her household and her relationship
group, when she does participate in community affairs she is treated
with the punctilio which marks all phases of Samoan social life. The
better part of her attention and interest is focused on a smaller
group, cast in a more personal mode. For this reason, it is impossible
to evaluate accurately the difference in innate social drive between
men and women in Samoa. In those social spheres where women have been
given an opportunity, they take their place with as much ability as
the men. The wives of the talking chiefs in fact exhibit even greater
adaptability than their husbands. The talking chiefs are especially
chosen for their oratorical and intellectual abilities, whereas the
women have a task thrust upon them at their marriage requiring great
oratorical skill, a fertile imagination, tact, and a facile memory.
VII
FORMAL SEX RELATIONS
The first attitude which a little girl learns towards boys is one of
avoidance and antagonism. She learns to observe the brother and sister
taboo towards the boys of her relationship group and household, and
together with the other small girls of her age group she treats all
other small boys as enemies elect. After a little girl is eight or nine
years of age she has learned never to approach a group of older boys.
This feeling of antagonism towards younger boys and shamed avoidance
of older ones continues up to the age of thirteen or fourteen, to the
group of girls who are just reaching puberty and the group of boys who
have just been circumcised. These children are growing away from the
age-group life and the age-group antagonisms. They are not yet actively
sex-conscious. And it is at this time that relationships between the
sexes are least emotionally charged. Not until she is an old married
woman with several children will the Samoan girl again regard the
opposite sex so quietly. When these adolescent children gather together
there is a good-natured banter, a minimum of embarrassment, a great
deal of random teasing which usually takes the form of accusing some
little girl of a consuming passion for a decrepit old man of eighty,
or some small boy of being the father of a buxom matron’s eighth child.
Occasionally the banter takes the form of attributing affection between
two age mates and is gaily and indignantly repudiated by both. Children
at this age meet at informal _siva_ parties, on the outskirts of more
formal occasions, at community reef fishings (when many yards of reef
have been enclosed to make a great fish trap) and on torch-fishing
excursions. Good-natured tussling and banter and co-operation in common
activities are the keynotes of these occasions. But unfortunately
these contacts are neither frequent nor sufficiently prolonged to
teach the girls co-operation or to give either boys or girls any real
appreciation of personality in members of the opposite sex.
Two or three years later this will all be changed. The fact that little
girls no longer belong to age groups makes the individual’s defection
less noticeable. The boy who begins to take an active interest in
girls is also seen less in a gang and spends more time with one close
companion. Girls have lost all of their nonchalance. They giggle,
blush, bridle, run away. Boys become shy, embarrassed, taciturn, and
avoid the society of girls in the daytime and on the brilliant moonlit
nights for which they accuse the girls of having an exhibitionistic
preference. Friendships fall more strictly within the relationship
group. The boy’s need for a trusted confidante is stronger than that
of the girl, for only the most adroit and hardened Don Juans do their
own courting. There are occasions, of course, when two youngsters
just past adolescence, fearful of ridicule, even from their nearest
friends and relatives, will slip away alone into the bush. More
frequently still an older man, a widower or a divorced man, will be
a girl’s first lover. And here there is no need for an ambassador.
The older man is neither shy nor frightened, and furthermore there
is no one whom he can trust as an intermediary; a younger man would
betray him, an older man would not take his amours seriously. But the
first spontaneous experiment of adolescent children and the amorous
excursions of the older men among the young girls of the village are
variants on the edge of the recognised types of relationships; so also
is the first experience of a young boy with an older woman. But both
of these are exceedingly frequent occurrences, so that the success
of an amatory experience is seldom jeopardised by double ignorance.
Nevertheless, all of these occasions are outside the recognised forms
into which sex relations fall. The little boy and girl are branded
by their companions as guilty of _tautala lai titi_ (presuming above
their ages) as is the boy who loves or aspires to love an older woman,
while the idea of an older man pursuing a young girl appeals strongly
to their sense of humour; or if the girl is very young and naïve, to
their sense of unfitness. “She is too young, too young yet. He is too
old,” they will say, and the whole weight of vigorous disapproval fell
upon a _matai_ who was known to be the father of the child of Lotu,
the sixteen-year-old feeble-minded girl on Olesega. Discrepancy in
age or experience always strikes them as comic or pathetic according
to the degree. The theoretical punishment which is meted out to a
disobedient and runaway daughter is to marry her to a very old man,
and I have heard a nine-year-old giggle contemptuously over her
mother’s preference for a seventeen-year-old boy. Worst among these
unpatterned deviations is that of the man who makes love to some young
and dependent woman of his household, his adopted child or his wife’s
younger sister. The cry of incest is raised against him and sometimes
feeling runs so high that he has to leave the group.
Besides formal marriage there are only two types of sex relations
which receive any formal recognition from the community—love affairs
between unmarried young people (this includes the widowed) who are very
nearly of the same age, whether leading to marriage or merely a passing
diversion; and adultery.
Between the unmarried there are three forms of relationship: the
clandestine encounter, “under the palm trees,” the published elopement,
_Avaga_, and the ceremonious courtship in which the boy “sits before
the girl”; and on the edge of these, the curious form of surreptitious
rape, called _moetotolo_, sleep crawling, resorted to by youths who
find favour in no maiden’s eyes.
In these three relationships, the boy requires a confidant and
ambassador whom he calls a _soa_. Where boys are close companions,
this relationship may extend over many love affairs, or it may be
a temporary one, terminating with the particular love affair. The
_soa_ follows the pattern of the talking chief who makes material
demands upon his chief in return for the immaterial services which he
renders him. If marriage results from his ambassadorship, he receives
a specially fine present from the bridegroom. The choice of a _soa_
presents many difficulties. If the lover chooses a steady, reliable
boy, some slightly younger relative devoted to his interests, a boy
unambitious in affairs of the heart, very likely the ambassador will
bungle the whole affair through inexperience and lack of tact. But if
he chooses a handsome and expert wooer who knows just how “to speak
softly and walk gently,” then as likely as not the girl will prefer the
second to the principal. This difficulty is occasionally anticipated by
employing two or three _soas_ and setting them to spy on each other.
But such a lack of trust is likely to inspire a similar attitude in
the agents, and as one overcautious and disappointed lover told me
ruefully, “I had five _soas_, one was true and four were false.”
Among possible _soas_ there are two preferences, a brother or a girl.
A brother is by definition loyal, while a girl is far more skilful for
“a boy can only approach a girl in the evening, or when no one is by,
but a girl can go with her all day long, walk with her and lie on the
mat by her, eat off the same platter, and whisper between mouthfuls
the name of the boy, speaking ever of him, how good he is, how gentle
and how true, how worthy of love. Yes, best of all is the _soafafine_,
the woman ambassador.” But the difficulties of obtaining a _soafafine_
are great. A boy may not choose from his own female relatives. The
taboo forbids him ever to mention such matters in their presence. It is
only by good chance that his brother’s sweetheart may be a relative of
the girl upon whom he has set his heart; or some other piece of good
fortune may throw him into contact with a girl or woman who will act
in his interests. The most violent antagonisms in the young people’s
groups are not between ex-lovers, arise not from the venom of the
deserted nor the smarting pride of the jilted, but occur between the
boy and the _soa_ who has betrayed him, or a lover and the friend of
his beloved who has in any way blocked his suit.
In the strictly clandestine love affair the lover never presents
himself at the house of his beloved. His _soa_ may go there in a group
or upon some trumped-up errand, or he also may avoid the house and find
opportunities to speak to the girl while she is fishing or going to
and from the plantation. It is his task to sing his friend’s praise,
counteract the girl’s fears and objections, and finally appoint a
rendezvous. These affairs are usually of short duration and both boy
and girl may be carrying on several at once. One of the recognised
causes of a quarrel is the resentment of the first lover against his
successor of the same night, “for the boy who came later will mock
him.” These clandestine lovers make their rendezvous on the outskirts
of the village. “Under the palm trees” is the conventionalised
designation of this type of intrigue. Very often three or four couples
will have a common rendezvous, when either the boys or the girls are
relatives who are friends. Should the girl ever grow faint or dizzy,
it is the boy’s part to climb the nearest palm and fetch down a fresh
cocoanut to pour on her face in lieu of _eau de cologne_. In native
theory, barrenness is the punishment of promiscuity; and, _vice versa_,
only persistent monogamy is rewarded by conception. When a pair of
clandestine experimenters whose rank is so low that their marriages are
not of any great economic importance become genuinely attached to each
other and maintain the relationship over several months, marriage often
follows. And native sophistication distinguishes between the adept
lover whose adventures are many and of short duration and the less
skilled man who can find no better proof of his virility than a long
affair ending in conception.
Often the girl is afraid to venture out into the night, infested with
ghosts and devils, ghosts that strangle one, ghosts from far-away
villages who come in canoes to kidnap the girls of the village, ghosts
who leap upon the back and may not be shaken off. Or she may feel that
it is wiser to remain at home, and if necessary, attest her presence
vocally. In this case the lover braves the house; taking off his
_lavalava_, he greases his body thoroughly with cocoanut oil so that
he can slip through the fingers of pursuers and leave no trace, and
stealthily raises the blinds and slips into the house. The prevalence
of this practice gives point to the familiar incident in Polynesian
folk tales of the ill fortune that falls the luckless hero who “sleeps
until morning, until the rising sun reveals his presence to the other
inmates of the house.” As perhaps a dozen or more people and several
dogs are sleeping in the house, a due regard for silence is sufficient
precaution. But it is this habit of domestic rendezvous which lends
itself to the peculiar abuse of the _moetotolo_, or sleep crawler.
The _moetotolo_ is the only sex activity which presents a definitely
abnormal picture. Ever since the first contact with white civilisation,
rape, in the form of violent assault, has occurred occasionally in
Samoa. It is far less congenial, however, to the Samoan attitude than
_moetotolo_, in which a man stealthily appropriates the favours which
are meant for another. The need for guarding against discovery makes
conversation impossible, and the sleep crawler relies upon the girl’s
expecting a lover or the chance that she will indiscriminately accept
any comer. If the girl suspects and resents him, she raises a great
outcry and the whole household gives chase. Catching a _moetotolo_ is
counted great sport, and the women, who feel their safety endangered,
are even more active in pursuit than the men. One luckless youth in
Lumā neglected to remove his _lavalava_. The girl discovered him and
her sister succeeded in biting a piece out of his _lavalava_ before
he escaped. This she proudly exhibited the next day. As the boy had
been too dull to destroy his _lavalava_, the evidence against him
was circumstantial and he was the laughing stock of the village; the
children wrote a dance song about it and sang it after him wherever he
went. The _moetotolo_ problem is complicated by the possibility that
a boy of the household may be the offender and may take refuge in the
hue and cry following the discovery. It also provides the girl with an
excellent alibi, since she has only to call out “_moetotolo_” in case
her lover is discovered. “To the family and the village that may be a
_moetotolo_, but it is not so in the hearts of the girl and the boy.”
Two motives are given for this unsavoury activity, anger and failure in
love. The Samoan girl who plays the coquette does so at her peril. “She
will say, ‘Yes, I will meet you to-night by that old cocoanut tree just
beside the devilfish stone when the moon goes down.’ And the boy will
wait and wait and wait all night long. It will grow very dark; lizards
will drop on his head; the ghost boats will come into the channel. He
will be very much afraid. But he will wait there until dawn, until his
hair is wet with dew and his heart is very angry and still she does
not come. Then in revenge he will attempt a _moetotolo_. Especially
will he do so if he hears that she has met another that night.” The
other set explanation is that a particular boy cannot win a sweetheart
by any legitimate means, and there is no form of prostitution, except
guest prostitution in Samoa. As some of the boys who were notorious
_moetotolos_ were among the most charming and good-looking youths of
the village, this is a little hard to understand. Apparently, these
youths, frowned upon in one or two tentative courtships, inflamed by
the loudly proclaimed success of their fellows and the taunts against
their own inexperience, cast established wooing procedure to the winds
and attempt a _moetotolo_. And once caught, once branded, no girl
will ever pay any attention to them again. They must wait until as
older men, with position and title to offer, they can choose between
some weary and bedraggled wanton or the unwilling young daughter of
ambitious and selfish parents. But years will intervene before this
is possible, and shut out from the amours in which his companions
are engaging, a boy makes one attempt after another, sometimes
successfully, sometimes only to be caught and beaten, mocked by the
village, and always digging the pit deeper under his feet. Often
partially satisfactory solutions are relationships with men. There
was one such pair in the village, a notorious _moetotolo_, and a
serious-minded youth who wished to keep his heart free for political
intrigue. The _moetotolo_ therefore complicates and adds zest to the
surreptitious love-making which is conducted at home, while the danger
of being missed, the undesirability of chance encounters abroad, rain
and the fear of ghosts, complicate “love under the palm trees.”
Between these strictly _sub rosa_ affairs and a final offer of marriage
there is an intermediate form of courtship in which the girl is called
upon by the boy. As this is regarded as a tentative move towards
matrimony, both relationship groups must be more or less favourably
inclined towards the union. With his _soa_ at his side and provided
with a basket of fish, an octopus or so, or a chicken, the suitor
presents himself at the girl’s home before the late evening meal. If
his gift is accepted, it is a sign that the family of the girl are
willing for him to pay his addresses to her. He is formally welcomed
by the _matai_, sits with reverently bowed head throughout the evening
prayer, and then he and his _soa_ stay for supper. But the suitor does
not approach his beloved. They say: “If you wish to know who is really
the lover, look then not at the boy who sits by her side, looks boldly
into her eyes and twists the flowers in her necklace around his fingers
or steals the hibiscus flower from her hair that he may wear it behind
his ear. Do not think it is he who whispers softly in her ear, or says
to her, ‘Sweetheart, wait for me to-night. After the moon has set, I
will come to you,’ or who teases her by saying she has many lovers.
Look instead at the boy who sits afar off, who sits with bent head and
takes no part in the joking. And you will see that his eyes are always
turned softly on the girl. Always he watches her and never does he miss
a movement of her lips. Perhaps she will wink at him, perhaps she will
raise her eyebrows, perhaps she will make a sign with her hand. He must
always be wakeful and watching or he will miss it.” The _soa_ meanwhile
pays the girl elaborate and ostentatious court and in undertones
pleads the cause of his friend. After dinner, the centre of the house
is accorded the young people to play cards, sing or merely sit about,
exchanging a series of broad pleasantries. This type of courtship
varies from occasional calls to daily attendance. The food gift need
not accompany each visit, but is as essential at the initial call as is
an introduction in the West. The way of such declared lovers is hard.
The girl does not wish to marry, nor to curtail her amours in deference
to a definite betrothal. Possibly she may also dislike her suitor,
while he in turn may be the victim of family ambition. Now that the
whole village knows him for her suitor, the girl gratifies her vanity
by avoidance, by perverseness. He comes in the evening, she has gone to
another house; he follows her there, she immediately returns home. When
such courtship ripens into an accepted proposal of marriage, the boy
often goes to sleep in the house of his intended bride and often the
union is surreptitiously consummated. Ceremonial marriage is deferred
until such time as the boy’s family have planted or collected enough
food and other property and the girl’s family have gotten together a
suitable dowry of tapa and mats.
In such manner are conducted the love affairs of the average young
people of the same village, and of the plebeian young people of
neighbouring villages. From this free and easy experimentation, the
_taupo_ is excepted. Virginity is a legal requirement for her. At
her marriage, in front of all the people, in a house brilliantly
lit, the talking chief of the bridegroom will take the tokens of her
virginity.[3] In former days should she prove not to be a virgin, her
female relatives fell upon and beat her with stones, disfiguring and
sometimes fatally injuring the girl who had shamed their house. The
public ordeal sometimes prostrated the girl for as much as a week,
although ordinarily a girl recovers from first intercourse in two or
three hours, and women seldom lie abed more than a few hours after
childbirth. Although this virginity-testing ceremony was theoretically
observed at weddings of people of all ranks, it was simply ignored if
the boy knew that it was an idle form, and “a wise girl who is not a
virgin will tell the talking chief of her husband, so that she be not
shamed before all the people.”
[3] This custom is now forbidden by law, but is only gradually dying
out.
The attitude towards virginity is a curious one. Christianity has, of
course, introduced a moral premium on chastity. The Samoans regard
this attitude with reverent but complete scepticism and the concept of
celibacy is absolutely meaningless to them. But virginity definitely
adds to a girl’s attractiveness, the wooing of a virgin is considered
far more of a feat than the conquest of a more experienced heart,
and a really successful Don Juan turns most of his attention to their
seduction. One youth who at twenty-four married a girl who was still a
virgin was the laughing stock of the village over his freely related
trepidation which revealed the fact that at twenty-four, although he
had had many love affairs, he had never before won the favours of a
virgin.
The bridegroom, his relatives and the bride and her relatives all
receive prestige if she proves to be a virgin, so that the girl of rank
who might wish to forestall this painful public ceremony is thwarted
not only by the anxious chaperonage of her relatives but by the boy’s
eagerness for prestige. One young Lothario eloped to his father’s house
with a girl of high rank from another village and refused to live with
her because, said he, “I thought maybe I would marry that girl and
there would be a big _malaga_ and a big ceremony and I would wait and
get the credit for marrying a virgin. But the next day her father came
and said that she could not marry me, and she cried very much. So I
said to her, ‘Well, there is no use now to wait any longer. Now we will
run away into the bush.’” It is conceivable that the girl would often
trade the temporary prestige for an escape from the public ordeal, but
in proportion as his ambitions were honourable, the boy would frustrate
her efforts.
Just as the clandestine and casual “love under the palm trees” is the
pattern irregularity for those of humble birth, so the elopement
has its archetype in the love affairs of the _taupo_, and the other
chiefs’ daughters. These girls of noble birth are carefully guarded;
not for them are secret trysts at night or stolen meetings in the day
time. Where parents of lower rank complacently ignore their daughters’
experiments, the high chief guards his daughter’s virginity as he
guards the honour of his name, his precedence in the kava ceremony
or any other prerogative of his high degree. Some old woman of the
household is told off to be the girl’s constant companion and duenna.
The _taupo_ may not visit in other houses in the village, or leave the
house alone at night. When she sleeps, an older woman sleeps by her
side. Never may she go to another village unchaperoned. In her own
village she goes soberly about her tasks, bathing in the sea, working
in the plantation, safe under the jealous guardianship of the women of
her own village. She runs little risk from the _moetotolo_, for one who
outraged the _taupo_ of his village would formerly have been beaten to
death, and now would have to flee from the village. The prestige of the
village is inextricably bound up with the high repute of the _taupo_
and few young men in the village would dare to be her lovers. Marriage
to them is out of the question, and their companions would revile
them as traitors rather than envy them such doubtful distinction.
Occasionally a youth of very high rank in the same village will risk
an elopement, but even this is a rare occurrence. For tradition says
that the _taupo_ must marry outside her village, marry a high chief
or a _manaia_ of another village. Such a marriage is an occasion for
great festivities and solemn ceremony. The chief and all of his talking
chiefs must come to propose for her hand, come in person bringing
gifts for her talking chiefs. If the talking chiefs of the girl are
satisfied that this is a lucrative and desirable match, and the family
are satisfied with the rank and appearance of the suitor, the marriage
is agreed upon. Little attention is paid to the opinion of the girl.
So fixed is the idea that the marriage of the _taupo_ is the affair
of the talking chiefs that Europeanised natives on the main island,
refuse to make their daughters _taupos_ because the missionaries say a
girl should make her own choice, and once she is a _taupo_, they regard
the matter as inevitably taken out of their hands. After the betrothal
is agreed upon the bridegroom returns to his village to collect food
and property for the wedding. His village sets aside a piece of land
which is called the “Place of the Lady” and is her property and the
property of her children forever, and on this land they build a house
for the bride. Meanwhile, the bridegroom has left behind him in the
house of the bride, a talking chief, the counterpart of the humbler
_soa_. This is one of the talking chief’s best opportunities to acquire
wealth. He stays as the emissary of his chief, to watch over his future
bride. He works for the bride’s family and each week the _matai_ of
the bride must reward him with a handsome present. As an affianced
wife of a chief, more and more circumspect conduct is enjoined upon
the girl. Did she formerly joke with the boys of the village, she must
joke no longer, or the talking chief, on the watch for any lapse from
high decorum, will go home to his chief and report that his bride is
unworthy of such honour. This custom is particularly susceptible to
second thought on the part of either side. Does the bridegroom repent
of the bargain, he bribes his talking chief (who is usually a young
man, not one of the important talking chiefs who will benefit greatly
by the marriage itself) to be oversensitive to the behaviour of the
bride or the treatment he receives in the bride’s family. And this is
the time in which the bride will elope, if her affianced husband is
too unacceptable. For while no boy of her own village will risk her
dangerous favours, a boy from another village will enormously enhance
his prestige if he elopes with the _taupo_ of a rival community.
Once she has eloped, the projected alliance is of course broken off,
although her angry parents may refuse to sanction her marriage with her
lover and marry her for punishment to some old man.
So great is the prestige won by the village, one of whose young men
succeeds in eloping with a _taupo_, that often the whole effort of a
_malaga_ is concentrated upon abducting the _taupo_, whose virginity
will be respected in direct ratio to the chances of her family and
village consenting to ratify the marriage. As the abductor is often of
high rank, the village often ruefully accepts the compromise.
This elopement pattern, given meaning by the restrictions under which
the _taupo_ lives and this inter-village rivalry, is carried down to
the lower ranks where indeed it is practically meaningless. Seldom is
the chaperonage exercised over the girl of average family severe enough
to make elopement the only way of consummating a love affair. But the
elopement is spectacular; the boy wishes to increase his reputation as
a successful Don Juan, and the girl wishes to proclaim her conquest and
also often hopes that the elopement will end in marriage. The eloping
pair run away to the parents of the boy or to some of his relatives
and wait for the girl’s relatives to pursue her. As one boy related
the tale of such an adventure: “We ran away in the rain, nine miles
to Leone, in the pouring rain, to my father’s house. The next day her
family came to get her, and my father said to me, ‘How is it, do you
wish to marry this girl, shall I ask her father to leave her here?’
And I said, ‘Oh, no. I just eloped with her for public information.’”
Elopements are much less frequent than the clandestine love affairs
because the girl takes far more risk. She publicly renounces her often
nominal claims to virginity; she embroils herself with her family,
who in former times, and occasionally even to-day, would beat her
soundly and shave off her hair. Nine times out of ten, her lover’s only
motive is vanity and display, for the boy’s say, “The girls hate a
_moetotolo_, but they all love an _avaga_ (eloping) man.”
The elopement also occurs as a practical measure when one family
is opposed to a marriage upon which a pair of young people have
determined. The young people take refuge with the friendly side of the
family. But unless the recalcitrant family softens and consents to
legalise the marriage by a formal exchange of property, the principals
can do nothing to establish their status. A young couple may have had
several children and still be classed as “elopers,” and if the marriage
is finally legalised after long delay, this stigma will always cling
to them. It is far more serious a one than a mere accusation of sexual
irregularity, for there is a definite feeling that the whole community
procedure has been outraged by a pair of young upstarts.
Reciprocal gift-giving relations are maintained between the two
families as long as the marriage lasts, and even afterwards if there
are children. The birth of each child, the death of a member of either
household, a visit of the wife to her family, or if he lives with her
people, of the husband to his, is marked by the presentation of gifts.
