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Title: Coming of age in Samoa
A psychological study of primitive youth for western civilisation

Author: Margaret Mead

Author of introduction, etc.: Franz Boas

Release date: November 16, 2024 [eBook #74750]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: William Morrow & Company, 1928

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/74750

Credits: Robert Tonsing and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK COMING OF
AGE IN SAMOA ***

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

Foreword by Franz Boas
Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University

WILLIAM MORROW & COMPANY
NEW YORK MCMXXVIII

COMING OF AGE
IN SAMOA

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

PAGE

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

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.

The “House to meet the Stranger”

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.

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.

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.

A dancing costume for European tastes

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.

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.

In the bark cloth costume of long ago

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.

A talking chief—the native Master of Ceremonies

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.

CHAPTER V
Neighbourhood Maps

Pages 60 to 65.
For the sake of convenience the households were numbered in sequence from one
end of each village to the other. The houses did not stretch in a straight line along the
beach, but were located so unevenly that occasionally one house was directly behind
another. A schematic linear representation will, however, be sufficient to show the
effect of location in the formation of neighbourhood groups.

VILLAGE I
Lumā
(The name of the girl will be placed under the number of the household. Adolescent
girls’ names in capitals, girls’ just reaching puberty in lower case and the pre-
adolescent children in italics.)
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Vala Lita Maliu Lusi Fitu Lia Fiva
Pola Ula Luna

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18
Lota Pala Tuna
Vi
Pele

19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27
Losa Tulipa Masina Mina Tina
Sona

28 29 30 31 32 33
Tita Selu
Sina Aso Tolo
Elisa Suna

VILLAGE II
Siufaga
(Household 38 in Siufaga is adjacent to household 1 in Lumā. The two villages are
geographically continuous but socially they are separate units.)
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Vina Namu Lita[10] Tulima
Tolo Tolu
Lusina

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20
[10]
Tatala Lilina Tino Mala Lola

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30
Pulona Ipu Tasi Tua Timu
Meta

31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38
Lua Simina Fala
Solata

[10] Girls to whom a change of residence made important differences, see Chap. XI, “The Girl in
Conflict.”

VILLAGE III
Faleasao
(Faleasao was separated from Lumā by a high cliff which jutted out into the sea and
made it necessary to take an inland trail to get from one seaside village to the other.
This was about a twenty-minute walk from Taū. Faleasao children were looked upon
with much greater hostility and suspicion than that which the children of Lumā and
Siufaga showed to each other. The pre-adolescent children from this village are not
discussed by name and will be indicated by an x.)

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
x x x Talo Ela Leta
x x

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20
x x Mina Moana Sala x Mata
x x x
Luina

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29
x x x

CHAPTER IX

Pages 123 to 125.
The first person singular of the verb “to know,” used in the negative, has two forms:
Ta ilo (Contraction of Ta te lē iloa)
I euphonic neg. know
particle
and
Ua le iloa a’u
Pres. neg. know I
Part.
The former of these expressions has a very different meaning from the latter
although linguistically they represent optional syntactic forms, the second being
literally, “I do not know,” while the first can best be rendered by the slang phrase,
“Search me.” This “Search me” carries no implication of lack of actual knowledge or
information about the subject in question but is merely an indication either of lack of
interest or unwillingness to explain. That the Samoans feel this distinction very clearly
is shown by the frequent use of both forms in the same sentence: Ta ilo ua lē iloa a’u.
“Search me, I don’t know.”
Page 126.

Sample Character Sketches Given of Members of Their Households by
Adolescent Girls
(Literal translations from dictated texts)
I

He is an untitled man. He works hard on the plantation. He is tall, thin and dark-
skinned. He is not easily angered. He goes to work and comes again at night. He is a

policeman. He does work for the government. He is not filled with unwillingness. He is
attractive looking. He is not married.
II

She is an old woman. She is very old. She is weak. She is not able to work. She can
only remain in the house. Her hair is black. She is fat. She has elephantiasis in one leg.
She has no teeth. She is not irritable. She does not hate. She is clever at weaving mats,
fishing baskets and food trays.
III

She is strong and able to work. She goes inland. She weeds and makes the oven and
picks breadfruit and gathers paper mulberry bark. She is kind. She is of good conduct.
She is clever at weaving baskets and mats and fine mats and food trays, and painting
tapa cloth and scraping and pounding and pasting paper mulberry bark. She is short,
black-haired and dark-skinned. She is fat. She is good. If any one passes by she is
kindly disposed towards them and calls out, “Po’o fea ’e te maliu i ai?” (a most
courteous way of asking, “Where are you going?”)
IV