In premarital relationships, a convention of love making is strictly
adhered to. True, this is a convention of speech, rather than of
action. A boy declares that he will die if a girl refuses him her
favours, but the Samoans laugh at stories of romantic love, scoff at
fidelity to a long absent wife or mistress, believe explicitly that
one love will quickly cure another. The fidelity which is followed by
pregnancy is taken as proof positive of a real attachment, although
having many mistresses is never out of harmony with a declaration
of affection for each. The composition of ardent love songs, the
fashioning of long and flowery love letters, the invocation of the
moon, the stars and the sea in verbal courtship, all serve to give
Samoan love-making a close superficial resemblance to our own, yet
the attitude is far closer to that of Schnitzler’s hero in _The
Affairs of Anatol_. Romantic love as it occurs in our civilisation,
inextricably bound up with ideas of monogamy, exclusiveness, jealousy
and undeviating fidelity does not occur in Samoa. Our attitude is a
compound, the final result of many converging lines of development in
Western civilisation, of the institution of monogamy, of the ideas of
the age of chivalry, of the ethics of Christianity. Even a passionate
attachment to one person which lasts for a long period and persists in
the face of discouragement but does not bar out other relationships,
is rare among the Samoans. Marriage, on the other hand, is regarded as
a social and economic arrangement, in which relative wealth, rank, and
skill of husband and wife, all must be taken into consideration. There
are many marriages in which both individuals, especially if they are
over thirty, are completely faithful. But this must be attributed to
the ease of sexual adjustment on the one hand, and to the ascendency
of other interests, social organisation for the men, children for the
women, over sex interests, rather than to a passionate fixation upon
the partner in the marriage. As the Samoans lack the inhibitions and
the intricate specialisation of sex feeling which make marriages of
convenience unsatisfactory, it is possible to bulwark marital happiness
with other props than temporary passionate devotion. Suitability and
expediency become the deciding factors.
Adultery does not necessarily mean a broken marriage. A chief’s wife
who commits adultery is deemed to have dishonoured her high position,
and is usually discarded, although the chief will openly resent her
remarriage to any one of lower rank. If the lover is considered the
more culpable, the village will take public vengeance upon him. In
less conspicuous cases the amount of fuss which is made over adultery
is dependent upon the relative rank of the offender and offended, or
the personal jealousy which is only occasionally aroused. If either
the injured husband or the injured wife is sufficiently incensed to
threaten physical violence, the trespasser may have to resort to a
public _ifoga_, the ceremonial humiliation before some one whose
pardon is asked. He goes to the house of the man he has injured,
accompanied by all the men of his household, each one wrapped in a
fine mat, the currency of the country; the suppliants seat themselves
outside the house, fine mats spread over their heads, hands folded on
their breasts, heads bent in attitudes of the deepest dejection and
humiliation. “And if the man is very angry he will say no word. All
day he will go about his business; he will braid cinet with a quick
hand, he will talk loudly to his wife, and call out greetings to those
who pass in the roadway, but he will take no notice of those who sit
on his own terrace, who dare not raise their eyes or make any movement
to go away. In olden days, if his heart was not softened, he might
take a club and together with his relatives go out and kill those who
sit without. But now he only keeps them waiting, waiting all day long.
The sun will beat down upon them; the rain will come and beat on their
heads and still he will say no word. Then towards evening he will say
at last: ‘Come, it is enough. Enter the house and drink the kava. Eat
the food which I will set before you and we will cast our trouble into
the sea.’” Then the fine mats are accepted as payment for the injury,
the _ifoga_ becomes a matter of village history and old gossips will
say, “Oh, yes, Lua! no, she’s not Iona’s child. Her father is that
chief over in the next village. He _ifod_ to Iona before she was born.”
If the offender is of much lower rank than the injured husband, his
chief, or his father (if he is only a young boy) will have to humiliate
himself in his place. Where the offender is a woman, she and her female
relatives will make similar amends. But they will run far greater
danger of being roundly beaten and berated; the peaceful teachings of
Christianity—perhaps because they were directed against actual killing,
rather than the slightly less fatal encounters of women—have made far
less change in the belligerent activities of the women than in those
of the men.
If, on the other hand, a wife really tires of her husband, or a husband
of his wife, divorce is a simple and informal matter, the non-resident
simply going home to his or her family, and the relationship is said to
have “passed away.” It is a very brittle monogamy, often trespassed and
more often broken entirely. But many adulteries occur—between a young
marriage-shy bachelor and a married woman, or a temporary widower and
some young girl—which hardly threaten the continuity of established
relationships. The claim that a woman has on her family’s land renders
her as independent as her husband, and so there are no marriages of any
duration in which either person is actively unhappy. A tiny flare-up
and a woman goes home to her own people; if her husband does not care
to conciliate her, each seeks another mate.
Within the family, the wife obeys and serves her husband, in theory,
though of course, the hen-pecked husband is a frequent phenomenon.
In families of high rank, her personal service to her husband is
taken over by the _taupo_ and the talking chief but the wife always
retains the right to render a high chief sacred personal services,
such as cutting his hair. A wife’s rank can never exceed her husband’s
because it is always directly dependent upon it. Her family may be
richer and more illustrious than his, and she may actually exercise
more influence over the village affairs through her blood relatives
than he, but within the life of the household and the village, she is
a _tausi_, wife of a talking chief, or a _faletua_, wife of a chief.
This sometimes results in conflict, as in the case of Pusa who was the
sister of the last holder of the highest title on the island. This
title was temporarily extinct. She was also the wife of the highest
chief in the village. Should her brother, the heir, resume the higher
title, her husband’s rank and her rank as his wife would suffer.
Helping her brother meant lowering the prestige of her husband. As she
was the type of woman who cared a great deal more for wire pulling than
for public recognition, she threw her influence in for her brother.
Such conflicts are not uncommon, but they present a clear-cut choice,
usually reinforced by considerations of residence. If a woman lives
in her husband’s household, and if, furthermore, that household is
in another village, her interest is mainly enlisted in her husband’s
cause; but if she lives with her own family, in her own village, her
allegiance is likely to cling to the blood relatives from whom she
receives reflected glory and informal privilege, although no status.
VIII
THE RÔLE OF THE DANCE
Dancing is the only activity in which almost all ages and both sexes
participate and it therefore offers a unique opportunity for an
analysis of education.
In the dance there are virtuosos but no formal teachers. It is a highly
individual activity set in a social framework. This framework varies
from a small dancing party at which twelve to twenty people are present
to the major festivities of a _malaga_ (travelling party) or a wedding
when the largest guest house in the village is crowded within and
encircled by spectators without. With the size and importance of the
festivity, the formality of the arrangements varies also. Usually the
occasion of even a small _siva_ (dance) is the presence of at least
two or three strange young people from another village. The pattern
entertainment is a division of the performers into visitors and hosts,
the two sides taking turns in providing the music and dancing. This
pattern is still followed even when the _malaga_ numbers only two
individuals, a number of hosts going over to swell the visitors’ ranks.
It is at these small informal dances that the children learn to dance.
In the front of the house sit the young people who are the centre and
arbiters of the occasion. The _matai_ and his wife and possibly a
related _matai_ and the other elders of the household sit at the back
of the house, in direct reversal of the customary procedure according
to which the place of the young people is in the background. Around
the ends cluster women and children, and outside lurk the boys and
girls who are not participating in the dancing, although at any moment
they may be drawn into it. On such occasions the dancing is usually
started by the small children, beginning possibly with seven- and
eight-year-olds. The chief’s wife or one of the young men will call out
the names of the children and they are stood up in a group of three,
sometimes all boys or girls, sometimes with a girl between two boys,
which is the conventional adult grouping for the _taupo_ and her two
talking chiefs. The young men, sitting in a group near the centre of
the house, provide the music, one of them standing and leading the
singing to the accompaniment of an imported stringed instrument which
has taken the place of the rude bamboo drum of earlier times. The
leader sets the key and the whole company join in either in the song,
or by clapping, or by beating on the floor with their knuckles. The
dancers themselves are the final arbiters of the excellence of the
music and it is not counted as petulance for a dancer to stop in the
middle and demand better music as the price of continuing. The songs
sung are few in number; the young people of one village seldom know
more than a dozen airs; and perhaps twice as many sets of words which
are sung now to one air, now to another. The verse pattern is simply
based upon the number of syllables; a change in stress is permitted
and rhyme is not demanded so that any new event is easily set in the
old pattern, and names of villages and of individuals are inserted
with great freedom. The content of the songs is likely to take on an
extremely personal character containing many quips at the expense of
individuals and their villages.
The form of the participation of the audience changes according to the
age of the dancers. In the case of the smaller children, it consists
of an endless stream of good-natured comment: “Faster!” “Down lower!
Lower!” “Do it again!” “Fasten your _lavalava_.” In the dancing of the
more expert boys and girls the group takes part by a steady murmur
of “Thank you, thank you, for your dancing!” “Beautiful! Engaging!
Charming! Bravo!” which gives very much the effect of the irregular
stream of “Amens” at an evangelistic revival. This articulate courtesy
becomes almost lyric in quality when the dancer is a person of rank for
whom dancing at all is a condescension.
The little children are put out upon these public floors with a minimum
of preliminary instruction. As babies in their mothers’ arms at just
such a party as this, they learned to clap before they learned to
walk, so that the beat is indelibly fixed in their minds. As two- and
three-year-olds they have stood on a mat at home and clapped their
hands in time to their elders’ singing. Now they are called upon to
perform before a group. Wide-eyed, terrified babies stand beside
some slightly older child, clapping in desperation and trying to add
new steps borrowed on the spur of the moment from their companions.
Every improvement is greeted with loud applause. The child who
performed best at the last party is haled forward at the next, for
the group is primarily interested in its own amusement rather than in
distributing an equal amount of practice among the children. Hence some
children rapidly outdistance the rest, through interest and increased
opportunity as well as superior gift. This tendency to give the
talented child another and another chance is offset somewhat by rivalry
between relatives who wish to thrust their little ones forward.
[Illustration: _A dancing costume for European tastes_]
[Illustration: _By name, “House of Midnight Darkness”_]
While the children are dancing, the older boys and girls are
refurbishing their costumes with flowers, shell necklaces, anklets and
bracelets of leaves. One or two will probably slip off home and return
dressed in elaborate bark skirts. A bottle of cocoanut oil is produced
from the family chest and rubbed on the bodies of the older dancers.
Should a person of rank be present and consent to dance, the hostess
family bring out their finest mats and tapas as costume. Sometimes this
impromptu dressing assumes such importance that an adjoining house is
taken over as a dressing room; at others it is of so informal a nature
that spectators, who have gathered outside arrayed only in sheets, have
to borrow a dress or a _lavalava_ from some other spectator before
they can appear on the dance floor. The form of the dance itself is
eminently individualistic. No figures are prescribed except the half
dozen formal little claps which open the dance and the use of one of
a few set endings. There are twenty-five or thirty figures, two or
three set transitional positions, and at least three definite styles,
the dance of the _taupo_, the dance of the boys, and the dance of the
jesters. These three styles relate definitely to the kind of dance
and not to the status of the dancer. The _taupo’s_ dance is grave,
aloof, beautiful. She is required to preserve a set, dreamy, nonchalant
expression of infinite hauteur and detachment. The only permissible
alternative to this expression is a series of grimaces, impudent
rather than comic in nature and deriving their principal appeal from
the strong contrast which they present to the more customary gravity.
The _manaia_ also when he dances in his _manaia_ rôle is required to
follow this same decorous and dignified pattern. Most little girls and
a few little boys pattern their dancing on this convention. Chiefs, on
the rare occasions when they consent to dance, and older women of rank
have the privilege of choosing between this style and the adoption of a
comedian’s rôle. The boys’ dance is much jollier than the girls’. There
is much greater freedom of movement and a great deal of emphasis on the
noise made by giving rapid rhythmical slaps to the unclothed portions
of the body which produce a crackling tattoo of sound. This style is
neither salacious nor languorous although the _taupo’s_ dance is often
both. It is athletic, slightly rowdy, exuberant, and owes much of its
appeal to the feats of rapid and difficult co-ordination which the
slapping involves. The jester’s dance is peculiarly the dance of those
who dance upon either side of the _taupo_, or the _manaia_, and honour
them by mocking them. It is primarily the prerogative of talking chiefs
and old men and old women in general. The original motive is contrast;
the jester provides comic relief for the stately dance of the _taupo_,
and the higher the rank of the _taupo_, the higher the rank of the men
and women who will condescend to act as clownish foils to her ability.
The dancing of these jesters is characterised by burlesque, horseplay,
exaggeration of the stereotyped figures, a great deal of noise made by
hammering on the open mouth with spread palm, and a large amount of
leaping about and pounding on the floor. The clown is occasionally so
proficient that he takes the centre of the floor on these ceremonious
occasions.
The little girl who is learning to dance has these three styles from
which to choose, she has twenty-five or thirty figures from which to
compose her dance and most important of all she has the individual
dancers to watch. My first interpretation of the skill of the younger
children was that they each took an older boy or girl as a model and
sedulously and slavishly copied the whole dance. But I was not able to
find a single instance in which a child would admit or seemed in any
way conscious of having copied another; nor did I find, after closer
familiarity with the group, any younger child whose style of dancing
could definitely be referred to the imitation of another dancer. The
style of every dancer of any virtuosity is known to every one in the
village and when it is copied, it is copied conspicuously so that
Vaitogi, the little girl who places her forearms parallel with the top
of her head, her palms flat on her head, and advances in a stooping
position, uttering hissing sounds, will be said to be dancing _a la
Sina_. There is no stigma upon such imitation; the author does not
resent it nor particularly glory in it; the crowd does not upbraid
it; but so strong is the feeling for individualisation that a dancer
will seldom introduce more than one such feature into an evening’s
performance; and when the dancing of two girls is similar, it is
similar in spite of the efforts of both, rather than because of any
attempt at imitation. Naturally, the dancing of the young children is
much more similar than the dancing of the young men and girls who had
had time and opportunity really to perfect a style.
The attitude of the elders towards precocity in singing, leading
the singing or dancing, is in striking contrast to their attitude
towards every other form of precocity. On the dance floor the dreaded
accusation, “You are presuming above your age,” is never heard. Little
boys who would be rebuked and possibly whipped for such behaviour
on any other occasion are allowed to preen themselves, to swagger
and bluster and take the limelight without a word of reproach. The
relatives crow with delight over a precocity for which they would hide
their heads in shame were it displayed in any other sphere.
It is on these semi-formal occasions that the dance really serves as
an educational factor. The highly ceremonious dance of the _taupo_ or
_manaia_ and their talking chiefs at a wedding or a _malaga_, with its
elaborate costuming, compulsory distribution of gifts, and its vigilant
attention to precedent and prerogative, offers no opportunities to the
amateur or the child. They may only cluster outside the guest house and
watch the proceedings. The existence of such a heavily stylized and
elaborate archetype of course serves an additional function in giving
zest as well as precedent to the informal occasions which partially ape
its grandeur.
The significance of the dance in the education and socialisation of
Samoan children is two-fold. In the first place it effectively offsets
the rigorous subordination in which children are habitually kept. Here
the admonitions of the elders change from “Sit down and keep still!” to
“Stand up and dance!” The children are actually the centre of the group
instead of its barely tolerated fringes. The parents and relatives
distribute generous praise by way of emphasising their children’s
superiority over the children of their neighbours or their visitors.
The ubiquitous ascendency of age is somewhat relaxed in the interests
of greater proficiency. Each child is a person with a definite
contribution to make regardless of sex and age. This emphasis on
individuality is carried to limits which seriously mar the dance as an
æsthetic performance. The formal adult dance with its row of dancers,
the _taupo_ in the centre and an even number of dancers on each side
focussed upon her with every movement directed towards accentuating
her dancing, loses both symmetry and unity in the hands of the
ambitious youngsters. Each dancer moves in a glorious individualistic
oblivion of the others, there is no pretence of co-ordination or of
subordinating the wings to the centre of the line. Often a dancer does
not pay enough attention to her fellow dancers to avoid continually
colliding with them. It is a genuine orgy of aggressive individualistic
exhibitionism. This tendency, so blatantly displayed on these informal
occasions, does not mar the perfection of the occasional formal dance
when the solemnity of the occasion becomes a sufficient check upon
the participants’ aggressiveness. The formal dance is of personal
significance only to people of rank or to the virtuoso to whom it
presents a perfect occasion for display.
The second influence of the dance is its reduction of the threshold
of shyness. There is as much difference between one Samoan child and
another in the matter of shyness and self-consciousness as is apparent
among our children, but where our shyest children avoid the limelight
altogether, the Samoan child looks pained and anxious but dances just
the same. The limelight is regarded as inevitable and the child makes
at least a minimum of effort to meet its requirements by standing up
and going through a certain number of motions. The beneficial effects
of this early habituation to the public eye and the resulting control
of the body are more noticeable in the case of boys than of girls.
Fifteen- and sixteen-year-old boys dance with a charm and a complete
lack of self-consciousness which is a joy to watch. The adolescent girl
whose gawky, awkward gait and lack of co-ordination may be appalling,
becomes a graceful, self-possessed person upon the dance floor. But
this ease and poise does not seem to be carried over into everyday life
with the same facility as it is in the case of young boys.
In one way this informal dance floor approximates more closely to our
educational methods than does any other aspect of Samoan education. For
here the precocious child is applauded, made much of, given more and
more opportunities to show its proficiency while the stupid child is
rebuked, neglected and pushed to the wall. This difference in permitted
practice is reflected in increasing differences in the skill of the
children as they grow older. Inferiority feeling in the classic picture
which is so frequent in our society is rare in Samoa. Inferiority there
seems to be derived from two sources, clumsiness in sex relations
which affects the young men after they are grown and produces the
_moetotolo_, and clumsiness upon the dance floor. I have already told
the story of the little girl, shy beyond her fellows, whom prospective
high rank had forced into the limelight and made miserably diffident
and self-conscious.
And the most unhappy of the older girls was Masina, a girl about three
years past puberty. Masina could not dance. Every one in the village
knew that she could not dance. Her contemporaries deplored it; the
younger children made fun of her. She had little charm, was deprecating
in her manner, awkward, shy and ill at ease. All of her five lovers had
been casual, all temporary, all unimportant. She associated with girls
much younger than herself. She had no self-confidence. No one sought
her hand in marriage and she would not marry until her family needed
the kind of property which forms a bride price.
It is interesting to notice that the one aspect of life in which the
elders actively discriminate against the less proficient children seems
to be the most powerful determinant in giving the children a feeling of
inferiority.
The strong emphasis upon dancing does not discriminate against the
physically defective. Instead every defect is capitalised in the form
of the dance or compensated for by the perfection of the dance. I saw
one badly hunchbacked boy who had worked out a most ingenious imitation
of a turtle and also a combination dance with another boy in which
the other supported him on his back. Ipu, the little albino, danced
with aggressive facility and with much applause, while mad Laki, who
suffered from a delusion that he was the high chief of the island,
was only too delighted to dance for any one who addressed him with
the elaborate courtesy phrases suitable to his rank. The dumb brother
of the high chief of one village utilised his deaf mute gutturals
as a running accompaniment to his dance, while the brothers of a
fourteen-year-old feeble-minded mad boy were accustomed to deck his
head with branches which excited him to a frenzied rhythmical activity,
suggesting a stag whose antlers had been caught in the bush. The most
precocious girl dancer in Taū was almost blind. So every defect, every
handicap was included in this universal, specialised exploitation of
personality.
The dancing child is almost always a very different person from her
everyday self. After long acquaintance it is sometimes possible to
guess the type of dance which a particular girl will do. This is
particularly easy in the case of obviously tom-boy girls, but one is
continually fooled by the depths of sophistication in the dancing
of some pensive, dull child, or the lazy grace of some noisy little
hoodlum.
Formal dancing displays are a recognised social entertainment and the
highest courtesy a chief can offer his guest is to have his _taupo_
dance for him. So likewise the boys dance after they have been
tattooed, the _manaia_ dances when he goes to woo his bride, the bride
dances at her wedding. In the midnight conviviality of a _malaga_ the
dance often becomes flagrantly obscene and definitely provocative
in character, but both of these are special developments of less
importance than the function of informal dancing in the development of
individuality and the compensation for repression of personality in
other spheres of life.
IX
THE ATTITUDE TOWARDS PERSONALITY
The ease with which personality differences can be adjusted by a change
of residence prevents the Samoans from pressing one another too hard.
Their evaluations of personality are a curious mixture of caution
and fatalism. There is one word _musu_ which expresses unwillingness
and intractability, whether in the mistress who refuses to welcome
a hitherto welcome lover, the chief who refuses to lend his kava
bowl, the baby who won’t go to bed, or the talking chief who won’t go
on a _malaga_. The appearance of a _musu_ attitude is treated with
almost superstitious respect. Lovers will prescribe formulæ for the
treatment of a mistress, “lest she become _musu_,” and the behaviour
of the suppliant is carefully orientated in respect to this mysterious
undesirability. The feeling seems to be not that one is dealing with
an individual in terms of his peculiar preoccupations in order to
assure a successful outcome of a personal relationship, appealing
now to vanity, now to fear, now to a desire for power, but rather
that one is using one or another of a series of potent practices to
prevent a mysterious and widespread psychological phenomenon from
arising. Once this attitude has appeared, a Samoan habitually gives
up the struggle without more detailed inquiry and with a minimum
of complaint. This fatalistic acceptance of an inexplicable attitude
makes for an odd incuriousness about motives. The Samoans are not in
the least insensitive to differences between people. But their full
appreciation of these differences is blurred by their conception of
an obstinate disposition, a tendency to take umbrage, irascibility,
contra-suggestibility, and particular biases as just so many roads to
one attitude—_musu_.
[Illustration: _A spirit of the wood_]
This lack of curiosity about motivation is furthered by the
conventional acceptance of a completely ambiguous answer to any
personal question. The most characteristic reply to any question about
one’s motivation is _Ta ilo_, “search me,” sometimes made more specific
by the addition of “I don’t know.”[4] This is considered to be an
adequate and acceptable answer in ordinary conversation although its
slight curtness bars it out from ceremonious occasions. So deep seated
is the habit of using this disclaimer that I had to put a taboo upon
its use by the children in order to get the simplest question answered
directly. When this ambiguous rejoinder is combined with a statement
that one is _musu_, the result is the final unrevealing statement,
“Search me, why, I don’t want to, that’s all.” Plans will be abandoned,
children refuse to live at home, marriages broken off. Village gossip
is interested in the fact but shrugs its shoulders before the motives.
[4] See Appendix I, page 253.
There is one curious exception to this attitude. If an individual
falls ill, the explanation is sought first in the attitudes of his
relatives. Anger in the heart of a relative, especially in that of a
sister, is most potent in producing evil and so the whole household
is convened, a kava ceremony held and each relative solemnly enjoined
to confess what anger there is in his heart against the sick person.
Such injunctions are met either by solemn disclaimers or by detailed
confessions: “Last week my brother came into the house and ate all the
food, and I was angry all day”; or “My brother and I had a quarrel
and my father took my brother’s side and I was angry at my father for
his favouritism towards my brother.” But this special ceremony only
serves to throw into strong relief the prevalent unspeculative attitude
towards motivation. I once saw a girl leave a week-end fishing party
immediately upon arrival at our destination and insist upon returning
in the heat of the day the six miles to the village. But her companions
ventured no hypothesis; she was simply _musu_ to the party.
How great a protection for the individual such an attitude is will
readily be seen when it is remembered how little privacy any one has.
Chief or child, he dwells habitually in a house with at least half a
dozen other people. His possessions are simply rolled in a mat, placed
on the rafters or piled carelessly into a basket or a chest. A chief’s
personal property is likely to be respected, at least by the women of
the household, but no one else can be sure from hour to hour of his
nominal possessions. The tapa which a woman spent three weeks in making
will be given away to a visitor during her temporary absence. The rings
may be begged off her fingers at any moment. Privacy of possessions
is virtually impossible. In the same way, all of an individual’s acts
are public property. An occasional love affair may slip through the
fingers of gossip, and an occasional _moetotolo_ go uncaught, but there
is a very general cognisance on the part of the whole village of the
activity of every single inhabitant. I shall never forget the outraged
expression with which an informant told me that nobody, actually nobody
at all, knew who was the father of Fa’amoana’s baby. The oppressive
atmosphere of the small town is all about them; in an hour children
will have made a dancing song of their most secret acts. This glaring
publicity is compensated for by a violent gloomy secretiveness. Where a
Westerner would say, “Yes, I love him but you’ll never know how far it
went,” a Samoan would say, “Yes, of course I lived with him, but you’ll
never know whether I love him or hate him.”
The Samoan language has no regular comparative. There are several
clumsy ways of expressing comparison by using contrast, “This is
good and that is bad”; or by the locution, “And next to him there
comes, etc.” Comparisons are not habitual although in the rigid
social structure of the community, relative rank is very keenly
recognised. But relative goodness, relative beauty, relative wisdom
are unfamiliar formalisations to them. I tried over and over again
to get judgments as to who was the wisest or the best man of the
community. An informant’s first impulse was always to answer: “Oh, they
are all good”; or, “There are so many wise ones.” Curiously enough,
there seemed to be less difficulty in distinguishing the vicious
than the virtuous. This is probably due to the Missionary influence
which if it has failed to give the native a conviction of Sin, has
at least provided him with a list of sins. Although I often met with
a preliminary response, “There are so many bad boys”; it was usually
qualified spontaneously by “But so-and-so is the worst because he ...”
Ugliness and viciousness were more vivid and unusual attributes of
personality; beauty, wisdom, and kindness were taken for granted.
In an account given of another person the sequence of traits mentioned
followed a set and objective pattern: sex, age, rank, relationship,
defects, activities. Spontaneous comment upon character or personality
were unusual. So a girl describes her grandmother: “Lauuli? Oh, she is
an old woman, very old, she’s my father’s mother. She’s a widow with
one eye. She is too old to go inland but sits in the house all day. She
makes tapa.”[5] This completely unanalytical account is only modified
in the case of exceptionally intelligent adults who are asked to make
judgments.
[5] For additional character sketches see Appendix I, page 253.
In the native classification attitudes are qualified by four terms,
good and bad, easy and difficult, paired. A good child will be said
to listen easily or to act well, a bad child to listen with difficulty
or act badly. “Easy” and “with difficulty” are judgments of character;
“good” and “bad” of behaviour. So that good or bad behaviour have
become, explained in terms of ease or difficulty, to be regarded as an
inherent capability of the individual. As we would say a person sang
easily or swam without effort, the Samoan will say one obeys easily,
acts respectfully, “easily,” reserving the terms “good” or “well”
for objective approbation. So a chief who was commenting on the bad
behaviour of his brother’s daughter remarked, “But Tui’s children
always did listen with difficulty,” with as casual an acceptance of an
irradicable defect as if he had said, “But John always did have poor
eye sight.”
Such an attitude towards conduct is paralleled by an equally unusual
attitude towards the expression of emotion. The expressions of emotions
are classified as “caused” and “uncaused.” The emotional, easily upset,
moody person is described as laughing without cause, crying without
cause, showing anger or pugnaciousness without cause. The expression
“to be very angry without cause” does not carry the implication of
quick temper, which is expressed by the word “to anger easily,” nor the
connotation of a disproportionate response to a legitimate stimulus,
but means literally to be angry without cause, or freely, an emotional
state without any apparent stimulus whatsoever. Such judgments are the
nearest that the Samoan approaches to evaluation of temperament as
opposed to character. The well-integrated individual who approximates
closely to the attitudes of his age and sex group is not accused of
laughing, crying, or showing anger without cause. Without inquiry it is
assumed that he has good typical reasons for a behaviour which would be
scrutinised and scorned in the case of the temperamental deviant. And
always excessive emotion, violent preferences, strong allegiances are
disallowed. The Samoan preference is for a middle course, a moderate
amount of feeling, a discreet expression of a reasonable and balanced
attitude. Those who care greatly are always said to care without cause.
The one most disliked trait in a contemporary is expressed by the term
_fiasili_, literally “desiring to be highest,” more idiomatically,
“stuck up.” This is the comment of the age mate where an older person
would use the disapproving _tautala laititi_, “presuming above one’s
age.” It is essentially the resentful comment of those who are ignored,
neglected, left behind upon those who excel them, scorn them, pass them
by. As a term of reproach it is neither as dreaded nor as resented as
the _tautala laititi_ because envy is felt to play a part in the taunt.
In the casual conversations, the place of idle speculation about
motivation is taken by explanations in terms of physical defect or
objective misfortune, thus “Sila is crying over in that house. Well,
Sila is deaf.” “Tulipa is angry at her brother. Tulipa’s mother went
to Tutuila last week.” Although these statements have the earmarks of
attempted explanations they are really only conversational habits. The
physical defect or recent incident, is not specifically invoked but
merely mentioned with slightly greater and more deprecatory emphasis.
The whole preoccupation is with the individual as an actor, and the
motivations peculiar to his psychology are left an unplumbed mystery.
Judgments are always made in terms of age groups, from the standpoints
of the group of the speaker and the age of the person judged. A young
boy will not be regarded as an intelligent or stupid, attractive or
unattractive, clumsy or skilful person. He is a bright little boy of
nine who runs errands efficiently and is wise enough to hold his tongue
when his elders are present, or a promising youth of eighteen who can
make excellent speeches in the _Aumaga_, lead a fishing expedition
with discretion and treat the chiefs with the respect which is due to
them, or a wise _matai_, whose words are few and well chosen and who
is good at weaving eel traps. The virtues of the child are not the
virtues of the adult. And the judgment of the speaker is similarly
influenced by age, so that the relative estimation of character varies
also. Pre-adolescent boys and girls will vote that boy and girl worst
who are most pugnacious, irascible, contentious, rowdy. Young people
from sixteen to twenty shift their censure from the rowdy and bully
to the licentious, the _moetotolo_ among the boys, the notoriously
promiscuous among the girls; while adults pay very little attention
to sex offenders and stress instead the inept, the impudent and the
disobedient among the young, and the lazy, the stupid, the quarrelsome
and the unreliable as the least desirable characters among the adults.
When an adult is speaking the standards of conduct are graded in
this fashion: small children should keep quiet, wake up early, obey,
work hard and cheerfully, play with children of their own sex; young
people should work industriously and skilfully, not be presuming,
marry discreetly, be loyal to their relatives, not carry tales, nor
be trouble makers; while adults should be wise, peaceable, serene,
generous, anxious for the good prestige of their village and conduct
their lives with all good form and decorum. No prominence is given to
the subtler facts of intelligence and temperament. Preference between
the sexes is given not to the arrogant, the flippant, the courageous,
but to the quiet, the demure boy or girl who “speaks softly and treads
lightly.”
X
THE EXPERIENCE AND INDIVIDUALITY OF THE AVERAGE GIRL[6]
With a background of knowledge about Samoan custom, of the way in which
a child is educated, of the claims which the community makes upon
children and young people, of the attitude towards sex and personality,
we come to the tale of the group of girls with whom I spent many
months, the group of girls between ten and twenty years of age who
lived in the three little villages on the lee side of the island of
Taū. In their lives as a group, in their responses as individuals, lies
the answer to the question: What is coming of age like in Samoa?
[6] See Tables and Summaries in Appendix IV.
The reader will remember that the principal activity of the little
girls was baby-tending. They could also do reef fishing, weave a
ball and make a pin-wheel, climb a cocoanut tree, keep themselves
afloat in a swimming hole which changed its level fifteen feet with
every wave, grate off the skin of a breadfruit or taro, sweep the
sanded yard of the house, carry water from the sea, do simple washing
and dance a somewhat individualised _siva_. Their knowledge of the
biology of life and death was overdeveloped in proportion to their
knowledge of the organisation of their society or any of the niceties
of conduct prescribed for their elders. They were in a position which
would be paralleled in our culture if a child had seen birth and death
before she was taught not to pass a knife blade first or how to make
change for a quarter. None of these children could speak the courtesy
language, even in its most elementary forms, their knowledge being
confined to four or five words of invitation and acceptance. This
ignorance effectually barred them from the conversations of their
elders upon all ceremonial occasions. Spying upon a gathering of chiefs
would have been an unrewarding experience. They knew nothing of the
social organisation of the village beyond knowing which adults were
heads of families and which adult men and women were married. They used
the relationship terms loosely and without any real understanding,
often substituting the term, “sibling of my own sex,” where a sibling
of opposite sex was meant, and when they applied the term “brother” to
a young uncle, they did so without the clarity of their elders who,
while using the term in an age-grouping sense, realised perfectly that
the “brother” was really a mother’s or father’s brother. In their
use of language their immaturity was chiefly evidenced by a lack of
familiarity with the courtesy language, and by much confusion in the
use of the dual and of the inclusive and exclusive pronouns. These
present about the same difficulty in their language as the use of
a nominative after the verb “to be” in English. They had also not
acquired a mastery of the processes for manipulating the vocabulary
by the use of very freely combining prefixes and suffixes. A child
will use the term _fa’a Samoa_, “in Samoan fashion,” or _fa’atama_,
tomboy, but fail to use the convenient _fa’a_ in making a new and less
stereotyped comparison, using instead some less convenient linguistic
circumlocution.[7]
[7] See Appendix I, page 256.
All of these children had seen birth and death. They had seen many
dead bodies. They had watched miscarriage and peeked under the arms
of the old women who were washing and commenting upon the undeveloped
fœtus. There was no convention of sending children of the family away
at such times, although the hordes of neighbouring children were
scattered with a shower of stones if any of the older women could take
time from the more absorbing events to hurl them. But the feeling here
was that children were noisy and troublesome; there was no desire to
protect them from shock or to keep them in ignorance. About half of the
children had seen a partly developed fœtus, which the Samoans fear will
otherwise be born as an avenging ghost, cut from a woman’s dead body in
the open grave. If shock is the result of early experiences with birth,
death, or sex activities, it should surely be manifest here in this
postmortem Cæsarian where grief for the dead, fear of death, a sense of
horror and a dread of contamination from contact with the dead, the
open, unconcealed operation and the sight of the distorted, repulsive
fœtus all combine to render the experience indelible. An only slightly
less emotionally charged experience was the often witnessed operation
of cutting open any dead body to search out the cause of death. These
operations performed in the shallow open grave, beneath a glaring
noon-day sun, with a frighted, excited crowd watching in horrified
fascination, are hardly orderly or unemotional initiations into the
details of biology and death, and yet they seem to leave no bad effects
on the children’s emotional make-up. Possibly the adult attitude that
these are horrible but perfectly natural, non-unique occurrences,
forming a legitimate part of the child’s experience, may sufficiently
account for the lack of bad results. Children take an intense interest
in life and death, and are more proportionately obsessed by it than
are their adults who divide their horror between the death of a young
neighbour in child-bed and the fact that the high chief has been
insulted by some breach of etiquette in the neighbouring village. The
intricacies of the social life are a closed book to the child and a
correspondingly fascinating field of exploration in later life, while
the facts of life and death are shorn of all mystery at an early age.
In matters of sex the ten-year-olds are equally sophisticated, although
they witness sex activities only surreptitiously, since all expressions
of affection are rigorously barred in public. A couple whose wedding
night may have been spent in a room with ten other people will
never the less shrink in shame from even touching hands in public.
Individuals between whom there have been sex relations are said to be
“shy of each other,” and manifest this shyness in different fashion but
with almost the same intensity as in the brother and sister avoidance.
Husbands and wives never walk side by side through the village, for
the husband, particularly, would be “ashamed.” So no Samoan child
is accustomed to seeing father and mother exchange casual caresses.
The customary salutation by rubbing noses is, of course, as highly
conventionalised and impersonal as our handshake. The only sort of
demonstration which ever occurs in public is of the horseplay variety
between young people whose affections are not really involved. This
romping is particularly prevalent in groups of women, often taking the
form of playfully snatching at the sex organs.
But the lack of privacy within the houses where mosquito netting marks
off purely formal walls about the married couples, and the custom of
young lovers of using the palm groves for their rendezvous, makes it
inevitable that children should see intercourse, often and between many
different people. In many cases they have not seen first intercourse,
which is usually accompanied by greater shyness and precaution. With
the passing of the public ceremony, defloration forms one of the few
mysteries in a young Samoan’s knowledge of life. But scouring the
village palm groves in search of lovers is one of the recognised forms
of amusement for the ten-year-olds.
Samoan children have complete knowledge of the human body and its
functions, owing to the custom of little children going unclothed, the
scant clothing of adults, the habit of bathing in the sea, the use of
the beach as a latrine and the lack of privacy in sexual life. They
also have a vivid understanding of the nature of sex. Masturbation
is an all but universal habit, beginning at the age of six or seven.
There were only three little girls in my group who did not masturbate.
Theoretically it is discontinued with the beginning of heterosexual
activity and only resumed again in periods of enforced continence.
Among grown boys and girls casual homosexual practices also supplant
it to a certain extent. Boys masturbate in groups but among little
girls it is a more individualistic, secretive practice. This habit
seems never to be a matter of individual discovery, one child always
learning from another. The adult ban only covers the unseemliness of
open indulgence.
The adult attitude towards all the details of sex is characterised by
this view that they are unseemly, not that they are wrong. Thus a youth
would think nothing of shouting the length of the village, “Ho, maiden,
wait for me in your bed to-night,” but public comment upon the details
of sex or of evacuation were considered to be in bad taste. All the
words which are thus banished from polite conversation are cherished
by the children who roll the salacious morsels under their tongues
with great relish. The children of seven and eight get as much illicit
satisfaction out of the other functions of the body as out of sex. This
is interesting in view of the different attitude in Samoa towards the
normal processes of evacuation. There is no privacy and no sense of
shame. Nevertheless the brand of bad taste seems to be as effective in
interesting the young children as is the brand of indecency among us.
It is also curious that in theory and in fact boys and men take a more
active interest in the salacious than do the women and girls.
It seems difficult to account for a salacious attitude among a people
where so little is mysterious, so little forbidden. The precepts of the
missionaries may have modified the native attitude more than the native
practice. And the adult attitude towards children as non-participants
may also be an important causal factor. For this seems to be the more
correct view of any prohibitions which govern children. There is little
evidence of a desire to preserve a child’s innocence or to protect it
from witnessing behaviour, the following of which would constitute
the heinous offence, _tautala laititi_ (“presuming above one’s age”).
For while a pair of lovers would never indulge in any demonstration
before any one, child or adult, who was merely a spectator, three
or four pairs of lovers who are relatives or friends often choose a
common rendezvous. (This, of course, excludes relatives of opposite
sex, included in the brother and sister avoidance, although married
brothers and sisters might live in the same house after marriage.)
From the night dances, now discontinued under missionary influence,
which usually ended in a riot of open promiscuity, children and
old people were excluded, as non-participants whose presence as
uninvolved spectators would have been indecent. This attitude towards
non-participants characterised all emotionally charged events, a
women’s weaving bee which was of a formal, ceremonial nature, a
house-building, a candle-nut burning—these were activities at which the
presence of a spectator would have been unseemly.
Yet, coupled with the sophistication of the children went no
pre-adolescent heterosexual experimentation and very little
homosexual activity which was regarded in native theory as imitative
of and substitutive for heterosexual. The lack of precocious sex
experimentation is probably due less to the parental ban on such
precocity than to the strong institutionalised antagonism between
younger boys and younger girls and the taboo against any amiable
intercourse between them. This rigid sex dichotomy may also be
operative in determining the lack of specialisation of sex feeling in
adults. Since there is a heavily charged avoidance feeling towards
brother and cousins, and a tendency to lump all other males together
as the enemy who will some day be one’s lovers, there are no males in
a girl’s age group whom she ever regards simply as individuals without
relation to sex.
Such then was the experience of the twenty-eight little girls in the
three villages. In temperament and character they varied enormously.
There was Tita, who at nine acted like a child of seven, was still
principally preoccupied with food, completely irresponsible as to
messages and commissions, satisfied to point a proud fat finger at
her father who was town crier. Only a year her senior was Pele,
the precocious little sister of the loosest woman in the village.
Pele spent most of her time caring for her sister’s baby which, she
delighted in telling you, was of disputed parentage. Her dancing in
imitation of her sister’s was daring and obscene. Yet, despite the
burden of the heavy ailing baby which she carried always on her hip
and the sordidness of her home where her fifty-year-old mother still
took occasional lovers and her weak-kneed insignificant father lived
a hen-pecked ignominious existence, Pele’s attitude towards life was
essentially gay and sane. Better than suggestive dancing she liked
hunting for rare _samoana_ shells along the beach or diving feet first
into the swimming hole or hunting for land crabs in the moonlight.
Fortunately for her, she lived in the centre of the Lumā gang. In a
more isolated spot her unwholesome home and natural precocity might
have developed very differently. As it was, she differed far less from
the other children in her group than her family, the most notorious in
the village, differed from the families of her companions. In a Samoan
village the influence of the home environment is being continually
offset in the next generation by group activities through which the
normal group standards assert themselves. This was universally true for
the boys for whom the many years’ apprenticeship in the _Aumaga_ formed
an excellent school for disciplining individual peculiarities. In the
case of the girls this function was formerly performed in part by the
_Aualuma_, but, as I pointed out in the chapter on the girl and her age
group, the little girl is much more dependent upon her neighbourhood
than is the boy. As an adult she is also more dependent upon her
relationship group.
Tuna, who lived next door to Pele, was in a different plight, the
unwilling little victim of the great Samoan sin of _tautala laititi_.
Her sister Lila had eloped at fifteen with a seventeen-year-old boy. A
pair of hot-headed children, they had never thoroughly re-established
themselves with the community, although their families had relented
and solemnised the marriage with an appropriate exchange of property.
Lila still smarted under the public disapproval of her precocity and
lavished a disproportionate amount of affection upon her obstreperous
baby whose incessant crying was the bane of the neighbourhood. After
spoiling him beyond endurance, she would hand him over to Tuna. Tuna,
a stocky little creature with a large head and enormous melting
eyes, looked at life from a slightly oblique angle. She was a little
more calculating than the other children, a little more watchful for
returns, less given to gratuitous outlays of personal service. Her
sister’s overindulgence of the baby made Tuna’s task much harder than
those of her companions. But she reaped her reward in the slightly
extra gentleness with which they treated their most burdened associate,
and here again the group saved her from a pronounced temperamental
response to the exigencies of her home life.
A little further away lived Fitu and Ula, Maliu and Pola, two pairs of
sisters. Fitu and Maliu, girls of about thirteen, were just withdrawing
from the gang, turning their younger brothers and sisters over to Ula
and Pola, and beginning to take a more active part in the affairs of
their households. Ula was alert, pretty, pampered. Her household might
in all fairness be compared to ours; it consisted of her mother, her
father, two sisters and two brothers. True, her uncle who lived next
door was the _matai_ of the household, but still this little biological
family had a strong separate existence of its own and the children
showed the results of it. Lalala, the mother, was an intelligent
and still beautiful woman, even after bearing six children in close
succession. She came from a family of high rank, and because she had
had no brothers, her father had taught her much of the genealogical
material usually taught to the favourite son. Her knowledge of the
social structure of the community and of the minutiæ of the ceremonies
which had formerly surrounded the court of the king of Manu’a was as
full as that of any middle-aged man in the community. She was skilled
in the handicrafts and her brain was full of new designs and unusual
applications of material. She knew several potent medical remedies
and had many patients. Married at fifteen, while still a virgin,
her marital life, which had begun with the cruel public defloration
ceremony, had been her only sex experience. She adored her husband,
whose poverty was due to his having come from another island and not
to laziness or inability. Lalala made her choices in life with a full
recognition of the facts of her existence. There was too much for her
to do. She had no younger sisters to bear the brunt of baby-tending for
her. There were no youths to help her husband in the plantations. Well
and good, she would not wrestle with the inevitable. And so Lalala’s
house was badly kept. Her children were dirty and bedraggled. But her
easy good nature did not fail her as she tried to weave a fine mat
on some blazing afternoon, while the baby played with the brittle
easily broken pandanus strands, and doubled her work. But all of this
reacted upon Fitu, lanky, ill-favoured executive little creature that
she was. Fitu combined a passionate devotion to her mother with an
obsessive solicitude for her younger brothers and sisters. Towards
Ula alone her attitude was mixed. Ula, fifteen months younger, was
pretty, lithe, flexible and indolent. While Fitu was often teased by
her mother and rebuked by her companions for being like a boy, Ula
was excessively feminine. She worked as hard as any other child of
her age, but Fitu felt that their mother and their home were unusual
and demanded more than the average service and devotion. She and her
mother were like a pair of comrades, and Fitu bossed and joked with
her mother in a fashion shocking to all Samoan onlookers. If Fitu was
away at night, her mother went herself to look for her, instead of
sending another child. Fitu was the eldest daughter, with a precocity
bred of responsibility and an efficiency which was the direct outcome
of her mother’s laissez-faire attitude. Ula showed equally clearly the
effect of being the prettier younger sister, trading upon her superior
attractiveness and more meagre sense of duty. These children, as did
the children in all three of the biological families in the three
villages, showed more character, more sharply defined personality,
greater precocity and a more personal, more highly charged attitude
towards their parents.
It would be easy to lay too much stress on the differences between
children in large households and children in small ones. There were,
of course, too few cases to draw any final conclusions. But the small
family in Samoa _did_ demand from the child the very qualities which
were frowned upon in Samoan society, based upon the ideal of great
households in which there were many youthful labourers who knew their
place. And in these small families where responsibility and initiative
were necessary, the children seemed to develop them much earlier
than in the more usual home environment in which any display of such
qualities was sternly frowned upon.
This was the case with Malui and Meta, Ipu and Vi, Mata, Tino and
Lama, little girls just approaching puberty who lived in large
heterogeneous households. They were giving over baby-tending for more
productive work. They were reluctantly acquiring some of the rudiments
of etiquette; they were slowly breaking their play affiliations with
the younger children. But all of this was an enforced change of habits
rather than any change in attitude. They were conscious of their new
position as almost grown girls who could be trusted to go fishing or
work on the plantations. Under their short dresses they again wore
_lavalavas_ which they had almost forgotten how to keep fastened. These
dragged about their legs and cramped their movements and fell off if
they broke into a sprint. Most of all they missed the gang life and
eyed a little wistfully the activities of their younger relatives.
Their large impersonal households provided them with no personal
drives, invested them with no intriguing responsibilities. They were
simply little girls who were robust enough to do heavy work and old
enough to learn to do skilled work, and so had less time for play.
In general attitude, they differed not at all from Tolo, from
Tulipa, from Lua, or Lata, whose first menstruation was a few months
past. No ceremony had marked the difference between the two groups.
No social attitude testified to a crisis past. They were told not to
make kava while menstruating, but the participation in a restriction
they’d known about all their lives was unimpressive. Some of them had
made kava before puberty, others had not. It depended entirely upon
whether there was an available girl or boy about when a chief wished
to have some kava made. In more rigorous days a girl could not make
kava nor marry until she menstruated. But the former restriction had
yielded to the requirements of expediency. The menstruating girl
experienced very little pain which might have served to stress for her
her new maturity. All of the girls reported back or abdominal pains
which, however, were so slight that they seldom interfered in any way
with their usual activities. In the table I have counted it unusual
pain whenever a girl was incapacitated for work, but these cases were
in no sense comparable to severe cases of menstrual cramps in our
civilisation. They were unaccompanied by dizziness, fainting spells,
or pain sufficient to call forth groaning or writhing. The idea of
such pain struck all Samoan women as bizarre and humorous when it was
described to them. And no special solicitude for her health, mental
or physical, was shown to the menstruating girl. From foreign medical
advice they had learned that bathing during menstruation was bad, and
a mother occasionally cautioned her daughter not to bathe. There was
no sense of shame connected with puberty nor any need of concealment.