She is fat. She has long hair. She is dark-skinned. She is blind in one eye. She is of
good behaviour. She is clever at weeding taro and weaving floor mats and fine mats.
She is short. She has borne children. There is a baby. She remains in the house on some
days and on other days she goes inland. She also knows how to weave baskets.
V

He is a boy. His skin is dark. So is his hair. He goes to the bush to work. He works
on the taro plantation. He likes every one. He is clever at weaving baskets. He sings in
the choir of the young men on Sunday. He likes very much to consort with the girls. He
was expelled from the pastor’s house.
VI
Portrait of herself
I am a girl. I am short. I have long hair. I love my sisters and all the people. I know
how to weave baskets and fishing baskets and how to prepare paper mulberry bark. I
live in the house of the pastor.
VII

He is a man. He is strong. He goes inland and works upon the plantation of his
relatives. He goes fishing. He goes to gather cocoanuts and breadfruit and cooking
leaves and makes the oven. He is tall. He is dark-skinned. He is rather fat. His hair is
short. He is clever at weaving baskets. He braids the palm leaf thatching mats for the
house.[11] He is also clever at house-building. He is of good conduct and has a loving
countenance.

[11] Women’s work.

VIII

She is a woman. She can’t work hard enough (to suit herself). She is also clever at
weaving baskets and fine mats and at bark cloth making. She also makes the ovens and
clears away the rubbish around the house. She keeps her house in fine condition. She
makes the fire. She smokes. She goes fishing and gets octopuses and tu’itu’i (sea eggs)
and comes back and eats them raw. She is kind-hearted and of loving countenance. She
is never angry. She also loves her children.
IX

She is a woman. She has a son, ——— is his name. She is lazy. She is tall. She is
thin. Her hair is long. She is clever at weaving baskets, making bark cloth and weaving
fine mats. Her husband is dead. She does not laugh often. She stays in the house some
days and other days she goes inland. She keeps everything clean. She lives well upon
bananas. She has a loving face. She is not easily out of temper. She makes the oven.
X

She is the daughter of ———. She is a little girl about my age. She is also clever at
weaving baskets and mats and fine mats and blinds and floor mats. She is good in
school. She also goes to get leaves and breadfruit. She also goes fishing when the tide
is out. She gets crabs and jelly fish. She is very loving. She does not eat up all her food
if others ask her for it. She shows a loving face to all who come to her house. She also
spreads food for all visitors.
XI
Portrait of herself
I am clever at weaving mats and fine mats and baskets and blinds and floor mats. I
go and carry water for all of my household to drink and for others also. I go and gather
bananas and breadfruit and leaves and make the oven with my sisters. Then we (herself
and her sisters) go fishing together and then it is night.

CHAPTER X

Pages 132 to 133.
The children of this age already show a very curious example of a phonetic self-
consciousness in which they are almost as acute and discriminating as their elders.
When the missionaries reduced the language to writing, there was no k in the language,
the k positions in other Polynesian dialects being filled in Samoan either with a t or a
glottal stop. Soon after the printing of the Bible, and the standardisation of Samoan
spelling, greater contact with Tonga introduced the k into the spoken language of
Savai’i and Upolu, displacing the t, but not replacing the glottal stop. Slowly this
intrusive usage spread eastward over Samoa, the missionaries who controlled the

schools and the printing press fighting a dogged and losing battle with the less musical
k. To-day the t is the sound used in the speech of the educated and in the church, still
conventionally retained in all spelling and used in speeches and on occasions
demanding formality. The Manu’a children who had never been to the missionary
boarding schools, used the k entirely. But they had heard the t in church and at school
and were sufficiently conscious of the difference to rebuke me immediately if I slipped
into the colloquial k, which was their only speech habit, uttering the t sound for perhaps
the first time in their lives to illustrate the correct pronunciation from which I, who was
ostensibly learning to speak correctly, must not deviate. Such an ability to disassociate
the sound used from the sound heard is remarkable in such very young children and
indeed remarkable in any person who is not linguistically sophisticated.