Pre-adolescent children took the news that a girl had reached puberty,
a woman had had a baby, a boat had come from Ofu, or a pig had been
killed by a falling boulder with the same insouciance—all bits of
diverting gossip; and any girl could give accurate testimony as to the
development of any other girl in her neighbourhood or relationship
groups. Nor was puberty the immediate forerunner of sex experience.
Perhaps a year, two or even three years would pass before a girl’s
shyness would relax, or her figure appeal to the roving eye of some
older boy. To be a virgin’s first lover was considered the high point
of pleasure and amorous virtuosity, so that a girl’s first lover was
usually not a boy of her own age, equally shy and inexperienced. The
girls in this group were divided into little girls like Lua, and
gawky overgrown Tolo, who said frankly that they did not want to go
walking with boys, and girls like Pala, who while still virgins, were
a little weary of their status and eager for amorous experience. That
they remained in this passive untouched state so long was mainly due
to the conventions of love-making, for while a youth liked to woo a
virgin, he feared ridicule as a cradle-snatcher, while the girls also
feared the dreaded accusation of _tautala laititi_ (“presuming above
one’s age”). The forays of more seasoned middle-aged marauders among
these very young girls were frowned upon, and so the adolescent girls
were given a valuable interval in which to get accustomed to new work,
greater isolation and an unfamiliar physical development. The next
older girls were definitely divided as to whether or not they lived in
the pastor’s households. A glance at the table in the appendix will
show that among the girls a couple of years past puberty, there is a
definite inverse correlation between residence at home and chastity,
with only one exception, Ela, who had been forgiven and taken back into
the household of a pastor where workers were short. Ela’s best friend
was her cousin, Talo, the only girl in the group who had sex experience
before menstruation had begun. But Talo was clearly a case of delayed
menstruation; all the other signs of puberty were present. Her aunt
shrugged her shoulders in the face of Talo’s obvious sophistication
and winning charm and made no attempt to control her. The friendship
between these two girls was one of the really important friendships in
the whole group. Both girls definitely proclaimed their preference, and
their homosexual practices were undoubtedly instrumental in producing
Talo’s precocity and solacing Ela for the stricter régime of the
pastor’s household.
These casual homosexual relations between girls never assumed any
long-time importance. On the part of growing girls or women who
were working together they were regarded as a pleasant and natural
diversion, just tinged with the salacious. Where heterosexual
relationships were so casual, so shallowly channelled, there was
no pattern into which homosexual relationships could fall. Native
theory and vocabulary recognised the real pervert who was incapable
of normal heterosexual response, and the very small population is
probably sufficient explanation for the rarity of these types. I saw
only one, Sasi, a boy of twenty who was studying for the ministry.
He was slightly but not pronouncedly feminine in appearance, was
skilled at women’s work and his homosexual drive was strong enough to
goad him into making continual advances to other boys. He spent more
time casually in the company of girls, maintained a more easy-going
friendship with them than any other boy on the island. Sasi had
proposed marriage to a girl in a pastor’s household in a distant
village and been refused, but as there was a rule that divinity
students must marry before ordination, this has little significance. I
could find no evidence that he had ever had heterosexual relations and
the girls’ casual attitude towards him was significant. They regarded
him as an amusing freak while the men to whom he had made advances
looked upon him with mingled annoyance and contempt. There were no
girls who presented such a clear picture although three of the deviants
discussed in the next chapter were clearly mixed types, without,
however, showing convincing evidence of genuine perversion.
The general preoccupation with sex, the attitude that minor sex
activities, suggestive dancing, stimulating salacious conversation,
salacious songs and definitely motivated tussling are all acceptable
and attractive diversions, is mainly responsible for the native
attitude towards homosexual practices. They are simply _play_, neither
frowned upon nor given much consideration. As heterosexual relations
are given significance not by love and a tremendous fixation upon one
individual, the only forces which can make a homosexual relationship
lasting and important, but by children and the place of marriage in the
economic and social structure of the village, it is easy to understand
why very prevalent homosexual practices have no more important or
striking results. The recognition and use in heterosexual relations
of all the secondary variations of sex activity which loom as primary
in homosexual relations are instrumental also in minimising their
importance. The effects of chance childhood perversions, the fixation
of attention on unusual erogenous zones with consequent transfer of
sensitivity from the more normal centres, the absence of a definite
and accomplished specialisation of erogenous zones—all the accidents
of emotional development which in a civilisation, recognising only
one narrow form of sex activity, result in unsatisfactory marriages,
casual homosexuality and prostitution, are here rendered harmless. The
Samoan puts the burden of amatory success upon the man and believes
that women need more initiating, more time for the maturing of sex
feeling. A man who fails to satisfy a woman is looked upon as a clumsy,
inept blunderer, a fit object for village ridicule and contempt. The
women in turn are conscious that their lovers use a definite technique
which they regard with a sort of fatalism as if all men had a set
of slightly magical, wholly irresistible, tricks up their sleeves.
But amatory lore is passed down from one man to another and is looked
upon much more self-consciously and analytically by men than by women.
Parents are shy of going beyond the bounds of casual conversation
(naturally these are much wider than in our civilisation) in the
discussion of sex with their children, so that definite instruction
passes from the man of twenty-five to the boy of eighteen rather than
from father to son. The girls learn from the boys and do very little
confiding in each other. All of a man’s associates will know every
detail of some unusual sex experience while the girl involved will
hardly have confided the bare outlines to any one. Her lack of any
confidants except relatives towards whom there is always a slight
barrier of reserve (I have seen a girl shudder away from acting as an
ambassador to her sister) may partly account for this.
The fact that educating one sex in detail and merely fortifying
the other sex with enough knowledge and familiarity with sex to
prevent shock produces normal sex adjustments is due to the free
experimentation which is permitted and the rarity with which both
lovers are amateurs. I knew of only one such case, where two children,
a sixteen-year-old boy and a fifteen-year-old girl, both in boarding
schools on another island, ran away together. Through inexperience
they bungled badly. They were both expelled from school, and the boy
is now a man of twenty-four with high intelligence and real charm,
but a notorious _moetotolo_, execrated by every girl in his village.
Familiarity with sex, and the recognition of a need of a technique to
deal with sex as an art, have produced a scheme of personal relations
in which there are no neurotic pictures, no frigidity, no impotence,
except as the temporary result of severe illness, and the capacity for
intercourse only once in a night is counted as senility.
Of the twenty-five girls past puberty, eleven had had heterosexual
experience. Fala, Tolu, and Namu were three cousins who were popular
with the youths of their own village and also with visitors from
distant Fitiuta. The women of Fala’s family were of easy virtue; Tolu’s
father was dead and she lived with her blind mother in the home of
Namu’s parents, who, burdened with six children under twelve years
of age, were not going to risk losing two efficient workers by too
close supervision. The three girls made common rendezvous with their
lovers and their liaisons were frequent and gay. Tolu, the eldest, was
a little weary after three years of casual adventures and professed
herself willing to marry. She later moved into the household of an
important chief in order to improve her chances of meeting strange
youths who might be interested in matrimony. Namu was genuinely taken
with a boy from Fitiuta whom she met in secret while a boy of her
own village whom her parents favoured courted her openly. Occasional
assignations with other boys of her own village relieved the monotony
of life between visits from her preferred lover. Fala, the youngest,
was content to let matters drift. Her lovers were friends and relatives
of the lovers of her cousins and she was still sufficiently childlike
and uninvolved to get almost as much enjoyment out of her cousins’
love affairs as out of her own. All three of these girls worked hard,
doing the full quota of work for an adult. All day they fished, washed,
worked on the plantation, wove mats and blinds. Tolu was exceptionally
clever at weaving. They were valuable economic assets to their
families; they would be valuable to the husbands whom their families
were not over anxious to find for them.
In the next village lived Luna, a lazy good-natured girl, three years
past puberty. Her mother was dead. Her father had married again, but
the second wife had gone back to her own people. Luna lived for several
years in the pastor’s household and had gone home when her stepmother
left her father. Her father was a very old chief, tremendously
preoccupied with his prestige and reputation in the village. He held
an important title; he was a master craftsman; he was the best versed
man in the village in ancient lore and details of ceremonial procedure.
His daughter was a devoted and efficient attendant. It was enough.
Luna tired of the younger girls who had been her companions in the
pastor’s household and sought instead two young married women among her
relatives. One of these, a girl who had deserted her husband and was
living with a temporary successor came to live in Luna’s household.
She and Luna were constant companions, and Luna, quite easily and
inevitably took one lover, then two, then a third—all casual affairs.
She dressed younger than her years, emphasised that she was still
a girl. Some day she would marry and be a church member, but now:
_Laititi a’u_ (“I am but young”). And who was she to give up dancing.
Her cousin Lotu was a church member, and had attended the missionary
boarding school. She had had only one accepted lover, the illegitimate
son of a chief who dared not jeopardise his very slender chance of
succeeding to his father’s title by marrying her. She was the eldest
of nine children, living in the third strictly biological family in
the village. She showed the effects of greater responsibility at home
by a quiet maturity and decision of manner, of her school training
in a greater neatness of person and regard for the nicety of detail.
Although she was transgressing, the older church members charitably
closed their eyes, sympathising with her lover’s family dilemma. Her
only other sex experience had been with a _moetotolo_, a relative.
Should her long fidelity to her lover lead to pregnancy, she would
probably bear the child. (When a Samoan woman does wish to avoid
giving birth to a child, exceedingly violent massage and the chewing
of kava is resorted to, but this is only in very exceptional cases,
as even illegitimate children are enthusiastically welcomed.) Lotu’s
attitudes were more considered, more sophisticated than those of the
other girls of her age. Had it not been for the precarious social
status of her lover, she would probably have been married already. As
it was, she laboured over the care of her younger brothers and sisters,
and followed the routine of relationship duties incumbent upon a young
girl in the largest family on the island. She reconciled her church
membership and her deviation from chastity by the tranquil reflection
that she would have married had it been possible, and her sin rested
lightly upon her.
In the household of one high chief lived the Samoan version of our
devoted maiden aunts. She was docile, efficient, responsible, entirely
overshadowed by several more attractive girls. To her were entrusted
the new-born babies and the most difficult diplomatic errands. Hard
work which she never resented took up all her time and energy. When she
was asked to dance, she did so negligently. Others dancing so much more
brilliantly, why make the effort? Hers was the appreciative worshipping
disposition which glowed over Tolu’s beauty or Fala’s conquests or
Alofi’s new baby. She played the ukulele for others to dance, sewed
flower necklaces for others to wear, planned rendezvous for others to
enjoy, without humiliation or a special air of martyrdom. She admitted
that she had had but one lover. He had come from far away; she didn’t
even know from what village, and he had never come back. Yes, probably
she would marry some day if her chief so willed it, and was that the
baby crying? She was the stuff of whom devoted aunts are made, depended
upon and loved by all about her. A _malaga_ to another village might
have changed her life, for Samoa boys sought strange girls merely
because they were strangers. But she was always needed at home by some
one and younger girls went journeying in her stead.
Perhaps the most dramatic story was that of Moana, the last of the
group of girls who lived outside the pastors’ households, a vain,
sophisticated child, spoiled by years of trading upon her older
half-sister’s devotion. Her amours had begun at fifteen and by the time
a year and a half had passed, her parents, fearing that her conduct
was becoming so indiscreet as to seriously mar her chances of making
a good marriage, asked her uncle to adopt her and attempt to curb her
waywardness. This uncle, who was a widower and a sophisticated rake,
when he realised the extent of his niece’s experience, availed himself
also of her complacency. This incident, not common in Samoa, because of
the great lack of privacy and isolation, would have passed undetected
in this case, if Moana’s older sister, Sila, had not been in love with
the uncle also. This was the only example of prolonged and intense
passion which I found in the three villages. Samoans rate romantic
fidelity in terms of days or weeks at most, and are inclined to scoff
at tales of life-long devotion. (They greeted the story of Romeo and
Juliet with incredulous contempt.) But Sila was devoted to Mutu, her
stepfather’s younger brother, to the point of frenzy. She had been his
mistress and still lived in his household, but his dilettantism had
veered away from her indecorous intensity. When she discovered that
he had lived with her sister, her fury knew no bounds. Masked under a
deep solicitude for the younger girl, whom she claimed was an innocent
untouched child, she denounced Mutu the length of the three villages.
Moana’s parents fetched her home again in a great rage and a family
feud resulted. Village feeling ran high, but opinion was divided as to
whether Mutu was guilty, Moana lying to cover some other peccadillo
or Sila gossiping from spite. The incident was in direct violation of
the brother and sister taboo for Mutu was young enough for Moana to
speak of him as _tuagane_ (brother). But when two months later, another
older sister died during pregnancy, it was necessary to find some one
stout-hearted enough to perform the necessary Cæsarian post-mortem
operation. After a violent family debate, expediency triumphed and
Mutu, most skilled of native surgeons, was summoned to operate on the
dead body of the sister of the girl he had violated. When he later on
announced his intention of marrying a girl from another island, Sila
again displayed the most uncontrolled grief and despair, although she
herself was carrying on a love affair at the time.
The lives of the girls who lived in the pastor’s household differed
from those of their less restricted sisters and cousins only in the
fact that they had no love affairs and lived a more regular and ordered
existence. For the excitement of moonlight trysts they substituted
group activities, letting the pleasant friendliness of a group of
girls fill their lesser leisure. Their interest in salacious material
was slightly stronger than the interest of the girls who were free to
experiment. They made real friends outside their relationship group,
trusted other girls more, worked better in a group, were more at
ease with one another but less conscious of their place in their own
households than were the others.
With the exception of the few cases to be discussed in the next
chapter, adolescence represented no period of crisis or stress, but was
instead an orderly developing of a set of slowly maturing interests and
activities. The girls’ minds were perplexed by no conflicts, troubled
by no philosophical queries, beset by no remote ambitions. To live as
a girl with many lovers as long as possible and then to marry in one’s
own village, near one’s own relatives and to have many children, these
were uniform and satisfying ambitions.
XI
THE GIRL IN CONFLICT
Were there no conflicts, no temperaments which deviated so markedly
from the normal that clash was inevitable? Was the diffused affection
and the diffused authority of the large families, the ease of moving
from one family to another, the knowledge of sex and the freedom to
experiment a sufficient guarantee to all Samoan girls of a perfect
adjustment? In almost all cases, yes. But I have reserved for this
chapter the tales of the few girls who deviated in temperament or in
conduct, although in many cases these deviations were only charged with
possibilities of conflict, and actually had no painful results.
The girl between fourteen and twenty stands at the centre of household
pressure and can expend her irritation at her elders on those over
whom she is in a position of authority. The possibility of escape
seems to temper her restiveness under authority and the irritation
of her elders also. When to the fear of a useful worker’s running
away is added also the fear of a daughter’s indulging in a public
elopement, and thus lowering her marriage value, any marked exercise
of parental authority is considerably mitigated. Violent outbursts of
wrath and summary chastisements do occur but consistent and prolonged
disciplinary measures are absent, and a display of temper is likely to
be speedily followed by conciliatory measures. This, of course, applies
only to the relation between a girl and her elders. Often conflicts of
personality between young people of the same age in a household are
not so tempered, but the removal of one party to the conflict, the
individual with the weakest claims upon the household, is here also
the most frequent solution. The fact that the age-group gang breaks
up before adolescence and is never resumed except in a highly formal
manner, coupled with the decided preference for household rather than
group solidarity, accounts for the scarcity of conflict here. The child
who shuns her age mates is more available for household work and is
never worried by questions as to why she doesn’t run and play with the
other children. On the other hand, the tolerance of the children in
accepting physical defect or slight strangeness of temperament prevents
any child’s suffering from undeserved ostracism.
The child who is unfavourably located in the village is the only real
exile. Should the age group last over eight or ten years of age, the
exiles would certainly suffer or very possibly as they grew bolder,
venture farther from home. But the breakdown of the gang just as the
children are bold enough and free enough to go ten houses from home,
prevents either of these two results from occurring.
The absence of any important institutionalised relationship to the
community is perhaps the strongest cause for lack of conflict here.
The community makes no demands upon the young girls except for the
occasional ceremonial service rendered at the meetings of older women.
Were they delinquent in such duties it would be primarily the concern
of their own households whose prestige would suffer thereby. A boy
who refuses to attend the meetings of the _Aumaga_, or to join in the
communal work, comes in for strong group disapproval and hostility, but
a girl owes so small a debt to her community that it does not greatly
concern itself to collect it.
The opportunity to experiment freely, the complete familiarity with sex
and the absence of very violent preferences make her sex experiences
less charged with possibilities of conflict than they are in a more
rigid and self-conscious civilisation. Cases of passionate jealousy do
occur but they are matters for extended comment and amazement. During
nine months in the islands only four cases came to my attention, a girl
who informed against a faithless lover accusing him of incest, a girl
who bit off part of a rival’s ear, a woman whose husband had deserted
her and who fought and severely injured her successor, and a girl who
falsely accused a rival of stealing. But jealousy is less expected and
less sympathised with than among us, and consequently there is less
of a pattern to which an individual may respond. Possibly conditions
may also be simplified by the Samoan recognition and toleration
of vindictive detraction and growling about a rival. There are no
standards of good form which prescribe an insincere acceptance of
defeat, no insistence on reticence and sportsmanship. So a great deal
of slight irritation can be immediately dissipated. Friendships are of
so casual and shifting a nature that they give rise to neither jealousy
nor conflict. Resentment is expressed by subdued grumblings and any
strong resentment results in the angry one’s leaving the household or
sometimes the village.
[Illustration: _In the bark cloth costume of long ago_]
[Illustration: _Dressed up in her big sister’s dancing skirt_]
In the girl’s religious life the attitude of the missionaries was
the decisive one. The missionaries require chastity for church
membership and discouraged church membership before marriage, except
for the young people in the missionary boarding schools who could
be continually supervised. This passive acceptance by the religious
authorities themselves of pre-marital irregularities went a long way
towards minimising the girls’ sense of guilt. Continence became not
a passport to heaven but a passport to the missionary schools which
in turn were regarded as a social rather than a religious adventure.
The girl who indulged in sex experiments was expelled from the local
pastor’s school, but it was notable that almost every older girl in
the community, including the most notorious sex offenders, had been
at one time resident in the pastors’ households. The general result
of the stricter supervision provided by these schools seemed to be to
postpone the first sex experience two or three years. The seven girls
in the household of one native pastor, the three in the household of
the other, were all, although past puberty, living continent lives, in
strong contrast to the habits of the rest of their age mates.
It might seem that there was fertile material for conflict between
parents who wished their children to live in the pastor’s house and
children who did not wish to do so, and also between children who
wished it and parents who did not.[8] This conflict was chiefly reduced
by the fact that residence in the pastor’s house actually made very
little difference in the child’s status in her own home. She simply
carried her roll of mats, her pillow and her mosquito net from her
home to the pastor’s, and the food which she would have eaten at home
was added to the quota of the food which her family furnished to the
pastor. She ate her evening meal and slept at the pastor’s; one or two
days a week she devoted to working for the pastor’s family, washing,
weaving, weeding and sweeping the premises. The rest of her time she
spent at home performing the usual tasks of a girl of her age, so that
it was seldom that a parent objected strongly to sending a child to the
pastor’s. It involved no additional expense and was likely to reduce
the chances of his daughter’s conduct becoming embarrassing, to improve
her mastery of the few foreign techniques, sewing, ironing, embroidery,
which she could learn from the more skilled and schooled pastor’s wife
and thus increase her economic value.
[8] See Appendix, page 257.
If, on the other hand, the parents wished their children to stay and
the children were unwilling to do so, the remedy was simple. They had
but to transgress seriously the rules of the pastor’s household, and
they would be expelled; if they feared to return to their parents,
there were always other relatives.
So the attitude of the church in respect to chastity held only
the germs of a conflict which was seldom realised, because of the
flexibility with which it adapted itself to the nearly inevitable.
Attendance at the girls’ main boarding school was an attractive
prospect. The fascination of living in a large group of young people
where life was easier and more congenial than at home, was usually
a sufficient bribe to good behaviour, or at least to discretion.
Confession of sin was a rare phenomenon in Samoa. The missionaries had
made a rule that a boy who transgressed the chastity rule would be
held back in his progress through the preparatory school and seminary
for two years after the time his offence was committed. It had been
necessary to change this ruling to read _two years from the detection
of the offence_, because very often the offence was not detected until
after the student had been over two years in the seminary, and under
the old ruling, he would not have been punished at all. Had the young
people been inspired with a sense of responsibility to a heavenly
rather than an earthly decree and the boy or girl been answerable to a
recording angel, rather than a spying neighbour, religion would have
provided a real setting for conflict. If such an attitude had been
coupled with emphasis upon church membership for the young and an
expectation of religious experience in the lives of the young, crises
in the lives of the young people would very likely have occurred. As
it is, the whole religious setting is one of formalism, of compromise,
of acceptance of half measure. The great number of native pastors with
their peculiar interpretations of Christian teaching have made it
impossible to establish the rigour of western Protestantism with its
inseparable association of sex offences and an individual consciousness
of sin. And the girls upon whom the religious setting makes no demands,
make no demands upon it. They are content to follow the advice of
their elders to defer church membership until they are older. _Laititi
a’u. Fia siva_ (“For I am young and like to dance”). The church member
is forbidden to dance or to witness a large night dance. One of the
three villages boasted no girl church members. The second village had
only one, who had, however, long since transgressed her vows. But as
her lover was a youth whose equivocal position in his family made
it impossible to marry, the neighbours did not tattle where their
sympathies were aroused, so Lotu remained tacitly a church member.
In the third village there were two unmarried girls who were church
members, Lita and Ana.
Lita had lived for years in the pastor’s household and with one other
girl, showed most clearly the results of a slightly alien environment.
She was clever and executive, preferred the society of girls to that of
boys, had made the best of her opportunities to learn English, worked
hard at school, and wished to go to Tutuila and become a nurse or a
teacher. Her ideals were thus just such as might frequently be found
from any random selection of girls in a freshman class in a girls’
college in this country. She coupled this set of individual ambitions
with a very unusual enthusiasm for a pious father, and complied easily
with his expressed wish for her to become a church member. After she
left the pastor’s household, she continued to go to school and apply
herself vigorously to her studies, and her one other interest in life
was a friendship with an older cousin who spoke some English and had
had superior educational advantages in another island. Although this
friendship had most of the trappings of a “crush” and was accompanied
by the casual homosexual practices which are the usual manifestations
of most associations between young people of the same sex, Lita’s
motivation was more definitely ambition, a desire to master every
accessible detail of this alien culture in which she wished to find a
place.
Sona, who was two years younger than Lita and had also lived for
several years in the pastor’s household, presented a very similar
picture. She was overbearing in manner, arbitrary and tyrannous towards
younger people, impudently deferential towards her elders. Without
exceptional intellectual capacity she had exceptional persistence
and had forced her way to the head of the school by steady dogged
application. Lita, more intelligent and more sensitive, had left
school for one year because the teacher beat her and Sona had passed
above her, although she was definitely more stupid. Sona came from
another island. Both her parents were dead and she lived in a large,
heterogeneous household, at the beck and call of a whole series of
relatives. Intent on her own ends, she was not enthusiastic about all
this labour and was also unenthusiastic about most of her relatives.
But one older cousin, the most beautiful girl in the village, had
caught her imagination. This cousin, Manita, was twenty-seven and
still unmarried. She had had many suitors and nearly as many lovers
but she was of a haughty and aggressive nature and men whom she deemed
worthy of her hand were wary of her sophisticated domineering manner.