CHAPTER XI

Pages 161 to 163.
During six months I saw six girls leave the pastor’s establishment for several
reasons: Tasi, because her mother was ill and she, that rare phenomenon, the eldest in a
biological household, was needed at home; Tua, because she had come out lowest in
the missionaries’ annual examination which her mother attributed to favouritism on the
part of the pastor; Luna, because her stepmother, whom she disliked, left her father and
thus made her home more attractive and because under the influence of a promiscuous
older cousin she began to tire of the society of younger girls and take an interest in love
affairs; Lita, because her father ordered her home, because with the permission of the
pastor, but without consulting her family, she went off for a three weeks’ visit in
another island. Going home for Lita involved residence in the far end of the other
village, necessitating a complete change of friends. The novelty of the new group and
new interests kept her from in any way chafing at the change. Sala, a stupid idle girl,
had eloped from the household of the pastor.

APPENDIX II
METHODOLOGY OF THIS STUDY

It is impossible to present a single and unified picture of the adolescent
girl in Samoa and at the same time to answer most satisfactorily the various
kinds of questions which such a study will be expected to answer. For the
ethnologist in search of data upon the usages and rites connected with
adolescence it is necessary to include descriptions of customs which have
fallen into partial decay under the impact of western propaganda and
foreign example. Traditional observances and attitudes are also important in
the study of the adolescent girl in present-day Samoa because they still
form a large part of the thought pattern of her parents, even if they are no
longer given concrete expression in the girl’s cultural life. But this double
necessity of describing not only the present environment and the girl’s
reaction to it, but also of interpolating occasionally some description of the
more rigid cultural milieu of her mother’s girlhood, mars to some extent the
unity of the study.
The detailed observations were all made upon a group of girls living in
three practically contiguous villages on one coast of the island of Taū. The
data upon the ceremonial usages surrounding birth, adolescence and
marriage were gathered from all of the seven villages in the Manu’a
Archipelago.
The method of approach is based upon the assumption that a detailed
intensive investigation will be of more value than a more diffused and
general study based upon a less accurate knowledge of a greater number of
individuals. Dr. Van Waters’ study of The Adolescent Girl Among Primitive
Peoples has exhausted the possibilities of an investigation based upon the
merely external observations of the ethnologist who is giving a standardised
description of a primitive culture. We have a huge mass of general
descriptive material without the detailed observations and the individual
cases in the light of which it would be possible to interpret it.

The writer therefore chose to work in one small locality, in a group
numbering only six hundred people, and spend six months accumulating an
intimate and detailed knowledge of all the adolescent girls in this
community. As there were only sixty-eight girls between the ages of nine
and twenty, quantitative statements are practically valueless for obvious
reasons: the probable error of the group is too large; the age classes are too
small, etc. The only point at which quantitative statements can have any
relevance is in regard to the variability within the group, as the smaller the
variability within the sample, the greater the general validity of the results.
Furthermore, the type of data which we needed is not of the sort which
lends itself readily to quantitative treatment. The reaction of the girl to her
stepmother, to relatives acting as foster parents, to her younger sister, or to
her older brother,—these are incommensurable in quantitative terms. As the
physician and the psychiatrist have found it necessary to describe each case
separately and to use their cases as illumination of a thesis rather than as
irrefutable proof such as it is possible to adduce in the physical sciences, so
the student of the more intangible and psychological aspects of human
behaviour is forced to illuminate rather than demonstrate a thesis. The
composition of the background against which the girl acts can be described
in accurate and general terms, but her reactions are a function of her own
personality and cannot be described without reference to it. The
generalisations are based upon a careful and detailed observation of a small
group of subjects. These results will be illuminated and illustrated by case
histories.
The conclusions are also all subject to the limitation of the personal
equation. They are the judgments of one individual upon a mass of data,
many of the most significant aspects of which can, by their very nature, be
known only to herself. This was inevitable and it can only be claimed in
extenuation that as the personal equation was held absolutely constant, the
different parts of the data are strictly commensurable. The judgment on the
reaction of Lola to her uncle and of Sona to her cousin are made on exactly
the same basis.
Another methodological device which possibly needs explanation is the
substitution of a cross sectional study for a linear one. Twenty-eight
children who as yet showed no signs of puberty, fourteen children who
would probably mature within the next year or year and a half, and twenty-