By unanimous vote she was the most beautiful girl in the village.
Her lovely golden hair had contributed to half a dozen ceremonial
headdresses. Her strategic position in her own family was heightened by
the fact that her uncle, who had no hereditary right to make a _taupo_,
had declared Manita to be his _taupo_. There was no other _taupo_ in
the village to dispute her claim. The murmurings were dying out; the
younger children spoke of her as a _taupo_ without suspicion; her
beauty and ability as a dancer made it expedient to thus introduce her
to visitors. Her family did not press her to marry, for the longer she
remained unmarried, the stronger waxed the upstart legend. Her last
lover had been a widower, a talking chief of intelligence and charm. He
had loved Manita but he would not marry her. She lacked the docility
which he demanded in a wife. Leaving Manita he searched in other
villages for some very young girl whose manners were good but whose
character was as yet unformed.
All this had a profound effect upon Sona, the ugly little stranger over
whose lustreless eyes cataracts were already beginning to form. “Her
sister” has no use for marriage; neither had she, Sona. Essentially
unfeminine in outlook, dominated by ambition, she bolstered up her
preference for the society of girls and a career by citing the example
of her beautiful, wilful cousin. Without such a sanction she might have
wavered in her ambitions, made so difficult by her already failing
eyesight. As it was she went forward, blatantly proclaiming her pursuit
of ends different from those approved by her fellows. Sona and Lita
were not friends; the difference in their sanctions was too great;
their proficiency at school and an intense rivalry divided them.
Sona was not a church member. It would not have interfered with her
behaviour in the least but it was part of her scheme of life to remain
a school girl as long as possible and thus fend off responsibilities.
So she, as often as the others, would answer, _Laititi a’u_ (“I am but
young”). While Lita attached herself to her cousin and attempted to
learn from her every detail of another life, Sona identified herself
passionately with the slightly more Europeanised family of the pastor,
asserting always their greater relationship to the new civilisation,
calling Ioane’s wife, Mrs. Johns, building up a pitiable platform of
_papalagi_ (foreign) mannerisms as a springboard for future activities.
There was one other girl church member of Siufaga, Ana, a girl of
nineteen. Her motives were entirely different. She was of a mild,
quiescent nature, highly intelligent, very capable. She was the
illegitimate child of a chief by a mother who had later married, run
away, married again, been divorced, and finally gone off to another
island. She formed no tie for Ana. Her father was a widower, living
in a brother’s house and Ana had been reared in the family of another
brother. This family approximated to a biological one; there were
two married daughters older than Ana, a son near her age, a daughter
of fourteen and a crowd of little children. The father was a gentle,
retiring man who had built his house outside the village, “to escape
from the noise,” he said. The two elder daughters married young and
went away to live in their husbands’ households. Ana and her boy cousin
both lived in the pastor’s household, while the next younger girl slept
at home. The mother had a great distrust of men, especially of the
young men of her own village. Ana should grow up to marry a pastor. She
was not strong enough for the heavy work of the average Samoan wife.
Her aunt’s continuous harping on this strain, which was prompted mainly
by a dislike of Ana’s mother and a fear of the daughter’s leaving home
to follow in her mother’s footsteps, had convinced Ana that she was a
great deal too delicate for a normal existence. This theory received
complete verification in the report of the doctor who examined the
candidates for the nursing school and rejected her because of a heart
murmur. Ana, influenced by her aunt’s gloomy foreboding, was now
convinced that she was too frail to bear children, or at least not more
than one child at some very distant date. She became a church member,
gave up dancing, clung closer to the group of younger girls in the
pastor’s school and to her foster home, the neurasthenic product of a
physical defect, a small, isolated family group and the pastor’s school.
These girls all represented the deviants from the pattern in one
direction; they were those who demanded a different or improved
environment, who rejected the traditional choices. At any time, they,
like all deviants, might come into real conflict with the group. That
they did not was an accident of environment. The younger girls in the
pastor’s group as yet showed fewer signs of being influenced by their
slightly artificial environment. They were chaste where they would not
otherwise have been chaste, they had friends outside their relationship
group whom they would otherwise have viewed with suspicion, they paid
more attention to their lessons. They still had not acquired a desire
to substitute any other career for the traditional one of marriage.
This was, of course, partly due to the fact that the pastor’s school
was simply one influence in their lives. The girls still spent the
greater proportion of their waking time at home amid conventional
surroundings. Unless a girl was given some additional stimulus, such
as unusual home conditions, or possessed peculiarities of temperament,
she was likely to pass through the school essentially unchanged in
her fundamental view of life. She would acquire a greater respect for
the church, a preference for slightly more fastidious living, greater
confidence in other girls. At the same time the pastor’s school
offered a sufficient contrast to traditional Samoan life to furnish
the background against which deviation could flourish. Girls who left
the village and spent several years in the boarding school under the
tutelage of white teachers were enormously influenced. Many of them
became nurses; the majority married pastors, usually a deviation in
attitude, involving as it did, acceptance of a different style of
living.
So, while religion itself offered little field for conflict, the
institutions promoted by religion might act as stimuli to new choices
and when sufficiently reinforced by other conditions might produce
a type of girl who deviated markedly from her companions. That the
majority of Samoan girls are still unaffected by these influences
and pursue uncritically the traditional mode of life is simply a
testimony to the resistance of the native culture, which in its present
slightly Europeanised state, is replete with easy solutions for all
conflicts; and to the apparent fact that adolescent girls in Samoa do
not generate their own conflicts, but require a vigorous stimulus to
produce them.
These conflicts which have been discussed are conflicts of children who
deviate upwards, who wish to exercise more choice than is traditionally
permissible, and who, in making their choices, come to unconventional
and bizarre solutions. The untraditional choices which are encouraged
by the educational system inaugurated by the missionaries are education
and the pursuit of a career and marriage outside of the local group (in
the case of native pastors, teachers and nurses), preference for the
society of one’s own sex through prolonged and close association in
school, a self-conscious evaluation of existence, and the consequent
making of self-conscious choices. All of these make for increased
specialisation, increased sophistication, greater emphasis upon
individuality, where an individual makes a conscious choice between
alternate or opposing lines of conduct. In the case of this group of
girls, it is evident that the mere presentation of conflicting choices
was not sufficient but that real conflict required the yeast of a need
for choice and in addition a culturally favourable batter in which to
work.
It will now be necessary to discuss another type of deviant, the
deviant in a downward direction, or the delinquent. I am using the term
delinquent to describe the individual who is maladjusted to the demands
of her civilisation, and who comes definitely into conflict with her
group, not because she adheres to a different standard, but because she
violates the group standards which are also her own.[9]
[9] Such a distinction might well be made in the attitude towards
delinquency in our own civilisation. Delinquency cannot be defined
even within one culture in terms of acts alone, but attitudes
should also be considered. Thus the child who rifles her mother’s
purse to get money to buy food for a party or clothes to wear
to a dance hall, who believes stealing is wrong, but cannot or
will not resist the temptation to steal, is a delinquent, if the
additional legal definition is given to her conduct by bringing
her before some judicial authority. The young Christian communist
who gives away her own clothes and also those of her brothers and
sisters may be a menace to her family and to a society based upon
private property, but she is not delinquent in the same sense. She
has simply chosen an alternative standard. The girl who commits
sex offences with all attendant shame, guilt, and inability to
defend herself from becoming continually more involved in a course
of action which she is conscious is “wrong,” until she becomes
a social problem as an unmarried mother or a prostitute, is, of
course, delinquent. The young advocate of free love who possesses
a full quiver of ideals and sanctions for her conduct, may be
undesirable, but from the standpoint of this discussion, she is not
delinquent.
A Samoan family or a Samoan community might easily come to conceive the
conduct and standards of Sona and Lita as anti-social and undesirable.
Each was following a plan of life which would not lead to marriage
and children. Such a choice on the part of the females of any human
community is, of course, likely to be frowned upon. The girls who,
responding to the same stimuli, follow Sona’s and Lita’s example in the
future will also run this risk.
But were there really delinquent girls in this little primitive
village, girls who were incapable of developing new standards and
incapable of adjusting themselves to the old ones? My group included
two girls who might be so described, one girl who was just reaching
puberty, the other a girl two years past puberty. Their delinquency was
not a new phenomenon, but in both cases dated back several years. The
members of their respective groups unhesitatingly pronounced them “bad
girls,” their age mates avoided them, and their relatives regretted
them. As the Samoan village had no legal machinery for dealing with
such cases, these are the nearest parallels which it is possible to
draw with our “delinquent girl,” substituting definite conflict with
unorganised group disapproval for the conflict with the law which
defines delinquency in our society.
Lola was seventeen, a tall, splendidly developed, intelligent hoyden.
She had an unusual endowment in her capacity for strong feeling, for
enthusiasms, for violent responses to individuals. Her father had died
when she was a child and she had been reared in a headless house. Her
father’s brother who was the _matai_ had several houses and he had
scattered his large group of dependants in several different parts of
the village. So Lola, two older sisters, two younger sisters, and a
brother a year older, were brought up by their mother, a kindly but
ineffective woman. The eldest sister married and left the village
when Lola was eight. The next sister, Sami, five years older than
Lola, was like her mother, mild and gentle, with a soft undercurrent
of resentment towards life running through all her quiet words. She
resented and disliked her younger sister but she was no match for her.
Nito, her brother, was a high-spirited and intelligent youth who might
have taught his sister a little wisdom had it not been for the brother
and sister taboo which kept them always upon a formal footing. Aso,
two years younger, was like Sami without Sami’s sullen resentment.
She adopted the plan of keeping out of Lola’s way. The youngest,
Siva, was like Lola, intelligent, passionate, easily aroused, but
she was only eleven and merely profited by her sister’s bad example.
Lola was quarrelsome, insubordinate, impertinent. She contended every
point, objected to every request, shirked her work, fought with her
sisters, mocked her mother, went about the village with a chip upon
her shoulder. When she was fourteen, she became so unmanageable at
home that her uncle sent her to live in the pastor’s household. She
stayed there through a year of stormy scenes until she was finally
expelled after a fight with Mala, the other delinquent. That she was
not expelled sooner was out of deference to her rank as the niece of
a leading chief. Her uncle realised the folly of sending her back to
her mother. She was almost sixteen and well developed physically; and
could be expected to add sex offences to the list of her troublesome
activities at any moment. He took her to live in his own household
under the supervision of his very strong-minded, executive wife, Pusa.
Lola stayed there almost a year. It was a more interesting household
than any in which she had lived. Her uncle’s rank made constant calls
upon her. She learned to make kava well, to dance with greater ease and
mastery. A trip to Tutuila relieved the monotony of life; two cousins
from another island came to visit, and there was much gaiety about the
house. As consciousness of sex became more acute, she became slightly
subdued and tentative in her manner. Pusa was a hard task master and
for a while Lola seemed to enjoy the novelty of a strong will backed by
real authority. But the novelty wore off. The cousins prolonged their
visit month after month. They persisted in treating her as a child. She
became bored, sullen, jealous. Finally she ran away to other relatives,
a very high chief’s family, in the next village. Here, temporarily,
was another house group of women folk, as the head of the house was in
Tutuila, and his wife, his mother and his two children were the only
occupants of the great guest house. Lola’s labour was welcomed, and
she set herself to currying favour with the high chief of the family.
At first this was quite easy, as she had run away from the household
of a rival chief and he appreciated her public defection. There were
only much younger or much older girls in his household. Lola received
the attention which she craved. The little girls resented her, but
secretly admired her dashing uncompromising manner. But she had only
been established here about a month when another chief, with a young
and beautiful _taupo_ in his train, came to visit her new chief and the
whole party was lodged in the very house where she slept. Now began an
endless round of hospitable tasks, and worst of all she must wait upon
the pretty stranger who was a year younger than herself, but whose rank
as visiting _taupo_ gave her precedence. Lola again became troublesome.
She quarrelled with the younger girls, was impertinent to the older
ones, shirked her work, talked spitefully against the stranger. Perhaps
all of this might have been only temporary and had no more far-reaching
results than a temporary lack of favour in her new household, had
it not been for a still more unfortunate event. The Don Juan of the
village was a sleek, discreet man of about forty, a widower, a _matai_,
a man of circumspect manner and winning ways. He was looking for a
second wife and turned his attention toward the visitor who was lodged
in the guest house of the next village. But Fuativa was a cautious and
calculating lover. He wished to look over his future bride carefully
and so he visited her house casually, without any declaration of his
intention. And he noticed that Lola had reached a robust girlhood
and stopped to pluck this ready fruit by the way, while he was still
undecided about the more serious business of matrimony.
With all her capacity for violence, Lola possessed also a strong
capacity for affection. Fuativa was a skilled and considerate lover.
Few girls were quite so fortunate in their first lovers, and so few
felt such unmixed regret when the first love affair was broken off.
Fuativa won her easily and after three weeks which were casual to him,
and very important to her, he proposed for the hand of the visitor.
The proposal itself might not have so completely enraged Lola although
her pride was sorely wounded. Still, plans to marry a bride from such
a great distance might miscarry. But the affianced girl so obviously
demurred from the marriage that the talking chiefs became frightened.
Fuativa was a rich man and the marriage ceremony would bring many
perquisites for the talking chief. If the girl was allowed to go home
and plead with her parents, or given the opportunity to elope with
some one else, there would be no wedding perhaps and no rewards. The
public defloration ceremony is forbidden by law. That the bridegroom
was a government employé would further complicate his position should
he break the law. So the anxious talking chief and the anxious suitor
made their plans and he was given access to his future bride. The rage
of Lola was unbounded and she took an immediate revenge, publicly
accusing her rival of being a thief and setting the whole village by
the ears. The women of the host household drove her out with many
imprecations and she fled home to her mother, thus completing the
residence cycle begun four years ago. She was now in the position of
the delinquent in our society. She had continuously violated the group
standards and she had exhausted all the solutions open to her. No other
family group would open its doors to a girl whose record branded her
as a liar, a trouble maker, a fighter, and a thief, for her misdeeds
included continual petty thievery. Had she quarrelled with a father
or been outraged by a brother-in-law, a refuge would have been easy to
find. But her personality was essentially unfortunate. In her mother’s
household she made her sisters miserable, but she did not lord it over
them as she had done before. She was sullen, bitter, vituperative. The
young people of the village branded her as the possessor of a _lotu le
aga_, (“a bad heart”) and she had no companions. Her young rival left
the island to prepare for her wedding, or the next chapter might have
been Lola’s doing her actual physical violence. When I left, she was
living, idle, sullen, and defiant in her long-suffering mother’s house.
Mala’s sins were slightly otherwise. Where Lola was violent, Mala was
treacherous; where Lola was antagonistic, Mala was insinuating. Mala
was younger, having just reached puberty in January, the middle of
my stay on the island. She was a scrawny, ill-favoured little girl,
always untidily dressed. Her parents were dead and she lived with
her uncle, a sour, disgruntled man of small position. His wife came
from another village and disliked her present home. The marriage was
childless. The only other member of the house group was another niece
who had divorced her husband. She also was childless. None showed
Mala any affection, and they worked her unmercifully. The life of the
only young girl or boy in a Samoan house, in the very rare cases when
it occurs, is always very difficult. In this case it was doubly so.
Ordinarily other relatives in the neighbourhood would have handed
their babies over to her care, giving her a share in the activities
of happier and more populous households. But from her early childhood
she had been branded as a thief, a dangerous charge in a country where
there are no doors or locks, and houses are left empty for a day at a
time. Her first offence had been to steal a foreign toy which belonged
to the chief’s little son. The irate mother had soundly berated the
child, on boat day, on the beach where all the people were gathered.
When her name was mentioned, the information that she was a thief and
a liar was tacked on as casually as was the remark that another was
cross-eyed or deaf. Other children avoided her. Next door lived Tino,
a dull good child, a few months younger than Mala. Ordinarily these
two would have been companions and Mala always insisted that Tino was
her friend, but Tino indignantly disclaimed all association with her.
And as if her reputation for thievery were not sufficient, she added
a further misdemeanour. She played with boys, preferred boys’ games,
tied her _lavalava_ like a boy. This behaviour was displayed to the
whole village who were vociferous in their condemnation. “She really
was a very bad girl. She stole; she lied; and she played with boys.”
As in other parts of the world, the whole odium fell on the girl, so
the boys did not fight shy of her. They teased her, bullied her, used
her as general errand boy and fag. Some of the more precocious boys of
her own age were already beginning to look to her for possibilities of
other forms of amusement. Probably she will end by giving her favours
to whoever asks for them, and sink lower and lower in the village
esteem and especially in the opinion of her own sex from whom she so
passionately desires recognition and affection.
Lola and Mala both seemed to be the victims of lack of affection. They
both had unusual capacity for devotion and were abnormally liable
to become jealous. Both responded with pathetic swiftness to any
manifestations of affection. At one end of the scale in their need for
affection, they were unfortunately placed at the other end in their
chance of receiving it. Lola had a double handicap in her unfortunate
temperament and the greater amiability of her three sisters. Her
temperamental defects were further aggravated by the absence of any
strong authority in her immediate household. Sami, the docile sister,
had been saddled with the care of the younger children; Lola, harder
to control, was given no such saving responsibility. These conditions
were all as unusual as her demand and capacity for affection. And,
similarly, seldom were children as desolate as Mala, marooned in a
household of unsympathetic adults. So it would appear that their
delinquency was produced by the combination of two sets of casual
factors, unusual emotional needs and unusual home conditions. Less
affectionate children in the same environments, or the same children
in more favourable surroundings, probably would never have become as
definitely outcast as these. Only one other girl in the three villages
calls for consideration under this conception of delinquency and she
received far less general condemnation than either of the others. This
was Sala, who lived in the third village. She lived in a household of
seven, consisting of her widowed mother, her younger brother of ten,
her grandmother, her uncle and his wife, and their two-year-old son.
This presented a fairly well-balanced family group and there were in
addition many other relatives close by. Sala had been sent to live
in the pastor’s house but had speedily got involved in sex offences
and been expelled. Her attitude towards this pastor was still one of
unveiled hostility. She was stupid, underhanded, deceitful and she
possessed no aptitude for the simplest mechanical tasks. Her ineptness
was the laughing stock of the village and her lovers were many and
casual, the fathers of illegitimate children, men whose wives were
temporarily absent, witless boys bent on a frolic. It was a saying
among the girls of the village that Sala was apt at only one art, sex,
and that she, who couldn’t even sew thatch or weave blinds, would never
get a husband. The social attitude towards her was one of contempt,
rather than of antagonism, and she had experienced it keenly enough to
have sunk very low in her own eyes. She had a sullen furtive manner,
lied extravagantly in her assertions of skill and knowledge, and was
ever on the alert for slights and possible innuendoes. She came into no
serious conflict with her community. Her father beat her occasionally
in a half-hearted manner, but her stupidity was her salvation for the
Samoan possesses more charity towards weakness than towards misdirected
strength. Sooner or later Sala’s random sex experiences will probably
lead to pregnancy, resulting in a temporary restriction of her
activities and a much greater dependency upon her family. This economic
dependence which in her case will be reinforced by her lack of manual
skill will be strong enough to give her family a whip hand over her and
force her to at least moderate her experimentation. She may not marry
for many years and possibly will always be rated too inefficient for
such responsibility.
The only delinquent in the making, that is a child who showed
marked possibilities of increasing misbehaviour, was Siva, Lola’s
eleven-year-old little sister. She had the same obstreperous nature and
was always engaging in fist fights with the other children, or hurling
deadly insults after fleeing backs. She had the same violent craving
for affection. But her uncle, profiting by her sister’s unfortunate
development, had taken her at the age of ten into his immediate family
and so she was spending her pre-adolescent years under a much firmer
régime than had her sister. And she differed from her sister in one
respect, which was likely to prove her salvation. Where Lola had no
sense of humour and no lightness of touch, Siva had both. She was a
gifted mimic, an excruciatingly funny dancer, a born comedian. People
forgave her her violence and her quarrelsomeness for sheer mirth over
her propitiatory antics. If this facility continues to endear her to
her aunts and cousins, who already put up with any number of pranks
and fits of temper from her, she will probably not follow in her
sister’s steps. One affectionate word makes her shift her attention,
and she has a real gift for affection. Once at a dancing party I had
especially requested the children to be good and not waste time in
endless bickerings and jealousies. I selected three little girls, the
traditional number, to dance, and one of them, Meta, claimed that she
had a sore foot. I turned hastily to Siva and asked her to fill out the
figure. She was preparing to do so, with none too good grace at being
second choice, when Meta, who had merely been holding back for more
urging, leaped to her feet, and took the empty place. Siva was doubling
up her fists ready to fly at Meta’s throat when she caught my eye. She
swallowed furiously, and then jerked the flower wreath from around
her own neck and flung it over Meta’s head. With better luck than her
sister, she will not come into lasting conflict with her society.
And here ends the tale of serious conflict or serious deviation from
group standards. The other girls varied as to whether they were
subjected to the superior supervision of the pastor’s household or not,
as to whether they came from households of rank or families of small
prestige, and most of all as to whether they lived in a biological
family or a large heterogeneous household. But with differences in
temperament equal to those found among us, though with a possibly
narrower range of intellectual ability, they showed a surprising
uniformity of knowledge, skill and attitude, and presented a picture
of orderly, regular development in a flexible, but strictly delimited,
environment.
XII
MATURITY AND OLD AGE
Because the community makes no distinction between unmarried girls and
the wives of untitled men in the demands which it makes upon them, and
because there is seldom any difference in sex experience between the
two groups, the dividing line falls not between married and unmarried
but between grown women and growing girls in industrial activity and
between the wives of _matais_ and their less important sisters in
ceremonial affairs. The girl of twenty-two or twenty-three who is still
unmarried loses her laissez faire attitude. Family pressure is an
effective cause in bringing about this change. She is an adult, as able
as her married sisters and her brothers’ young wives; she is expected
to contribute as heavily as they to household undertakings. She lives
among a group of contemporaries upon whom the responsibilities of
marriage are making increased demands. Rivalry and emulation enter in.
And also she may be becoming a little anxious about her own marital
chances. The first preoccupation with sex experimentation has worn
itself out and she settles down to increase her value as a wife. In
native theory a girl knows how to sew thatch, but doesn’t really make
thatch until she is married. In actual practice the adult unmarried
girls perform household and agricultural tasks identical with those
performed by their married sisters, except that whereas pregnancy
and nursing children tie the young married women to the house, the
unmarried girls are free to go off on long fishing expeditions, or far
inland in search of weaving materials.
A married couple may live either in the household of the girl or of the
boy, choice being made on the basis of rank, or the industrial needs of
the two households. The change of residence makes much less difference
to the girl than to the boy. A married woman’s life is lived in such a
narrow sphere that her only associates are the women of her household.
Residence in her husband’s village instead of her own does not narrow
her life, for her participation in village affairs will remain slight
and unimportant until her husband assumes a title which confers status
upon her also. If her husband’s household is in her own village, her
responsibilities will be increased somewhat because she will be subject
to continual demands from her own near relatives as well as from those
of her husband.
There is no expectation of conflict between daughter-in-law and
mother-in-law. The mother-in-law must be respected because she is
an elder of the household and an insolent daughter-in-law is no
more tolerated than an insubordinate daughter or niece. But tales
of the traditional lack of harmony which exists in our civilisation
were treated by the Samoans with contemptuous amusement. Where the
emotional ties between parents and children are so weak, it was
impossible to make them see it as an issue between a man’s mother and
man’s wife, in which jealousy played a part. They saw it simply as
failure on the part of the young and unimportant person to pay proper
respect to the old, granting of course that there were always irascible
old people from whom it was expedient to move away. The same thing
holds true for the young man, if he goes to live in his father-in-law’s
house. If the father-in-law is the _matai_, he has complete authority
over his daughter’s husband; if he is only an untitled old man, he must
still be treated with respect.