five girls who had passed puberty within the last four years but were not yet
classed by the community as adults, were studied in detail. Less intensive
observations were also made upon the very little children and the young
married women. This method of taking cross sections, samples of
individuals at different periods of physical development, and arguing that a
group in an earlier stage will later show the characteristics which appear in
another group at a later stage, is, of course, inferior to a linear study in
which the same group is under observation for a number of years. A very
large number of cases has usually been the only acceptable defence of such
a procedure. The number of cases included in this investigation, while very
small in comparison with the numbers mustered by any student of American
children, is nevertheless a fair-sized sample in terms of the very small
population of Samoa (a rough eight thousand in all four islands of American
Samoa) and because the only selection was geographical. It may further be
argued that the almost drastic character of the conclusions, the exceedingly
few exceptions which need to be made, further validate the size of the
sample. The adoption of the cross section method was, of course, a matter
of expediency, but the results when carefully derived from a fair sample,
may be fairly compared with the results obtained by using the linear
method, when the same subjects are under observation over a period of
years. This is true when the conclusions to be drawn are general and not
individual. For the purposes of psychological theory, it is sufficient to know
that children in a certain society walk, on the average, at twelve months,
and talk, on the average, at fifteen months. For the purposes of the
diagnostician, it is necessary to know that John walked at eighteen months
and did not talk until twenty months. So, for general theoretical purposes, it
is enough to state that little girls just past puberty develop a shyness and
lack of self-possession in the presence of boys, but if we are to understand
the delinquency of Mala, it is necessary to know that she prefers the
company of boys to that of girls and has done so for several years.

PARTICULAR METHODS USED
The description of the cultural background was obtained in orthodox
fashion, first through interviews with carefully chosen informants, followed
by checking up their statements with other informants and by the use of
many examples and test cases. With a few unimportant exceptions this

material was obtained in the Samoan language and not through the medium
of interpreters. All of the work with individuals was done in the native
language, as there were no young people on the island who spoke English.
Although a knowledge of the entire culture was essential for the accurate
evaluation of any particular individual’s behaviour, a detailed description
will be given only of those aspects of the culture which are immediately
relevant to the problem of the adolescent girl. For example, if I observe Pele
refuse point blank to carry a message to the house of a relative, it is
important to know whether she is actuated by stubbornness, dislike of the
relative, fear of the dark, or fear of the ghost which lives near by and has a
habit of jumping on people’s backs. But to the reader a detailed exposition
of the names and habits of all the local ghost population would be of little
assistance in the appreciation of the main problem. So all descriptions of the
culture which are not immediately relevant are omitted from the discussion
but were not omitted from the original investigation. Their irrelevancy has,
therefore, been definitely ascertained.
The knowledge of the general cultural pattern was supplemented by a
detailed study of the social structure of the three villages under
consideration. Each household was analysed from the standpoint of rank,
wealth, location, contiguity to other households, relationship to other
households, and the age, sex, relationship, marital status, number of
children, former residence, etc., of each individual in the household. This
material furnished a general descriptive basis for a further and more careful
analysis of the households of the subjects, and also provided a check on the
origin of feuds or alliances between individuals, the use of relationship
terms, etc. Each child was thus studied against a background which was
known in detail.
A further mass of detailed information was obtained about the subjects:
approximate age (actual age can never be determined in Samoa), order of
birth, numbers of brothers and sisters, who were older and younger than the
subject, number of marriages of each parent, patrilocal and matrilocal
residence, years spent in the pastor’s school and in the government school
and achievement there, whether the child had ever been out of the village or
off the island, sex experience, etc. The children were also given a makeshift
intelligence test, colour-naming, rote memory, opposites, substitution, ball
and field, and picture interpretation. These tests were all given in Samoan;

standardisation was, of course, impossible and ages were known only
relatively; they were mainly useful in assisting me in placing the child
within her group, and have no value for comparative purposes. The results
of the tests did indicate, however, a very low variability within the group.
The tests were supplemented by a questionnaire which was not
administered formally but filled in by random questioning from time to
time. This questionnaire gave a measure of their industrial knowledge, the
extent to which they participated in the lore of the community, of the degree
to which they had absorbed European teaching in matters like telling time,
reading the calendar, and also of the extent to which they had participated in
or witnessed scenes of death, birth, miscarriage, etc.
But this quantitative data represents the barest skeleton of the material
which was gathered through months of observation of the individuals and of
groups, alone, in their households, and at play. From these observations, the
bulk of the conclusions are drawn concerning the attitudes of the children
towards their families and towards each other, their religious interests or the
lack of them, and the details of their sex lives. This information cannot be
reduced to tables or to statistical statements. Naturally in many cases it was
not as full as in others. In some cases it was necessary to pursue a more
extensive enquiry in order to understand some baffling aspect of the child’s
behaviour. In all cases the investigation was pursued until I felt that I
understood the girl’s motivation and the degree to which her family group
and affiliation in her age group explained her attitudes.
The existence of the pastor’s boarding-school for girls past puberty
provided me with a rough control group. These girls were so severely
watched that heterosexual activities were impossible; they were grouped
together with other girls of the same age regardless of relationship; they
lived a more ordered and regular life than the girls who remained in their
households. The ways in which they differed from other girls of the same
age and more resembled European girls of the same age follow with
surprising accuracy the lines suggested by the specific differences in
environment. However, as they lived part of the time at home, the
environmental break was not complete and their value as a control group is
strictly limited.

APPENDIX III
SAMOAN CIVILISATION AS IT IS TO-DAY

The scene of this study was the little island of Taū. Along one coast of the
island, which rises precipitately to a mountain peak in the centre, cluster
three little villages, Lumā and Siufaga, side by side, and Faleasao, half a
mile away. On the other end of the island is the isolated village of Fitiuta,
separated from the other three villages by a long and arduous trail. Many of
the people from the other villages have never been to Fitiuta, eight miles
away. Twelve miles across the open sea are the two islands of Ofu and
Olesega, which with Taū, make up the Manu’a Archipelago, the most
primitive part of Samoa. Journeys in slender outrigger canoes from one of
these three little islands to another are frequent, and the inhabitants of
Manu’a think of themselves as a unit as over against the inhabitants of
Tutuila, the large island where the Naval Station is situated. The three
islands have a population of a little over two thousand people, with constant
visiting, inter-marrying, adoption going on between the seven villages of
the Archipelago.
The natives still live in their beehive-shaped houses with floors of coral
rubble, no walls except perishable woven blinds which are lowered in bad
weather, and a roof of sugar-cane thatch over which it is necessary to bind
palm branches in every storm. They have substituted cotton cloth for their
laboriously manufactured bark cloth for use as everyday clothing, native
costume being reserved for ceremonial occasions. But the men content
themselves with a wide cotton loin cloth, the lavalava, fastened at the waist
with a dexterous twist of the material. This costume permits a little of the
tattooing which covers their bodies from knee to the small of the back, to
appear above and below the folds of the lavalava. Tattooing has been taboo
on Manu’a for two generations, so only a part of the population have made
the necessary journey to another island in search of a tattooer. Women wear
a longer lavalava and a short cotton dress falling to their knees. Both sexes
go barefoot and hats are worn only to Church, on which occasions the men

don white shirts and white coats, ingeniously tailored by the native women
in imitation of Palm Beach coats which have fallen into their hands. The
women’s tattooing is much sparser than the men’s, a mere matter of dots
and crosses on arms, hands, and thighs. Garlands of flowers, flowers in the
hair, and flowers twisted about the ankles, serve to relieve the drabness of
the faded cotton clothing, and on gala days, beautifully patterned bark cloth,
fine mats, gaily bordered with red parrot feathers, headdresses of human
hair decorated with plumes and feathers, recall the more picturesque attire
of pre-Christian days.
Sewing-machines have been in use for many years, although the natives
are still dependent upon some deft-handed sailor for repairs. Scissors have
also been added to the household equipment, but wherever possible a
Samoan woman still uses her teeth or a piece of bamboo. At the Missionary
boarding-schools a few of the women have learned to crochet and
embroider, using their skill particularly to ornament the plump, hard pillows
which are rapidly displacing the little bamboo head rests. Sheets of white
cotton have taken the place of sheets of firmly woven mats or of bark cloth.
Mosquito nets of cotton netting make a native house much more endurable
than must have been the case when bark cloth tents were the only defence
against insects. The netting is suspended at night from stout cords hung
across the house, and the edges weighted down with stones, so that
prowling dogs, pigs, and chickens wander through the house at will without
disturbing the sleepers.
Agate buckets share with hollowed cocoanut shells the work of bringing
water from the springs and from the sea, and a few china cups and glasses
co-operate with the cocoanut drinking cups. Many households have an iron
cook pot in which they can boil liquids in preference to the older method of
dropping red hot stones into a wooden vessel containing the liquid to be
heated. Kerosene lamps and lanterns are used extensively; the old candle-
nut clusters and cocoanut oil lamps being reinstated only in times of great
scarcity when they cannot afford to purchase kerosene. Tobacco is a much-
prized luxury; the Samoans have learned to grow it, but imported varieties
are very much preferred to their own.
Outside the household the changes wrought by the introduction of
European articles are very slight. The native uses an iron knife to cut his
copra and an iron adze blade in place of the old stone one. But he still binds