But change of village for the young man makes a great difference,
because he must take his place in a new _Aumaga_, and work with
strangers instead of with the boys with whom he has worked and played
since childhood. Very often he never becomes as thoroughly assimilated
to the new group as he was to the old. He stands more upon his dignity.
He works with his new companions but does not play with them. The
social life of the _Aumaga_ centres about the group courtesies which
they pay to visiting girls. In his own village a man will accompany the
younger boys on these occasions for many years after he is married.
But in his wife’s village, such behaviour becomes suddenly less
appropriate. Random amatory adventures are also more hazardous when
he is living as a member of his wife’s household. And although his
transition from the status of a young man to the status of a _matai_
is easier, he ages more quickly; although he may earn great respect in
his adopted village, he commands less of its affection.
In most marriages there is no sense of setting up a new and separate
establishment. The change is felt in the change of residence for either
husband or wife and in the reciprocal relations which spring up between
the two families. But the young couple live in the main household,
simply receiving a bamboo pillow, a mosquito net and a pile of mats
for their bed. Only for the chief or the chief’s son is a new house
built. The wife works with all the women of the household and waits
upon all the men. The husband shares the enterprises of the other men
and boys. Neither in personal service given or received are the two
marked off as a unit. Nor does marriage of either brother or sister
slacken the avoidance rules; it merely adds another individual, the
new sister or brother-in-law, to whom the whole series of avoidances
must be applied. In the sexual relation alone are the two treated as
one. For even in the care of the young children and in the decisions
as to their future, the uncles and aunts and grandparents participate
as fully as the parents. It is only when a man is _matai_ as well as
father, that he has control over his own children; and when this is so,
the relationship is blurred in opposite fashion, for he has the same
control over many other young people who are less closely related to
him. The pregnant young wife is surrounded by a multitude of taboos,
most of which are prohibitions against solitary activities. She must
not walk alone, sit alone, dance alone, gather food alone, eat alone,
or when only her husband is present. All of these taboos are explained
by the amiable doctrine that only things which are wrong are done in
solitude and that any wrong deed committed by the expectant mother
will injure the child. It seems simpler to prohibit solitary acts
than wrong ones. There are also ghosts which are particularly likely
to injure the pregnant woman, and she is warned against walking in
ghost-ridden places. She is warned against doing too heavy work and
against getting chilled or overheated. While pregnancy is not treated
with anything like the consideration which is often given it here, her
first pregnancy gives a woman a certain amount of social prominence.
This prominence is in direct proportion to her rank, and the young wife
whose child is the presumptive heir to some high title is watched over
with great solicitude. Relatives gather from great distances for the
confinement and birth feast, which is described as the mother’s feast,
rather than the feast in honour of either child or father.
After the birth of the first child, the other children arrive
frequently and with small remark. Old gossips count them and comment
on the number living, dead or miscarried in previous births. A pig
is roasted for the birth feast to which only the near relatives are
invited. The mother of many children is rather taken for granted
than praised. The barren woman is mildly execrated and her misfortune
attributed to loose living. There were three barren older women on Taū;
all three were midwives and reputed to be very wise. Now well past
the child-bearing age, they were reaping the reward of the greater
application to the intricacies of their calling with which they had
compensated for their barrenness.
The young married women of twenty to thirty are a busy, cheerful group.
They become church members and wear hats to church. When they have not
a baby at the breast, they are doing heavy work on the plantations,
fishing or making tapa. No other important event will ever happen
to them again. If their husbands die, they will probably take new
husbands, and those of lower rank. If their husbands become _matais_,
they will also acquire a place in the _fono_ of the women. But it is
only the woman with a flair for political wire-pulling and the luck to
have either important relatives or an important husband who gets any
real satisfaction out of the social organisation of the village.
The young men do not settle as early into a groove. What her first
child is to a woman his title is to a man, and while each new child is
less of an event in her life, a new title is always a higher one and
a greater event in his. A man rarely attains his first title before
he is thirty, often not before he is forty. All the years between
his entrance into the _Aumaga_ and his entrance into the _Fono_ are
years of striving. He cannot acquire a reputation and then rest
upon it or another claimant to the same title will take advantage of
his indolence and pass him in the race. One good catch of fish does
not make him a fisherman nor one housebeam neatly adzed, a carpenter;
the whole emphasis is upon a steady demonstration of increasing skill
which will be earnest of the necessary superiority over his fellows.
Only the lazy, the shiftless, the ambitionless fail to respond to this
competition. The one exception to this is in the case of the son or
heir of the high chief who may be made the _manaia_ at twenty. But here
his high rank has already subjected him to more rigorous discipline
and careful training than the other youths, and as _manaia_, he is
the titular head of the _Aumaga_, and must lead it well or lose his
prestige.
[Illustration: _A talking chief—the native Master of Ceremonies_]
[Illustration: _A famous maker of bark cloth_]
Once having acquired a _matai_ name and entered the _Fono_, differences
in temperament prevail. The _matai_ name he receives may be a very
small one, carrying with it no right to a post in the council house, or
other prerogatives. It may be so small that _matai_ though he is, he
does not try to command a household, but lives instead in the shadow of
some more important relative. But he will be a member of the _Fono_,
classed with the elders of the village, and removed forever from the
hearty group activities of the young men. Should he become a widower
and wish to court a new wife, he can only do so by laying aside his
_matai_ name and entering her house under the fiction that he is still
a youth. His main preoccupation is the affairs of the village; his
main diversion, hours spent in ceremonious argument in some meeting.
He always carries his bundle of beaten cocoanut fibre and as he talks,
he rolls the fibres together on his bare thigh.
The less ambitious rest upon this achievement. The more ambitious
continue the game, for higher titles, for greater prestige as craftsmen
or orators, for the control of more strings in the political game. At
last the preference for the most able, the very preference which, in
defiance of laws of primogeniture or direct descent, may have given a
man his title, takes it away from him. For should he live beyond his
prime, fifty-five or sixty, his name is taken from him and given to
another, and he is given a “little _matai_ name,” so that he may still
sit with the other _matais_ and drink his kava. These old men stay at
home, guard the house while the others go inland to the plantations,
superintend the children, braid cinet and give advice, or in a final
perverse assertion of authority, fail to give it. One young chief
who had been given his father’s name during his father’s lifetime,
complained to me: “I had no old man to help me. My father was angry
that his title was given to me and he would tell me nothing. My mother
was wise but she came from another island and did not know well the
ancient ways of our village. There was no old one in the house to sit
with me in the evening and fill my ears with the things from the olden
time. A young _matai_ should always have an old man beside him, who,
even though he is deaf and cannot always hear his questions, can still
tell him many things.”
The women’s lives pursue a more even tenor. The wives of chiefs and
talking chiefs have to give some time to the mastery of ceremonial.
The old women who become midwives or doctors pursue their professions
but seldom and in a furtive, private fashion. The menopause is marked
by some slight temperamental instability, irritability, finickiness
about food, a tendency to sudden whims and inexplicable fancies. Once
past the menopause and relieved of child-bearing, a woman turns her
attention again to the heavy work of the plantations. The hardest work
of the village is done by women between forty-five and fifty-five.
Then, as age approaches, she settles down to performing the skilled
tasks in the household, to weaving and tapa making.
Where a man is disqualified from active work by rheumatism,
elephantiasis, or general feebleness, his rôle as a teacher is
diminished. He can teach the aspirant young fisherman the lore of
fishing but not the technique. The old woman on the other hand is
mistress of housebound crafts and to her must go the girl who is
ambitious to become a skilled weaver. Another can gather the herbs
which she needs for her medicines, while she keeps the secret of
compounding them. The ceremonial burning of the candle-nut to obtain
black dye is in the hands of very old women. And also these old women
are usually more of a power within the household than the old men. The
men rule partly by the authority conferred by their titles, but their
wives and sisters rule by force of personality and knowledge of human
nature. A life-long preoccupation within the smaller group makes them
omniscient and tyrannical. They suffer no diminution of prestige except
such as is inherent in the complete loss of their faculties.
The feeling for generation is retained until death, and the very old
people sit in the sun and talk softly without regard for taboo or sex.
XIII
OUR EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS IN THE LIGHT OF SAMOAN CONTRASTS
For many chapters we have followed the lives of Samoan girls, watched
them change from babies to baby-tenders, learn to make the oven and
weave fine mats, forsake the life of the gang to become more active
members of the household, defer marriage through as many years of
casual love-making as possible, finally marry and settle down to
rearing children who will repeat the same cycle. As far as our material
permitted, an experiment has been conducted to discover what the
process of development was like in a society very different from our
own. Because the length of human life and the complexity of our society
did not permit us to make our experiment here, to choose a group of
baby girls and bring them to maturity under conditions created for
the experiment, it was necessary to go instead to another country
where history had set the stage for us. There we found girl children
passing through the same process of physical development through which
our girls go, cutting their first teeth and losing them, cutting
their second teeth, growing tall and ungainly, reaching puberty with
their first menstruation, gradually reaching physical maturity, and
becoming ready to produce the next generation. It was possible to
say: Here are the proper conditions for an experiment; the developing
girl is a constant factor in America and in Samoa; the civilisation
of America and the civilisation of Samoa are different. In the course
of development, the process of growth by which the girl baby becomes
a grown woman, are the sudden and conspicuous bodily changes which
take place at puberty accompanied by a development which is spasmodic,
emotionally charged, and accompanied by an awakened religious sense,
a flowering of idealism, a great desire for assertion of self against
authority—or not? Is adolescence a period of mental and emotional
distress for the growing girl as inevitably as teething is a period of
misery for the small baby? Can we think of adolescence as a time in
the life history of every girl child which carries with it symptoms of
conflict and stress as surely as it implies a change in the girl’s body?
Following the Samoan girls through every aspect of their lives we have
tried to answer this question, and we found throughout that we had to
answer it in the negative. The adolescent girl in Samoa differed from
her sister who had not reached puberty in one chief respect, that in
the older girl certain bodily changes were present which were absent
in the younger girl. There were no other great differences to set off
the group passing through adolescence from the group which would become
adolescent in two years or the group which had become adolescent two
years before. And if one girl past puberty is undersized while her
cousin is tall and able to do heavier work, there will be a difference
between them, due to their different physical endowment, which will be
far greater than that which is due to puberty. The tall, husky girl
will be isolated from her companions, forced to do longer, more adult
tasks, rendered shy by a change of clothing, while her cousin, slower
to attain her growth, will still be treated as a child and will have
to solve only the slightly fewer problems of childhood. The precedent
of educators here who recommend special tactics in the treatment of
adolescent girls translated into Samoan terms would read: Tall girls
are different from short girls of the same age, we must adopt a
different method of educating them.
But when we have answered the question we set out to answer we have not
finished with the problem. A further question presents itself. If it is
proved that adolescence is not necessarily a specially difficult period
in a girl’s life—and proved it is if we can find any society in which
that is so—then what accounts for the presence of storm and stress in
American adolescents? First, we may say quite simply, that there must
be something in the two civilisations to account for the difference. If
the same process takes a different form, in two different environments,
we cannot make any explanations in terms of the process, for that is
the same in both cases. But the social environment is very different
and it is to it that we must look for an explanation. What is there
in Samoa which is absent in America, what is there in America which is
absent in Samoa, which will account for this difference?
Such a question has enormous implications and any attempt to answer it
will be subject to many possibilities of error. But if we narrow our
question to the way in which aspects of Samoan life which irremediably
affect the life of the adolescent girl differ from the forces which
influence our growing girls, it is possible to try to answer it.
The background of these differences is a broad one, with two important
components; one is due to characteristics which are Samoan, the other
to characteristics which are primitive.
The Samoan background which makes growing up so easy, so simple a
matter, is the general casualness of the whole society. For Samoa is a
place where no one plays for very high stakes, no one pays very heavy
prices, no one suffers for his convictions or fights to the death for
special ends. Disagreements between parent and child are settled by
the child’s moving across the street, between a man and his village
by the man’s removal to the next village, between a husband and his
wife’s seducer by a few fine mats. Neither poverty nor great disasters
threaten the people to make them hold their lives dearly and tremble
for continued existence. No implacable gods, swift to anger and strong
to punish, disturb the even tenor of their days. Wars and cannibalism
are long since passed away and now the greatest cause for tears,
short of death itself, is a journey of a relative to another island.
No one is hurried along in life or punished harshly for slowness
of development. Instead the gifted, the precocious, are held back,
until the slowest among them have caught the pace. And in personal
relations, caring is as slight. Love and hate, jealousy and revenge,
sorrow and bereavement, are all matters of weeks. From the first months
of its life, when the child is handed carelessly from one woman’s
hands to another’s, the lesson is learned of not caring for one person
greatly, not setting high hopes on any one relationship.
And just as we may feel that the Occident penalises those unfortunates
who are born into Western civilisation with a taste for meditation and
a complete distaste for activity, so we may say that Samoa is kind to
those who have learned the lesson of not caring, and hard upon those
few individuals who have failed to learn it. Lola and Mala and little
Siva, Lola’s sister, all were girls with a capacity for emotion greater
than their fellows. And Lola and Mala, passionately desiring affection
and too violently venting upon the community their disappointment over
their lack of it, were both delinquent, unhappy misfits in a society
which gave all the rewards to those who took defeat lightly and turned
to some other goal with a smile.
In this casual attitude towards life, in this avoidance of conflict,
of poignant situations, Samoa contrasts strongly not only with America
but also with most primitive civilisations. And however much we may
deplore such an attitude and feel that important personalities and
great art are not born in so shallow a society, we must recognise that
here is a strong factor in the painless development from childhood to
womanhood. For where no one feels very strongly, the adolescent will
not be tortured by poignant situations. There are no such disastrous
choices as those which confronted young people who felt that the
service of God demanded forswearing the world forever, as in the Middle
Ages, or cutting off one’s finger as a religious offering, as among the
Plains Indians. So, high up in our list of explanations we must place
the lack of deep feeling which the Samoans have conventionalised until
it is the very framework of all their attitudes toward life.
And next there is the most striking way in which all isolated primitive
civilisation and many modern ones differ from our own, in the number
of choices which are permitted to each individual. Our children grow
up to find a world of choices dazzling their unaccustomed eyes. In
religion they may be Catholics, Protestants, Christian Scientists,
Spiritualists, Agnostics, Atheists, or even pay no attention at all to
religion. This is an unthinkable situation in any primitive society not
exposed to foreign influence. There is one set of gods, one accepted
religious practice, and if a man does not believe, his only recourse
is to believe less than his fellows; he may scoff but there is no
new faith to which he may turn. Present-day Manu’a approximates this
condition; all are Christians of the same sect. There is no conflict
in matters of belief although there is a difference in practice between
Church-members and non-Church-members. And it was remarked that in
the case of several of the growing girls the need for choice between
these two practices may some day produce a conflict. But at present the
Church makes too slight a bid for young unmarried members to force the
adolescent to make any decision.
Similarly, our children are faced with half a dozen standards of
morality: a double sex standard for men and women, a single standard
for men and women, and groups which advocate that the single standard
should be freedom while others argue that the single standard should
be absolute monogamy. Trial marriage, companionate marriage, contract
marriage—all these possible solutions of a social impasse are paraded
before the growing children while the actual conditions in their own
communities and the moving pictures and magazines inform them of mass
violations of every code, violations which march under no banners of
social reform.
The Samoan child faces no such dilemma. Sex is a natural, pleasurable
thing; the freedom with which it may be indulged in is limited by
just one consideration, social status. Chiefs’ daughters and chiefs’
wives should indulge in no extra-marital experiments. Responsible
adults, heads of households and mothers of families should have too
many important matters on hand to leave them much time for casual
amorous adventures. Every one in the community agrees about the matter,
the only dissenters are the missionaries who dissent so vainly that
their protests are unimportant. But as soon as a sufficient sentiment
gathers about the missionary attitude with its European standard of sex
behaviour, the need for choice, the forerunner of conflict, will enter
into Samoan society.
Our young people are faced by a series of different groups which
believe different things and advocate different practices, and to each
of which some trusted friend or relative may belong. So a girl’s father
may be a Presbyterian, an imperialist, a vegetarian, a teetotaler, with
a strong literary preference for Edmund Burke, a believer in the open
shop and a high tariff, who believes that woman’s place is in the home,
that young girls should wear corsets, not roll their stockings, not
smoke, nor go riding with young men in the evening. But her mother’s
father may be a Low Episcopalian, a believer in high living, a strong
advocate of States’ Rights and the Monroe Doctrine, who reads Rabelais,
likes to go to musical shows and horse races. Her aunt is an agnostic,
an ardent advocate of woman’s rights, an internationalist who rests
all her hopes on Esperanto, is devoted to Bernard Shaw, and spends
her spare time in campaigns of anti-vivisection. Her elder brother,
whom she admires exceedingly, has just spent two years at Oxford. He
is an Anglo-Catholic, an enthusiast concerning all things mediæval,
writes mystical poetry, reads Chesterton, and means to devote his
life to seeking for the lost secret of mediæval stained glass. Her
mother’s younger brother is an engineer, a strict materialist, who
never recovered from reading Haeckel in his youth; he scorns art,
believes that science will save the world, scoffs at everything that
was said and thought before the nineteenth century, and ruins his
health by experiments in the scientific elimination of sleep. Her
mother is of a quietistic frame of mind, very much interested in Indian
philosophy, a pacifist, a strict non-participator in life, who in spite
of her daughter’s devotion to her will not make any move to enlist
her enthusiasms. And this may be within the girl’s own household. Add
to it the groups represented, defended, advocated by her friends, her
teachers, and the books which she reads by accident, and the list of
possible enthusiasms, of suggested allegiances, incompatible with one
another, becomes appalling.
The Samoan girl’s choices are far otherwise. Her father is a member of
the Church and so is her uncle. Her father lives in a village where
there is good fishing, her uncle in a village where there are plenty
of cocoanut crabs. Her father is a good fisherman and in his house
there is plenty to eat; her uncle is a talking chief and his frequent
presents of bark cloth provide excellent dance dresses. Her paternal
grandmother, who lives with her uncle, can teach her many secrets of
healing; her maternal grandmother, who lives with her mother, is an
expert weaver of fans. The boys in her uncle’s village are admitted
younger into the _Aumaga_ and are not much fun when they come to
call; but there are three boys in her own village whom she likes very
much. And her great dilemma is whether to live with her father or her
uncle, a frank, straightforward problem which introduces no ethical
perplexities, no question of impersonal logic. Nor will her choice be
taken as a personal matter, as the American girl’s allegiance to the
views of one relative might be interpreted by her other relatives. The
Samoans will be sure she chose one residence rather than the other for
perfectly good reasons, the food was better, she had a lover in one
village, or she had quarrelled with a lover in the other village. In
each case she was making concrete choices within one recognised pattern
of behaviour. She was never called upon to make choices involving an
actual rejection of the standards of her social group, such as the
daughter of Puritan parents, who permits indiscriminate caresses, must
make in our society.
And not only are our developing children faced by a series of groups
advocating different and mutually exclusive standards, but a more
perplexing problem presents itself to them. Because our civilisation
is woven of so many diverse strands, the ideas which any one group
accepts will be found to contain numerous contradictions. So if the
girl has given her allegiance whole-heartedly to some one group and
has accepted in good faith their asseverations that they alone are
right and all other philosophies of life are Antichrist and anathema,
her troubles are still not over. While the less thoughtful receives
her worst blows in the discovery that what father thinks is good,
grandfather thinks is bad, and that things which are permitted at
home are banned at school, the more thoughtful child has subtler
difficulties in store for her. If she has philosophically accepted the
fact that there are several standards among which she must choose, she
may still preserve a childlike faith in the coherence of her chosen
philosophy. Beyond the immediate choice which was so puzzling and hard
to make, which perhaps involved hurting her parents or alienating her
friends, she expects peace. But she has not reckoned with the fact that
each of the philosophies with which she is confronted is itself but
the half-ripened fruit of compromise. If she accept Christianity, she
is immediately confused between the Gospel teachings concerning peace
and the value of human life and the Church’s whole-hearted acceptance
of war. The compromise made seventeen centuries ago between the Roman
philosophy of war and domination, and the early Church doctrine of
peace and humility, is still present to confuse the modern child.
If she accepts the philosophic premises upon which the Declaration
of Independence of the United States was founded, she finds herself
faced with the necessity of reconciling the belief in the equality
of man and our institutional pledges of equality of opportunity
with our treatment of the Negro and the Oriental. The diversity of
standards in present-day society is so striking that the dullest,
the most incurious, cannot fail to notice it. And this diversity is
so old, so embodied in semi-solutions, in those compromises between
different philosophies which we call Christianity, or democracy,
or humanitarianism, that it baffles the most intelligent, the most
curious, the most analytical.
So for the explanation of the lack of poignancy in the choices of
growing girls in Samoa, we must look to the temperament of the Samoan
civilisation which discounts strong feeling. But for the explanation
of the lack of conflict we must look principally to the difference
between a simple, homogeneous primitive civilisation, a civilisation
which changes so slowly that to each generation it appears static, and
a motley, diverse, heterogeneous modern civilisation.
And in making the comparison there is a third consideration, the
lack of neuroses among the Samoans, the great number of neuroses
among ourselves. We must examine the factors in the early education
of the Samoan children which have fitted them for a normal,
unneurotic development. The findings of the behaviourists and of the
psychoanalysts alike lay great emphasis upon the enormous rôle which
is played by the environment of the first few years. Children who have
been given a bad start are often found to function badly later on
when they are faced with important choices. And we know that the more
severe the choice, the more conflict; the more poignancy is attached
to the demands made upon the individual, the more neuroses will
result. History, in the form of the last war, provided a stupendous
illustration of the great number of maimed and handicapped individuals
whose defects showed only under very special and terrible stress.
Without the war, there is no reason to believe that many of these
shell-shocked individuals might not have gone through life unremarked;
the bad start, the fears, the complexes, the bad conditionings of early
childhood, would never have borne positive enough fruit to attract the
attention of society.
The implications of this observation are double. Samoa’s lack of
difficult situations, of conflicting choice, of situations in which
fear or pain or anxiety are sharpened to a knife edge will probably
account for a large part of the absence of psychological maladjustment.
Just as a low-grade moron would not be hopelessly handicapped in
Samoa, although he would be a public charge in a large American city,
so individuals with slight nervous instability have a much more
favourable chance in Samoa than in America. Furthermore the amount of
individualisation, the range of variation, is much smaller in Samoa.
Within our wider limits of deviation there are inevitably found weak
and non-resistant temperaments. And just as our society shows a greater
development of personality, so also it shows a larger proportion of
individuals who have succumbed before the complicated exactions of
modern life.
Nevertheless, it is possible that there are factors in the early
environment of the Samoan child which are particularly favourable to
the establishment of nervous stability. Just as a child from a better
home environment in our civilisation may be presumed to have a better
chance under all circumstances it is conceivable that the Samoan child
is not only handled more gently by its culture but that it is also
better equipped for those difficulties which it does meet.
Such an assumption is given force by the fact that little Samoan
children pass apparently unharmed through experiences which often have
grave effects on individual development in our civilisation. Our life
histories are filled with the later difficulties which can be traced
back to some early, highly charged experience with sex or with birth
or death. And yet Samoan children are familiarised at an early age
and without disaster, with all three. It is very possible that there
are aspects of the life of the young child in Samoa which equip it
particularly well for passing through life without nervous instability.