the rafters of his house together with cinet and sews the parts of his fishing
canoes together. The building of large canoes has been abandoned. Only
small canoes for fishing are built now, and for hauling supplies over the reef
the natives build keeled rowboats. Only short voyages are made in small
canoes and rowboats, and the natives wait for the coming of the Naval ship
to do their travelling. The government buys the copra and with the money
so obtained the Samoans buy cloth, thread, kerosene, soap, matches, knives,
belts, and tobacco, pay their taxes (levied on every man over a certain
height as age is an indeterminate matter), and support the church.
And yet, while the Samoans use these products of a more complex
civilisation, they are not dependent upon them. With the exception of
making and using stone tools, it is probably safe to say that none of the
native arts have been lost. The women all make bark cloth and weave fine
mats. Parturition still takes place on a piece of bark cloth, the umbilical cord
is cut with a piece of bamboo, and the new baby is wrapped in a specially
prepared piece of white bark cloth. If soap cannot be obtained, the wild
orange provides a frothy substitute. The men still manufacture their own
nets, make their own hooks, weave their own eel traps. And although they
use matches when they can get them, they have not lost the art of
converting a carrying stick into a fire plow at a moment’s notice.
Perhaps most important of all is the fact that they still depend entirely
upon their own foods, planted with a sharpened pole in their own
plantations. Breadfruit, bananas, taro, yams, and cocoanuts form a
substantial and monotonous accompaniment for the fish, shell fish, land
crabs, and occasional pigs and chickens. The food is carried down to the
village in baskets, freshly woven from palm leaves. The cocoanuts are
grated on the end of a wooden “horse,” pointed with shell or iron; the
breadfruit and taro are supported on a short stake, tufted with cocoanut
husk, and the rind is grated off with a piece of cocoanut shell. The green
bananas are skinned with a bamboo knife. The whole amount of food for a
family of fifteen or twenty for two or three days is cooked at once in a large
circular pit of stones. These are first heated to white heat; the ashes are then
raked away; the food placed on the stones and the oven covered with green
leaves, under which the food is baked thoroughly. Cooking over, the food is
stored in baskets which are hung up inside the main house. It is served on
palm leaf platters, garnished with a fresh banana leaf. Fingers are the only

knives and forks, and a wooden finger bowl is passed ceremoniously about
at the end of the meal.
Furniture, with the exception of a few chests and cupboards, has not
invaded the house. All life goes on on the floor. Speaking on one’s feet
within the house is still an unforgivable breach of etiquette, and the visitor
must learn to sit cross-legged for hours without murmuring.
The Samoans have been Christian for almost a hundred years. With the
exception of a small number of Catholics and Mormons, all the natives of
American Samoa are adherents of the London Missionary Society, known
in Samoa as the “Church of Tahiti,” from its local origin. The
Congregationalist missionaries have been exceedingly successful in
adapting the stern doctrine and sterner ethics of a British Protestant sect to
the widely divergent attitudes of a group of South Sea islanders. In the
Missionary boarding-schools they have trained many boys as native pastors
and as missionaries for other islands, and many girls to be the pastors’
wives. The pastor’s house is the educational as well as the religious centre
of the village. In the pastor’s school the children learn to read and write
their own language, to which the early missionaries adapted our script, to
do simple sums and sing hymns. The missionaries have been opposed to
teaching the natives English, or in any way weaning them away from such
of the simplicity of their primitive existence as they have not accounted
harmful. Accordingly, although the elders of the church preach excellent
sermons and in many cases have an extensive knowledge of the Bible
(which has been translated into Samoan), although they keep accounts, and
transact lengthy business affairs, they speak no English, or only very little
of it. On Taū there were never more than half a dozen individuals at one
time who had any knowledge of English.
The Naval Government has adopted the most admirable policy of
benevolent non-interference in native affairs. It establishes dispensaries and
conducts a hospital where native nurses are trained. These nurses are sent
out into the villages where they have surprising success in the
administration of the very simple remedies at their command, castor oil,
iodine, argyrol, alcohol rubs, etc. Through periodic administrations of
salvarsan the more conspicuous symptoms of yaws are rapidly
disappearing. And the natives are learning to come to the dispensaries for