With this hypothesis in mind it is worth while to consider in more
detail which parts of the young child’s social environment are most
strikingly different from ours. Most of these centre about the family
situation, the environment which impinges earliest and most intensely
upon the child’s consciousness. The organisation of a Samoan household
eliminates at one stroke, in almost all cases, many of the special
situations which are believed to be productive of undesirable emotional
sets. The youngest, the oldest, and the only child, hardly ever
occur because of the large number of children in a household, all of
whom receive the same treatment. Few children are weighted down with
responsibility, or rendered domineering and overbearing as eldest
children so often are, or isolated, condemned to the society of adults
and robbed of the socialising effect of contact with other children, as
only children so often are. No child is petted and spoiled until its
view of its own deserts is hopelessly distorted, as is so often the
fate of the youngest child. But in the few cases where Samoan family
life does approximate ours, the special attitudes incident to order of
birth and to close affectional ties with the parent tend to develop.
The close relationship between parent and child, which has such a
decisive influence upon so many in our civilisation, that submission to
the parent or defiance of the parent may become the dominating pattern
of a lifetime, is not found in Samoa. Children reared in households
where there are a half dozen adult women to care for them and dry their
tears, and a half dozen adult males, all of whom represent constituted
authority, do not distinguish their parents as sharply as our children
do. The image of the fostering, loving mother, or the admirable father,
which may serve to determine affectional choices later in life, is a
composite affair, composed of several aunts, cousins, older sisters and
grandmothers; of chief, father, uncles, brothers and cousins. Instead
of learning as its first lesson that here is a kind mother whose
special and principal care is for its welfare, and a father whose
authority is to be deferred to, the Samoan baby learns that its world
is composed of a hierarchy of male and female adults, all of whom can
be depended upon and must be deferred to.
The lack of specialised feeling which results from this diffusion of
affection in the household is further reinforced by the segregation of
the boys from the girls, so that a child regards the children of the
opposite sex as taboo relatives, regardless of individuality, or as
present enemies and future lovers, again regardless of individuality.
And the substitution of relationship for preference in forming
friendships completes the work. By the time she reaches puberty the
Samoan girl has learned to subordinate choice in the selection of
friends or lovers to an observance of certain categories. Friends must
be relatives of one’s own sex; lovers, non-relatives. All claim of
personal attraction or congeniality between relatives of opposite sex
must be flouted. All of this means that casual sex relations carry no
onus of strong attachment, that the marriage of convenience dictated by
economic and social considerations is easily born and casually broken
without strong emotion.
Nothing could present a sharper contrast to the average American home,
with its small number of children, the close, theoretically permanent
tie between the parents, the drama of the entrance of each new child
upon the scene and the deposition of the last baby. Here the growing
girl learns to depend upon a few individuals, to expect the rewards of
life from certain kinds of personalities. With this first set towards
preference in personal relations she grows up playing with boys as
well as with girls, learning to know well brothers and cousins and
schoolmates. She does not think of boys as a class but as individuals,
nice ones like the brother of whom she is fond, or disagreeable,
domineering ones, like a brother with whom she is always on bad terms.
Preference in physical make-up, in temperament, in character, develops
and forms the foundations for a very different adult attitude in which
choice plays a vivid rôle. The Samoan girl never tastes the rewards of
romantic love as we know it, nor does she suffer as an old maid who
has appealed to no lover or found no lover appealing to her, or as the
frustrated wife in a marriage which has not fulfilled her high demands.
Having learned a little of the art of disciplining sex feeling into
special channels approved by the whole personality, we will be inclined
to account our solution better than the Samoans. To attain what we
consider a more dignified standard of personal relations we are
willing to pay the penalty of frigidity in marriage and a huge toll
of barren, unmarried women who move in unsatisfied procession across
the American and English stage. But while granting the desirability of
this development of sensitive, discriminating response to personality,
as a better basis for dignified human lives than an automatic,
undifferentiated response to sex attraction, we may still, in the light
of Samoan solutions, count our methods exceedingly expensive. The
strict segregation of related boys and girls, the institutionalised
hostility between pre-adolescent children of opposite sexes in Samoa
are cultural features with which we are completely out of sympathy. For
the vestiges of such attitudes, expressed in our one-sex schools, we
are trying to substitute coeducation, to habituate one sex to another
sufficiently so that difference of sex will be lost sight of in the
more important and more striking differences in personality. There are
no recognisable gains in the Samoan system of taboo and segregation, of
response to a group rather than response to an individual. But when we
contrast the other factor of difference the conclusion is not so sure.
What are the rewards of the tiny, ingrown, biological family opposing
its closed circle of affection to a forbidding world, of the strong
ties between parents and children, ties which imply an active personal
relation from birth until death? Specialisation of affection, it is
true, but at the price of many individuals’ preserving through life the
attitudes of dependent children, of ties between parents and children
which successfully defeat the children’s attempts to make other
adjustments, of necessary choices made unnecessarily poignant because
they become issues in an intense emotional relationship. Perhaps these
are too heavy prices to pay for a specialisation of emotion which might
be brought about in other ways, notably through coeducation. And with
such a question in our minds it is interesting to note that a larger
family community, in which there are several adult men and women,
seems to ensure the child against the development of the crippling
attitudes which have been labelled Œdipus complexes, Electra complexes,
and so on.
The Samoan picture shows that it is not necessary to channel so deeply
the affection of a child for its parents and suggests that while we
would reject that part of the Samoan scheme which holds no rewards for
us, the segregation of the sexes before puberty, we may learn from a
picture in which the home does not dominate and distort the life of the
child.
The presence of many strongly held and contradictory points of view and
the enormous influence of individuals in the lives of their children
in our country play into each other’s hands in producing situations
fraught with emotion and pain. In Samoa the fact that one girl’s father
is a domineering, dogmatic person, her cousin’s father a gentle,
reasonable person, and another cousin’s father a vivid, brilliant,
eccentric person, will influence the three girls in only one respect,
choice of residence if any one of the three fathers is the head of
a household. But the attitudes of the three girls towards sex, and
towards religion, will not be affected by the different temperaments
of their three fathers, for the fathers play too slight a rôle in
their lives. They are schooled not by an individual but by an army of
relatives into a general conformity upon which the personality of their
parents has a very slight effect. And through an endless chain of cause
and effect, individual differences of standard are not perpetuated
through the children’s adherence to the parents’ position, nor are
children thrown into bizarre, untypical attitudes which might form
the basis for departure and change. It is possible that where our own
culture is so charged with choice, it would be desirable to mitigate,
at least in some slight measure, the strong rôle which parents play in
children’s lives, and so eliminate one of the most powerful accidental
factors in the choices of any individual life.
The Samoan parent would reject as unseemly and odious an ethical plea
made to a child in terms of personal affection. “Be good to please
mother.” “Go to church for father’s sake.” “Don’t be so disagreeable to
your sister, it makes father so unhappy.” Where there is one standard
of conduct and only one, such undignified confusion of ethics and
affection is blessedly eliminated. But where there are many standards
and all adults are striving desperately to bind their own children to
the particular courses which they themselves have chosen, recourse is
had to devious and non-reputable means. Beliefs, practices, courses of
action, are pressed upon the child in the name of filial loyalty. In
our ideal picture of the freedom of the individual and the dignity of
human relations it is not pleasant to realise that we have developed
a form of family organisation which often cripples the emotional
life, and warps and confuses the growth of many individuals’ power to
consciously live their own lives. The third element in the Samoan
pattern of lack of personal relationships and lack of specialised
affection, is the case of friendship. Here, most of all, individuals
are placed in categories and the response is to the category,
“relative,” or “wife of my husband’s talking chief,” or “son of my
father’s talking chief,” or “daughter of my father’s talking chief.”
Consideration of congeniality, of like-mindedness, are all ironed out
in favour of regimented associations. Such attitudes we would of course
reject completely.
Drawing the threads of this particular discussion together, we may say
that one striking difference between Samoan society and our own is the
lack of the specialisation of feeling, and particularly of sex feeling,
among the Samoans. To this difference is undoubtedly due a part of the
lack of difficulty of marital adjustments in a marriage of convenience,
and the lack of frigidity or psychic impotence. This lack of
specialisation of feeling must be attributed to the large heterogeneous
household, the segregation of the sexes before adolescence, and the
regimentation of friendship—chiefly along relationship lines. And yet,
although we deplore the prices in maladjusted and frustrated lives,
which we must pay for the greater specialisation of sex feeling in
our own society, we nevertheless vote the development of specialised
response as a gain which we would not relinquish. But an examination
of these three causal factors suggests that we might accomplish our
desired end, the development of a consciousness of personality,
through coeducation and free and unregimented friendships, and
possibly do away with the evils inherent in the too intimate family
organisation, thus eliminating a part of our penalty of maladjustment
without sacrificing any of our dearly bought gains.
The next great difference between Samoa and our own culture which may
be credited with a lower production of maladjusted individuals is
the difference in the attitude towards sex and the education of the
children in matters pertaining to birth and death. None of the facts
of sex or of birth are regarded as unfit for children, no child has to
conceal its knowledge for fear of punishment or ponder painfully over
little-understood occurrences. Secrecy, ignorance, guilty knowledge,
faulty speculations resulting in grotesque conceptions which may have
far-reaching results, a knowledge of the bare physical facts of sex
without a knowledge of the accompanying excitement, of the fact of
birth without the pains of labour, of the fact of death without the
fact of corruption—all the chief flaws in our fatal philosophy of
sparing children a knowledge of the dreadful truth—are absent In Samoa.
Furthermore, the Samoan child who participates intimately in the lives
of a host of relatives has many and varied experiences upon which
to base its emotional attitudes. Our children, confined within one
family circle (and such confinement is becoming more and more frequent
with the growth of cities and the substitution of apartment houses
with a transitory population for a neighbourhood of house-holders),
often owe their only experience with birth or death to the birth of
a younger brother or sister or the death of a parent or grandparent.
Their knowledge of sex, aside from children’s gossip, comes from an
accidental glimpse of parental activity. This has several very obvious
disadvantages. In the first place, the child is dependent for its
knowledge upon birth and death entering its own home; the youngest
child in a family where there are no deaths may grow to adult life
without ever having had any close knowledge of pregnancy, experience
with young children, or contact with death.
A host of ill-digested fragmentary conceptions of life and death will
fester in the ignorant, inexperienced mind and provide a fertile field
for the later growth of unfortunate attitudes. Second, such children
draw their experiences from too emotionally toned a field; one birth
may be the only one with which they come in close contact for the first
twenty years of their lives. And upon the accidental aspects of this
particular birth their whole attitude is dependent. If the birth is
that of a younger child who usurps the elder’s place, if the mother
dies in child bed, or if the child which is born is deformed, birth
may seem a horrible thing, fraught with only unwelcome consequences.
If the only death bed at which one has ever watched is the death bed
of one’s mother, the bare fact of death may carry all the emotion
which that bereavement aroused, carry forever an effect out of all
proportion to the particular deaths encountered later in life. And
intercourse seen only once or twice, between relatives towards
whom the child has complicated emotional attitudes, may produce any
number of false assumptions. Our records of maladjusted children are
full of cases where children have misunderstood the nature of the
sexual act, have interpreted it as struggle accompanied by anger,
or as chastisement, have recoiled in terror from one highly charged
experience. So our children are dependent upon accident for their
experience of life and death; and those experiences which they are
vouchsafed, lie within the intimate family circle and so are the worst
possible way of learning general facts about which it is important to
acquire no special, distorted attitudes. One death, two births, one sex
experience, is a generous total for the child brought up under living
conditions which we consider consonant with an American standard of
living. And considering the number of illustrations which we consider
it necessary to give of how to calculate the number of square feet of
paper necessary to paper a room eight feet by twelve feet by fourteen
feet, or how to parse an English sentence, this is a low standard of
illustration. It might be argued that these are experiences of such
high emotional tone that repetition is unnecessary. It might also be
argued if a child were severely beaten before being given its first
lesson in calculating how to paper a room, and as a sequel to the
lesson, saw its father hit its mother with the poker, it would always
remember that arithmetic lesson. But what it would know about the real
nature of the calculations involved in room-papering is doubtful. In
one or two experiences, the child is given no perspective, no chance
to relegate the grotesque and unfamiliar physical details of the life
process to their proper place. False impressions, part impressions,
repulsion, nausea, horror, grow up about some fact experienced only
once under intense emotional stress and in an atmosphere unfavourable
to the child’s attaining any real understanding.
A standard of reticence which forbids the child any sort of comment
upon its experiences makes for the continuance of such false
impressions, such hampering emotional attitudes, questions such as,
“Why were grandma’s lips so blue?” are promptly hushed. In Samoa, where
decomposition sets in almost at once, a frank, naïve repugnance to the
odours of corruption on the part of all the participants at a funeral
robs the physical aspect of death of any special significance. So, in
our arrangements, the child is not allowed to repeat his experiences,
and he is not permitted to discuss those which he has had and correct
his mistakes.
With the Samoan child it is profoundly different. Intercourse,
pregnancy, child birth, death, are all familiar occurrences. And the
Samoan child experiences them in no such ordered fashion as we, were
we to decide for widening the child’s experimental field, would regard
as essential. In a civilisation which suspects privacy, children of
neighbours will be accidental and unemotional spectators in a house
where the head of the household is dying or the wife is delivered of a
miscarriage. The pathology of the life processes is known to them, as
well as the normal. One impression corrects an earlier one until they
are able, as adolescents, to think about life and death and emotion
without undue preoccupation with the purely physical details.
It must not be supposed, however, that the mere exposure of children to
scenes of birth and death would be a sufficient guarantee against the
growth of undesirable attitudes. Probably even more influential than
the facts which are so copiously presented to them, is the attitude of
mind with which their elders regard the matter. To them, birth and sex
and death are the natural, inevitable structure of existence, of an
existence in which they expect their youngest children to share. Our
so often repeated comment that “it’s not natural” for children to be
permitted to encounter death would seem as incongruous to them as if
we were to say it was not natural for children to see other people eat
or sleep. And this calm, matter-of-fact acceptance of their children’s
presence envelops the children in a protective atmosphere, saves them
from shock and binds them closer to the common emotion which is so
dignifiedly permitted them.
As in every case, it is here impossible to separate attitude from
practice and say which is primary. The distinction is made only for
our use in another civilisation. The individual American parents, who
believe in a practice like the Samoan, and permit their children to
see adult human bodies and gain a wider experience of the functioning
of the human body than is commonly permitted in our civilisation, are
building upon sand. For the child, as soon as it leaves the protecting
circle of its home, is blasted by an attitude which regards such
experience in children as ugly and unnatural. As likely as not, the
attempt of the individual parents will have done the child more harm
than good, for the necessary supporting social attitude is lacking.
This is just a further example of the possibilities of maladjustment
inherent in a society where each home differs from each other home; for
it is in the fact of difference that the strain lies rather than in the
nature of the difference.
Upon this quiet acceptance of the physical facts of life, the Samoans
build, as they grow older, an acceptance of sex. Here again it is
necessary to sort out which parts of their practice seem to produce
results which we certainly deprecate, and which produce results which
we desire. It is possible to analyse Samoan sex practice from the
standpoint of development of personal relationships on the one hand,
and of the obviation of specific difficulties upon the other.
We have seen that the Samoans have a low level of appreciation of
personality differences, and a poverty of conception of personal
relations. To such an attitude the acceptance of promiscuity
undoubtedly contributes. The contemporaneousness of several
experiences, their short duration, the definite avoidance of forming
any affectional ties, the blithe acceptance of the dictates of a
favourable occasion, as in the expectation of infidelity in any wife
whose husband is long from home, all serve to make sex an end rather
than a means, something which is valued in itself, and deprecated
inasmuch as it tends to bind one individual to another. Whether such
a disregard of personal relations is completely contingent upon
the sex habits of the people is doubtful. It probably is also a
reflection of a more general cultural attitude in which personality
is consistently disregarded. But there is one respect in which these
very practices make possible a recognition of personality which is
often denied to many in our civilisation, because, from the Samoans’
complete knowledge of sex, its possibilities and its rewards, they are
able to count it at its true value. And if they have no preference
for reserving sex activity for important relationships, neither do
they regard relationships as important because they are productive of
sex satisfaction. The Samoan girl who shrugs her shoulder over the
excellent technique of some young Lothario is nearer to the recognition
of sex as an impersonal force without any intrinsic validity, than
is the sheltered American girl who falls in love with the first man
who kisses her. From their familiarity with the reverberations which
accompany sex excitement comes this recognition of the essential
impersonality of sex attraction which we may well envy them; from the
too slight, too casual practice comes the disregard of personality
which seems to us unlovely.
The fashion in which their sex practice reduces the possibility of
neuroses has already been discussed. By discounting our category
of perversion, as applied to practice, and reserving it for the
occasional psychic pervert, they legislate a whole field of neurotic
possibility out of existence. Onanism, homosexuality, statistically
unusual forms of heterosexual activity, are neither banned nor
institutionalised. The wider range which these practices give prevents
the development of obsessions of guilt which are so frequent a cause
of maladjustment among us. The more varied practices permitted
heterosexually preserve any individual from being penalised for special
conditioning. This acceptance of a wider range as “normal” provides a
cultural atmosphere in which frigidity and psychic impotence do not
occur and in which a satisfactory sex adjustment in marriage can always
be established. The acceptance of such an attitude without in any way
accepting promiscuity would go a long way towards solving many marital
impasses and emptying our park benches and our houses of prostitution.
Among the factors in the Samoan scheme of life which are influential in
producing stable, well-adjusted, robust individuals, the organisation
of the family and the attitude towards sex are undoubtedly the most
important. But it is necessary to note also the general educational
concept which disapproves of precocity and coddles the slow, the
laggard, the inept. In a society where the tempo of life was faster,
the rewards greater, the amount of energy expended larger, the
bright children might develop symptoms of boredom. But the slower
pace dictated by the climate, the complacent, peaceful society, and
the compensation of the dance, in its blatant precocious display of
individuality which drains off some of the discontent which the bright
child feels, prevent any child from becoming too bored. And the dullard
is not goaded and dragged along faster than he is able until, sick with
making an impossible effort, he gives up entirely. This educational
policy also tends to blur individual differences and so to minimise
jealousy, rivalry, emulation, those social attitudes which arise out
of discrepancies of endowment and are so far-reaching in their effects
upon the adult personality.
It is one way of solving the problem of differences between individuals
and a method of solution exceedingly congenial to a strict adult world.
The longer the child is kept in a subject, non-initiating state, the
more of the general cultural attitude it will absorb, the less of a
disturbing element it will become. Furthermore, if time is given them,
the dullards can learn enough to provide a stout body of conservatives
upon whose shoulders the burden of the civilisation can safely rest.
Giving titles to young men would put a premium upon the exceptional;
giving titles to men of forty, who have at last acquired sufficient
training to hold them, assures the continuation of the usual. It also
discourages the brilliant so that their social contribution is slighter
than it might otherwise have been. We are slowly feeling our way
towards a solution of this problem, at least in the case of formal
education. Until very recently our educational system offered only
two very partial solutions of the difficulties inherent in a great
discrepancy between children of different endowment and different
rates of development. One solution was to allow a sufficiently long
time to each educational step so that all but the mentally defective
could succeed, a method similar to the Samoan one and without its
compensatory dance floor. The bright child, held back, at intolerably
boring tasks, unless he was fortunate enough to find some other outlet
for his unused energy, was likely to expend it upon truancy and general
delinquency. Our only alternative to this was “skipping” a child from
one grade to another, relying upon the child’s superior intelligence
to bridge the gaps. This was a method congenial to American enthusiasm
for meteoric careers from canal boat and log cabin to the White
House. Its disadvantages in giving the child a sketchy, discontinuous
background, in removing it from its age group, have been enumerated
too often to need repetition here. But it is worthy of note that with
a very different valuation of individual ability than that entertained
by Samoan society we used for years one solution, similar and less
satisfactory than theirs, in our formal educational attempts.
The methods which experimental educators are substituting for these
unsatisfactory solutions, schemes like the Dalton Plan, or the rapidly
moving classes in which a group of children can move ahead at a high,
even rate of speed without hurt to themselves or to their duller
fellows, is a striking example of the results of applying reason to
the institutions of our society. The old red school-house was almost
as haphazard and accidental a phenomenon as the Samoan dance floor. It
was an institution which had grown up in response to a vaguely felt,
unanalysed need. Its methods were analogous to the methods used by
primitive peoples, non-rationalised solutions of pressing problems. But
the institutionalisation of different methods of education for children
of different capacities and different rates of development is not like
anything which we find in Samoa or in any other primitive society.
It is the conscious, intelligent directing of human institutions in
response to observed human needs.
Still another factor in Samoan education which results in different
attitudes is the place of work and play in the children’s lives. Samoan
children do not learn to work through learning to play, as the children
of many primitive peoples do. Nor are they permitted a period of lack
of responsibility such as our children are allowed. From the time they
are four or five years old they perform definite tasks, graded to their
strength and intelligence, but still tasks which have a meaning in the
structure of the whole society. This does not mean that they have less
time for play than American children who are shut up in schools from
nine to three o’clock every day. Before the introduction of schools to
complicate the ordered routine of their lives, the time spent by the
Samoan child in running errands, sweeping the house, carrying water,
and taking actual care of the baby, was possibly less than that which
the American school child devotes to her studies.
The difference lies not in the proportion of time in which their
activities are directed and the proportion in which they are free, but
rather in the difference of attitude. With the professionalisation
of education and the specialisation of industrial tasks which has
stripped the individual home of its former variety of activities,
our children are not made to feel that the time they do devote to
supervised activity is functionally related to the world of adult
activity. Although this lack of connection is more apparent than real,
it is still sufficiently vivid to be a powerful determinant in the
child’s attitude. The Samoan girl who tends babies, carries water,
sweeps the floor; or the little boy who digs for bait, or collects
cocoanuts, has no such difficulty. The necessary nature of their tasks
is obvious. And the practice of giving a child a task which he can do
well and never permitting a childish, inefficient tinkering with adult
apparatus, such as we permit to our children, who bang aimlessly and
destructively on their fathers’ typewriters, results in a different
attitude towards work. American children spend hours in schools
learning tasks whose visible relation to their mothers’ and fathers’
activities is often quite impossible to recognise. Their participation
in adults’ activities is either in terms of toys, tea-sets and dolls
and toy automobiles, or else a meaningless and harmful tampering with
the electric light system. (It must be understood that here, as always,
when I say American, I do not mean those Americans recently arrived
from Europe, who still present a different tradition of education. Such
a group would be the Southern Italians, who still expect productive
work from their children.)
So our children make a false set of categories, work, play, and school;
work for adults, play for children’s pleasure, and schools as an
inexplicable nuisance with some compensations. These false distinctions
are likely to produce all sorts of strange attitudes, an apathetic
treatment of a school which bears no known relation to life, a false
dichotomy between work and play, which may result either in a dread of
work as implying irksome responsibility or in a later contempt for play
as childish.
The Samoan child’s dichotomy is different. Work consists of those
necessary tasks which keep the social life going: planting and
harvesting and preparation of food, fishing, house-building,
mat-making, care of children, collecting of property to validate
marriages and births and succession to titles and to entertain
strangers, these are the necessary activities of life, activities
in which every member of the community, down to the smallest child,
has a part. Work is not a way of acquiring leisure; where every
household produces its own food and clothes and furniture, where there
is no large amount of fixed capital and households of high rank are
simply characterised by greater industry in the discharge of greater
obligations, our whole picture of saving, of investment, of deferred
enjoyment, is completely absent. (There is even a lack of clearly
defined seasons of harvest, which would result in special abundance of
food and consequent feasting. Food is always abundant, except in some
particular village where a few weeks of scarcity may follow a period
of lavish entertaining.) Rather, work is something which goes on all
the time for every one; no one is exempt; few are overworked. There is
social reward for the industrious, social toleration for the man who
does barely enough. And there is always leisure—leisure, be it noted,
which is not the result of hard work or accumulated capital at all,
but is merely the result of a kindly climate, a small population, a
well-integrated social system, and no social demands for spectacular
expenditure. And play is what one does with the time left over from
working, a way of filling in the wide spaces in a structure of
unirksome work.
Play includes dancing, singing, games, weaving necklaces of flowers,
flirting, repartee, all forms of sex activity. And there are social
institutions like the ceremonial inter-village visit which partake of
both work and play. But the distinctions between work as something one
has to do but dislikes, and play as something one wants to do; of work
as the main business of adults, play as the main concern of children,
are conspicuously absent. Children’s play is like adults’ play in kind,
interest, and in its proportion to work. And the Samoan child has no
desire to turn adult activities into play, to translate one sphere into
the other. I had a box of white clay pipes for blowing soap bubbles
sent me. The children were familiar with soap bubbles, but their native
method of blowing them was very inferior to the use of clay pipes. But
after a few minutes’ delight in the unusual size and beauty of the soap
bubbles, one little girl after another asked me if she might please
take her pipe home to her mother, for pipes were meant to smoke, not to
play with. Foreign dolls did not interest them, and they have no dolls
of their own, although children of other islands weave dolls from the
palm leaves from which Samoan children weave balls. They never make toy
houses, nor play house, nor sail toy boats. Little boys would climb
into a real outrigger canoe and practise paddling it within the safety
of the lagoon. This whole attitude gave a greater coherence to the
children’s lives than we often afford our children.
The intelligibility of a child’s life among us is measured only in
terms of the behaviour of other children. If all the other children go
to school the child who does not feels incongruous in their midst. If
the little girl next door is taking music lessons, why can’t Mary; or
why must Mary take music lessons, if the other little girl doesn’t
take them. But so sharp is our sense of difference between the concerns
of children and of adults that the child does not learn to judge its
own behaviour in relationship to adult life. So children often learn to
regard play as something inherently undignified, and as adults mangle
pitifully their few moments of leisure. But the Samoan child measures
her every act of work or play in terms of her whole community; each
item of conduct is dignified in terms of its realised relationship to
the only standard she knows, the life of a Samoan village. So complex
and stratified a society as ours cannot hope to develop spontaneously
any such simple scheme of education. Again we will be hard put to it to
devise ways of participation for children, and means of articulating
their school life with the rest of life which will give them the same
dignity which Samoa affords her children.
Last among the cultural differences which may influence the emotional
stability of the child is the lack of pressure to make important
choices. Children are urged to learn, urged to behave, urged to work,
but they are not urged to hasten in the choices which they make
themselves. The first point at which this attitude makes itself felt
is in the matter of the brother and sister taboo, a cardinal point of
modesty and decency. Yet the exact stage at which the taboo should be
observed is always left to the younger child. When it reaches a point
of discretion, of understanding, it will of itself feel “ashamed” and
establish the formal barrier which will last until old age. Likewise,
sex activity is never urged upon the young people, nor marriage forced
upon them at a tender age. Where the possibilities of deviation from
the accepted standard are so slight, a few years leeway holds no threat
for the society. The child who comes later to a realisation of the
brother and sister taboo really endangers nothing.
This laissez faire attitude has been carried over into the Samoan
Christian Church. The Samoan saw no reason why young unmarried people
should be pressed to make momentous decisions which would spoil part
of their fun in life. Time enough for such serious matters after they
were married or later still, when they were quite sure of what steps
they were taking and were in less danger of falling from grace every
month or so. The missionary authorities, realising the virtues of going
slowly and sorely vexed to reconcile Samoan sex ethics with a Western
European code, saw the great disadvantages of unmarried Church members
who were not locked up in Church schools. Consequently, far from urging
the adolescent to think upon her soul the native pastor advises her to
wait until she is older, which she is only too glad to do.
But, especially in the case of our Protestant churches, there is a
strong preference among us for the appeal to youth. The Reformation,
with its emphasis upon individual choice, was unwilling to accept the
tacit habitual Church membership which was the Catholic pattern,
a membership marked by additional sacramental gifts but demanding
no sudden conversion, no renewal of religious feeling. But the
Protestant solution is to defer the choice only so far as necessary,
and the moment the child reaches an age which may be called “years
of discretion” it makes a strong, dramatic appeal. This appeal is
reinforced by parental and social pressure; the child is bidden to
choose now and wisely. While such a position in the churches which
stem from the Reformation and its strong emphasis on individual choice
was historically inevitable, it is regrettable that the convention has
lasted so long. It has even been taken over by non-sectarian reform
groups, all of whom regard the adolescent child as the most legitimate
field of activity.
In all of these comparisons between Samoan and American culture, many
points are useful only in throwing a spotlight upon our own solutions,
while in others it is possible to find suggestions for change. Whether
or not we envy other peoples one of their solutions, our attitude
towards our own solutions must be greatly broadened and deepened by
a consideration of the way in which other peoples have met the same
problems. Realising that our own ways are not humanly inevitable nor
God-ordained, but are the fruit of a long and turbulent history, we may
well examine in turn all of our institutions, thrown into strong relief
against the history of other civilisations, and weighing them in the
balance, be not afraid to find them wanting.
XIV
EDUCATION FOR CHOICE
We have been comparing point for point, our civilisation and the
simpler civilisation of Samoa, in order to illuminate our own methods
of education. If now we turn from the Samoan picture and take away
only the main lesson which we learned there, that adolescence is not
necessarily a time of stress and strain, but that cultural conditions
make it so, can we draw any conclusions which might bear fruit in the
training of our adolescents?
At first blush the answer seems simple enough. If adolescents are
only plunged into difficulties and distress because of conditions in
their social environment, then by all means let us so modify that
environment as to reduce this stress and eliminate this strain and
anguish of adjustment. But, unfortunately, the conditions which vex
our adolescents are the flesh and bone of our society, no more subject
to straightforward manipulation upon our part than is the language
which we speak. We can alter a syllable here, a construction there;
but the great and far-reaching changes in linguistic structure (as
in all parts of culture) are the work of time, a work in which each
individual plays an unconscious and inconsiderable part. The principal
causes of our adolescents’ difficulty are the presence of conflicting
standards and the belief that every individual should make his or her
own choices, coupled with a feeling that choice is an important matter.
Given these cultural attitudes, adolescence, regarded now not as a
period of physiological change, for we know that physiological puberty
need not produce conflict, but as the beginning of mental and emotional
maturity, is bound to be filled with conflicts and difficulties. A
society which is clamouring for choice, which is filled with many
articulate groups, each urging its own brand of salvation, its own
variety of economic philosophy, will give each new generation no peace
until all have chosen or gone under, unable to bear the conditions of
choice. The stress is in our civilisation, not in the physical changes
through which our children pass, but it is none the less real nor the
less inevitable in twentieth-century America.
And if we look at the particular forms which this need for choice
takes, the difficulty of the adolescent’s position is only documented
further. Because the discussion is principally concerned with girls, I
shall discuss the problem from the girls’ point of view, but in many
respects the plight of the adolescent boy is very similar. Between
fourteen and eighteen, the average American boy and girl finish school.
They are now ready to go to work and must choose what type of work they
wish to do. It might be argued that they often have remarkably little
choice. Their education, the part of the country in which they live,
their skill with their hands, will combine to dictate choice perhaps
between the job of cash girl in a department store or of telephone
operator, or of clerk or miner. But small as is the number of choices
open to them in actuality, the significance of this narrow field of
opportunity is blurred by our American theory of endless possibilities.
Moving picture, magazine, newspaper, all reiterate the Cinderella
story in one form or another, and often the interest lies as much in
the way cash girl 456 becomes head buyer as in her subsequent nuptials
with the owner of the store. Our occupational classes are not fixed.
So many children are better educated and hold more skilled positions
than their parents that even the ever-present discrepancy between
opportunities open to men and opportunities open to women, although
present in a girl’s competition with her brother, is often absent as
between her unskilled father and herself. It is needless to argue that
these attitudes are products of conditions which no longer exist,
particularly the presence of a frontier and a large amount of free
land which provided a perpetual alternative of occupational choice. A
set which was given to our thinking in pioneer days is preserved in
other terms. As long as we have immigrants from non-English-speaking
countries, the gap in opportunities between non-English-speaking
parents and English-speaking children will be vivid and dramatic.
Until our standard of education becomes far more stable than it is
at present, the continual raising of the age and grade until which
schooling is compulsory ensures a wide educational gap between many
parents and their children. And occupational shifts like the present
movements of farmers and farm workers into urban occupations, give
the same picture. When the agricultural worker pictures urban work
as a step up in the social scale, and the introduction of scientific
farming is so radically reducing the numbers needed in agriculture,
the movement of young people born on the farm to city jobs is bound to
dazzle the imagination of our farming states during the next generation
at least. The substitution of machines for unskilled workers and the
absorption of many of the workers and their children into positions
where they manipulate machines affords another instance of the kind of
historical change which keeps our myth of endless opportunity alive.
Add to these special features, like the effect upon the prospects of
Negro children of the tremendous exodus from the southern corn fields,
or upon the children of New England mill-hands who are deprived of an
opportunity to follow duly in their parents’ footsteps and must at
least seek new fields if not better ones.
Careful students of the facts may tell us that class lines are becoming
fixed; that while the children of immigrants make advances beyond
their parents, they move up in step; that there are fewer spectacular
successes among them than there used to be; that it is much more
possible to predict the future status of the child from the present
status of the parent. But this measured comment of the statistician
has not filtered into our literature, nor our moving pictures, nor in
any way served to minimise the vividness of the improvement in the
children’s condition as compared with the condition of their parents.
Especially in cities, there is no such obvious demonstration of the
fact that improvement is the rule for the children of a given class
or district, and not merely a case of John Riley’s making twenty
dollars a week as a crossing man while Mary, his daughter, who has
gone to business school, makes twenty-five dollars a week, working
shorter hours. The lure of correspondence school advertising, the
efflorescence of a doctrine of short-cuts to fame, all contrive to
make an American boy or girl’s choice of a job different from that of
English children, born into a society where stratification is so old,
so institutionalised, that the dullest cannot doubt it. So economic
conditions force them to go to work and everything combines to make
that choice a difficult one, whether in terms of abandoning a care-free
existence for a confining, uncongenial one, or in terms of bitter
rebellion against the choice which they must make in contrast to the
opportunities which they are told are open to all Americans.
And taking a job introduces other factors of difficulty into the
adolescent girl’s home situation. Her dependence has always been
demonstrated in terms of limits and curbs set upon her spontaneous
activity in every field from spending money to standards of dress and
behaviour. Because of the essentially pecuniary nature of our society,
the relationship of limitation in terms of allowance to limitation
of behaviour are more far-reaching than in earlier times. Parental
disapproval of extreme styles of clothing would formerly have expressed
itself in a mother’s making her daughter’s dresses high in the neck
and long in the sleeve. Now it expresses itself in control through
money. If Mary doesn’t stop purchasing chiffon stockings, Mary shall
have no money to buy stockings. Similarly, a taste for cigarettes
and liquor can only be gratified through money; going to the movies,
buying books and magazines of which her parents disapprove, are all
dependent upon a girl’s having the money, as well as upon her eluding
more direct forms of control. And the importance of a supply of money
in gratifying all of a girl’s desires for clothes and for amusement
makes money the easiest channel through which to exert parental
authority. So easy is it, that the threat of cutting off an allowance,
taking away the money for the one movie a week or the coveted hat, has
taken the place of the whippings and bread-and-water exiles which were
favourite disciplinary methods in the last century. The parents come
to rely upon this method of control. The daughters come to see all
censoring of their behaviour, moral, religious or social, the ethical
code and the slightest sumptuary provisions in terms of an economic
threat. And then at sixteen or seventeen the daughter gets a job. No
matter how conscientiously she may contribute her share to the expenses
of the household, it is probably only in homes where a European
tradition still lingers that the wage-earning daughter gives all of
her earning to her parents. (This, of course, excludes the cases where
the daughter supports her parents, where the vesting of the economic
responsibility in her hands changes the picture of parental control in
another fashion.) For the first time in her life, she has an income of
her own, with no strings of morals or of manners attached to its use.
Her parents’ chief instrument of discipline is shattered at one blow,
but not their desire to direct their daughters’ lives. They have not
pictured their exercise of control as the right of those who provide,
to control those for whom they provide. They have pictured it in far
more traditional terms, the right of parents to control their children,
an attitude reinforced by years of practising such control.
But the daughter is in the position of one who has yielded unwillingly
to some one who held a whip in his hand, and now sees the whip
broken. Her unwillingness to obey, her chafing under special parental
restrictions which children accept as inevitable in simpler cultures,
is again a feature of our conglomerate civilisation. When all the
children in the community go to bed at curfew, one child is not as
likely to rail against her parents for enforcing the rule. But when the
little girl next door is allowed to stay up until eleven o’clock, why
must Mary go to bed at eight? If all of her companions at school are
allowed to smoke, why can’t she? And conversely, for it is a question
of the absence of a common standard far more than of the nature of the
standards, if all the other little girls are given lovely fussy dresses
and hats with flowers and ribbons, why must she be dressed in sensible,
straight linen dresses and simple round hats? Barring an excessive and
passionate devotion of the children to their parents, a devotion of a
type which brings other more serious difficulties in its wake, children
in a heterogeneous civilisation will not accept unquestioningly their
parents’ judgment, and the most obedient will temper present compliance
with the hope of future emancipation.
In a primitive, homogeneous community, disciplinary measures of
parents are expended upon securing small concessions from children,
in correcting the slight deviations which occur within one pattern of
behaviour. But in our society, home discipline is used to establish
one set of standards as over against other sets of standards, each
family group is fighting some kind of battle, bearing the onus of
those who follow a middle course, stoutly defending a cause already
lost in the community at large, or valiantly attempting to plant a new
standard far in advance of their neighbours. This propagandist aspect
greatly increases the importance of home discipline in the development
of a girl’s personality. So we have the picture of parents, shorn of
their economic authority, trying to coerce the girl who still lives
beneath their roof into an acceptance of standards against which she is
rebelling. In this attempt they often find themselves powerless and as
a result the control of the home breaks down suddenly, and breaks down
just at the point where the girl, faced with other important choices,
needs a steadying home environment.
It is at about this time that sex begins to play a rôle in the girl’s
life, and here also conflicting choices are presented to her. If
she chooses the freer standards of her own generation, she comes in
conflict with her parents, and perhaps more importantly with the
ideals which her parents have instilled. The present problem of the
sex experimentation of young people would be greatly simplified if it
were conceived of as experimentation instead of as rebellion, if no
Puritan self-accusations vexed their consciences. The introduction of
an experimentation so much wider and more dangerous presents sufficient
problems in our lack of social canons for such behaviour. For a new
departure in the field of personal relations is always accompanied by
the failure of those who are not strong enough to face an unpatterned
situation. Canons of honour, of personal obligation, of the limits of
responsibilities, grow up only slowly. And, of first experimenters,
many perish in uncharted seas. But when there is added to the pitfalls
of experiment, the suspicion that the experiment is wrong and the need
for secrecy, lying, fear, the strain is so great that frequent downfall
is inevitable. And if the girl chooses the other course, decides to
remain true to the tradition of the last generation, she wins the
sympathy and support of her parents at the expense of the comradeship
of her contemporaries. Whichever way the die falls, the choice is
attended by mental anguish. Only occasional children escape by various
sorts of luck, a large enough group who have the same standards so
that they are supported either against their parents or against the
majority of their age mates, or by absorption in some other interest.
But, with the exception of students for whom the problem of personal
relations is sometimes mercifully deferred for a later settlement,
those who find some other interest so satisfying that they take no
interest in the other sex, often find themselves old maids without any
opportunity to recoup their positions. The fear of spinsterhood is a
fear which shadows the life of no primitive woman; it is another item
of maladjustment which our civilisation has produced.
To the problem of present conduct are added all the perplexities
introduced by varying concepts of marriage, the conflict between
deferring marriage until a competence is assured, or marrying and
sharing the expenses of the home with a struggling young husband.
The knowledge of birth control, while greatly dignifying human
life by introducing the element of choice at the point where
human beings have before been most abjectly subject to nature,
introduces further perplexities. It complicates the issue from a
straight marriage-home-and-children plan of life versus independent
spinsterhood by permitting marriages without children, earlier
marriages, marriages and careers, sex relations without marriage and
the responsibility of a home. And because the majority of girls still
wish to marry and regard their occupations as stop-gaps, these problems
not only influence their attitude towards men, but also their attitude
towards their work, and prevent them from having a sustained interest
in the work which they are forced to do.
Then we must add to the difficulties inherent in a new economic status
and the necessity of adopting some standard of sex relations, ethical
and religious issues to be solved. Here again the home is a powerful
factor; the parents use every ounce of emotional pressure to enlist
their children in one of the dozen armies of salvation. The stress
of the revival meeting, the pressure of pastor and parent gives them
no peace. And the basic difficulties of reconciling the teachings of
authority with the practices of society and the findings of science,
all trouble and perplex children already harassed beyond endurance.
Granting that society presents too many problems to her adolescents,
demands too many momentous decisions on a few months’ notice, what is
to be done about it? One panacea suggested would be to postpone at
least some of the decisions, keep the child economically dependent, or
segregate her from all contact with the other sex, present her with
only one set of religious ideas until she is older, more poised,
better able to deal critically with the problems which will confront
her. In a less articulate fashion, such an idea is back of various
schemes for the prolongation of youth, through raising the working age,
raising the school age, shielding school children from a knowledge of
controversies like evolution versus fundamentalism, or any knowledge
of sex hygiene or birth control. Even if such measures, specially
initiated and legislatively enforced, could accomplish the end which
they seek and postpone the period of choice, it is doubtful whether
such a development would be desirable. It is unfair that very young
children should be the battleground for conflicting standards, that
their development should be hampered by propagandist attempts to
enlist and condition them too young. It is probably equally unfair to
culturally defer the decisions too late. Loss of one’s fundamental
religious faith is more of a wrench at thirty than at fifteen simply
in terms of the number of years of acceptance which have accompanied
the belief. A sudden knowledge of hitherto unsuspected aspects of sex,
or a shattering of all the old conventions concerning sex behaviour,
is more difficult just in terms of the strength of the old attitudes.
Furthermore, in practical terms, such schemes would be as they are now,
merely local, one state legislating against evolution, another against
birth control, or one religious group segregating its unmarried girls.
And these special local movements would simply unfit groups of young
people for competing happily with children who had been permitted to
make their choices earlier. Such an educational scheme, in addition
to being almost impossible of execution, would be a step backward and
would only beg the question.
Instead, we must turn all of our educational efforts to training our
children for the choices which will confront them. Education, in the
home even more than at school, instead of being a special pleading for
one régime, a desperate attempt to form one particular habit of mind
which will withstand all outside influences, must be a preparation for
those very influences. Such an education must give far more attention
to mental and physical hygiene than it has given hitherto. The child
who is to choose wisely must be healthy in mind and body, handicapped
in no preventable fashion. And even more importantly, this child of
the future must have an open mind. The home must cease to plead an
ethical cause or a religious belief with smiles or frowns, caresses or
threats. The children must be taught how to think, not what to think.
And because old errors die slowly, they must be taught tolerance,
just as to-day they are taught intolerance. They must be taught that
many ways are open to them, no one sanctioned above its alternative,
and that upon them and upon them alone lies the burden of choice.
Unhampered by prejudices, unvexed by too early conditioning to any one
standard, they must come clear-eyed to the choices which lie before
them. For it must be realised by any student of civilisation that
we pay heavily for our heterogeneous, rapidly changing civilisation;
we pay in high proportions of crime and delinquency, we pay in the
conflicts of youth, we pay in an ever-increasing number of neuroses, we
pay in the lack of a coherent tradition without which the development
of art is sadly handicapped. In such a list of prices, we must count
our gains carefully, not to be discouraged. And chief among our gains
must be reckoned this possibility of choice, the recognition of many
possible ways of life, where other civilisations have recognised only
one. Where other civilisations give a satisfactory outlet to only one
temperamental type, be he mystic or soldier, business man or artist, a
civilisation in which there are many standards offers a possibility of
satisfactory adjustment to individuals of many different temperamental
types, of diverse gifts and varying interests.
At the present time we live in a period of transition. We have many
standards but we still believe that only one standard can be the right
one. We present to our children the picture of a battle-field where
each group is fully armoured in a conviction of the righteousness
of its cause. And each of these groups make forays among the next
generation. But it is unthinkable that a final recognition of the great
number of ways in which man, during the course of history and at the
present time, is solving the problems of life, should not bring with
it in turn the downfall of our belief in a single standard. And when
no one group claims ethical sanction for its customs, and each group
welcomes to its midst only those who are temperamentally fitted for
membership, then we shall have realised the high point of individual
choice and universal toleration which a heterogeneous culture and a
heterogeneous culture alone can attain. Samoa knows but one way of life
and teaches it to her children. Will we, who have the knowledge of many
ways, leave our children free to choose among them?
APPENDIX I
NOTES TO CHAPTERS
CHAPTER IV
Pages 43 to 45.
In the Samoan classification of relatives two principles, sex and age,
are of the most primary importance. Relationship terms are never used
as terms of address, a name or nickname being used even to father or
mother. Relatives of the same age or within a year or two younger to
five or ten years older are classified as of the speaker’s generation,
and of the same sex or of the opposite sex. Thus a girl will call her
sister, her aunt, her niece, and her female cousin who are nearly of
the same age, _uso_, and a boy will do the same for his brother, uncle,
nephew, or male cousin. For relationships between siblings of opposite
sex there are two terms, _tuafafine_ and _tuagane_, female relative of
the same age group of a male, and male relative of the same age group
of a female. (The term _uso_ has no such subdivisions.)
The next most important term is applied to younger relatives of either
sex, the word _tei_. Whether a child is so classified by an older
relative depends not so much on how many years younger the child may
be, but rather on the amount of care that the elder has taken of it.
So a girl will call a cousin two years younger than herself her _tei_,
if she has lived near by, but an equally youthful cousin who has grown
up in a distant village until both are grown will be called _uso_. It
is notable that there is no term for elder relative. The terms _uso_,
_tufafine_ and _tuagane_ all carry the feeling of contemporaneousness,
and if it is necessary to specify seniority, a qualifying adjective
must be used.
_Tamā_, the term for father, is applied also to the _matai_ of a
household, to an uncle or older cousin with whose authority a younger
person comes into frequent contact and also to a much older brother who
in feeling is classed with the parent generation. _Tinā_ is used only
a little less loosely for the mother, aunts resident in the household,
the wife of the _matai_ and only very occasionally for an older sister.
A distinction is also made in terminology between men’s terms and
women’s terms for the children. A woman will say _tama_ (modified by
the addition of the suffixes _tane_ and _fafine_, male and female) and
a man will say _atalii_, son and _afafine_, daughter. Thus a woman
will say, “Losa is my _tama_,” specifying her sex only when necessary.
But Losa’s father will speak of Losa as his _afafine_. The same usage
is followed in speaking _to_ a man or _to_ a woman or a child. All of
these terms are further modified by the addition of the word, _moni_,
real, when a blood sister or blood father or mother is meant. The
elders of the household are called roughly _matua_, and a grandparent
is usually referred to as the _toa’ina_, the “old man” or _olamatua_,
“old woman,” adding an explanatory clause if necessary. All other
relatives are described by the use of relative clauses, “the sister of
the husband of the sister of my mother,” “the brother of the wife of my
brother,” etc. There are no special terms for the in-law group.