medicine rather than aggravate conjunctivitis to blindness by applying
irritating leaf poultices to the inflamed eyes.
Reservoirs have been constructed in most of the villages, providing an
unpolluted water supply at a central fountain where all the washing and
bathing is done. Copra sheds in each village store the copra until the
government ship comes to fetch it. Work on copra sheds, on village boats
used in hauling the copra over the reef, on roads between villages, on the
repairs of the water system, is carried through by a levy upon the village as
a whole, conforming perfectly to the native pattern of communal work. The
government operates through appointed district governors and county
chiefs, and elected “mayors” in each village. The administrations of these
officials are peaceful and effective in proportion to the importance of their
rank in the native social organisation. Each village also has two policemen
who act as town criers, couriers on government inspections, and carriers of
the nurses’ equipment from village to village. There are also county judges.
A main court is presided over by an American civil judge and a native
judge. The penal code is a random combination of government edicts,
remarkable for their tolerance of native custom. When no pronouncement
on a point of law is found in this code, the laws of the state of California,
liberally interpreted and revised, are used to provide a legalistic basis for
the court’s decision. These courts have taken over the settlement of disputes
concerning important titles, and property rights; and the chief causes of
litigation in the “courthouse” at Pago Pago are the same which agitated the
native fonos some hundred years ago.
Schools are now maintained in many villages, where the children, seated
cross-legged on the floor of a large native house, learn the haziest of
English from boys whose knowledge of the language is little more
extensive than theirs. They also learn part singing, at which they are
extraordinarily adept, and to play cricket and many other games. The
schools are useful in instilling elementary ideas of hygiene, and in breaking
down the barriers between age and sex groups and narrow residential units.
From the pupils in the outlying schools the most promising are selected to
become nurses, teachers, and candidates for the native marine corps, the
Fitafitas, who constitute the police, hospital corpsmen and interpreters for
the naval administration. The Samoans’ keen feeling for social distinction
makes them particularly able to co-operate with a government in which

there is a hierarchy of officialdom; the shoulder stars and bars are fitted into
their own system of rank without confusion. When the Governor and group
of officers pay an official visit, the native-talking chief distributes the kava,
first to the Governor, then to the highest chief among the hosts, then to the
Commander of the Naval Yard, then to the next highest chief, without any
difficulty.
In all the descriptions of Samoan life, one of the points which must have
struck the reader most forcibly is the extreme flexibility of the civilisation
as it is found to-day. This flexibility is the result of the blending of the
various European ideas, beliefs, mechanical devices, with the old primitive
culture. It is impossible to say whether it is due to some genius in the
Samoan culture itself, or to fortunate accident, that these foreign elements
have received such a thorough and harmonious acculturation. In many parts
of the South Seas contact with white civilisation has resulted in the
complete degeneration of native life, the loss of native techniques, and
traditions, and the annihilation of the past. In Samoa this is not so. The
growing child is faced by a smaller dilemma than that which confronts the
American-born child of European parentage. The gap between parents and
children is narrow and painless, showing few of the unfortunate aspects
usually present in a period of transition. The new culture, by offering
alternative careers to the children has somewhat lightened the parental
yoke. But essentially the children are still growing up in a homogeneous
community with a uniform set of ideals and aspirations. The present ease of
adolescence among Samoan girls which has been described cannot safely
be attributed to a period of transition. The fact that adolescence can be a
period of unstressed development is just as significant. Given no additional
outside stimulus or attempt to modify conditions, Samoan culture might
remain very much the same for two hundred years.
But it is only fair to point out that Samoan culture, before white
influence, was less flexible and dealt less kindly with the individual
aberrant. Aboriginal Samoa was harder on the girl sex delinquent than is
present-day Samoa. And the reader must not mistake the conditions which
have been described for the aboriginal ones, nor for typical primitive ones.
Present-day Samoan civilisation is simply the result of the fortuitous and on
the whole fortunate impetus of a complex, intrusive culture upon a simpler
and most hospitable indigenous one.

In former times, the head of the household had life and death powers
over every individual under his roof. The American legal system and the
missionary teachings between them have outlawed and banished these
rights. The individual still benefits by the communal ownership of property,
by the claims which he has on all family land; but he no longer suffers from
an irksome tyranny which could be enforced with violence and possible
death. Deviations from chastity were formerly punished in the case of girls
by a very severe beating and a stigmatising shaving of the head.
Missionaries have discouraged the beating and head shaving, but failed to
substitute as forceful an inducement to circumspect conduct. The girl whose
sex activities are frowned upon by her family is in a far better position than
that of her great-grandmother. The navy has prohibited, the church has
interdicted the defloration ceremony, formerly an inseparable part of the
marriages of girls of rank; and thus the most potent inducement to virginity
has been abolished. If for these cruel and primitive methods of enforcing a
stricter régime there had been substituted a religious system which seriously
branded the sex offender, or a legal system which prosecuted and punished
her, then the new hybrid civilisation might have been as heavily fraught
with possibilities of conflict as the old civilisation undoubtedly was.
This holds true also for the ease with which young people change their
residence. Formerly it might have been necessary to flee to a great distance
to avoid being beaten to death. Now the severe beatings are deprecated, but
the running-away pattern continues. The old system of succession must
have produced many heartburns in the sons who did not obtain the best
titles; to-day two new professions are open to the ambitious, the ministry
and the Fitafitas. The taboo system, although never as rigorous in Samoa as
in other parts of Polynesia, undoubtedly compelled the people to lead more
circumspect lives and stressed more vividly difference in rank. The few
economic changes which have been introduced have been just sufficient to
slightly upset the system of prestige which was based on display and lavish
distribution of property. Acquiring wealth is easier, through raising copra,
government employment, or manufacturing curios for the steamer-tourist
trade on the main island. Many high chiefs do not find it worth while to
keep up the state to which they are entitled, while numerous upstarts have
an opportunity to acquire prestige denied to them under a slower method of
accumulating wealth. The intensity of local feeling with its resulting feuds,
wars, jealousies and conflicts (in the case of inter-marriage between

villages) is breaking down with the improved facilities for transportation
and the co-operation between villages in religious and educational matters.
Superior tools have partially done away with the tyranny of the master
craftsman. The man who is poor, but ambitious, finds it easier to acquire a
guest house than it would have been when the laborious highly specialised
work was done with stone tools. The use of some money and of cloth,
purchased from traders, has freed women from part of the immense labour
of manufacturing mats and tapa as units of exchange and for clothing. On
the other hand, the introduction of schools has taken an army of useful little
labourers out of the home, especially in the case of the little girls who cared
for the babies, and so tied the adult women more closely to routine
domestic tasks.
Puberty was formerly much more stressed than it is to-day. The menstrual
taboos against participation in the kava ceremony and in certain kinds of
cooking were felt and enforced. The girl’s entrance into the Aualuma was
always, not just occasionally, marked by a feast. The unmarried girls and
the widows slept, at least part of the time, in the house of the taupo. The
taupo herself had a much harder life. To-day she pounds the kava root, but
in her mother’s day it was chewed until jaws ached from the endless task.
Formerly, should a defection from chastity be disclosed at her marriage, she
faced being beaten to death. The adolescent boy faced tattooing, a painful,
wearisome proceeding, additionally stressed by group ceremony and taboo.
To-day, scarcely half of the young men are tattooed; the tattooing is
performed at a much more advanced age and has no connection with
puberty; the ceremonies have vanished and it has become a mere matter of a
fee to the artist.
The prohibitions against blood revenge and personal violence have
worked like a yeast in giving greater personal freedom. As many of the
crimes which were formerly punished in this fashion are not recognised as
crimes by the new authorities, no new mechanism of punishment has been
devised for the man who marries the divorced wife of a man of higher rank,
the miscreant who gossips outside his village and so brings his village into
disrepute, the insolent detractor who recites another’s genealogy, or the
naughty boy who removes the straws from the pierced cocoanuts and thus
offers an unspeakable affront to visitors. And the Samoan is not in the habit
of committing many of the crimes listed in our legal code. He steals and is

fined by the government as he was formerly fined by the village. But he
comes into very slight conflict with the central authorities. He is too
accustomed to taboos to mind a quarantine prohibition which parades under
the same guise; too accustomed to the exactions of his relations to fret
under the small taxation demands of the government. Even the stern attitude
formerly taken by the adults towards precocity has now been subdued, for
what is a sin at home becomes a virtue at school.
The new influences have drawn the teeth of the old culture. Cannibalism,
war, blood revenge, the life and death power of the matai, the punishment
of a man who broke a village edict by burning his house, cutting down his
trees, killing his pigs, and banishing his family, the cruel defloration
ceremony, the custom of laying waste plantations on the way to a funeral,
the enormous loss of life in making long voyages in small canoes, the
discomfort due to widespread disease—all these have vanished. And as yet
their counterparts in producing misery have not appeared.
Economic instability, poverty, the wage system, the separation of the
worker from his land and from his tools, modern warfare, industrial disease,
the abolition of leisure, the irksomeness of a bureaucratic government—
these have not yet invaded an island without resources worth exploiting.
Nor have the subtler penalties of civilisation, neuroses, philosophical
perplexities, the individual tragedies due to an increased consciousness of
personality and to a greater specialisation of sex feeling, or conflicts
between religion and other ideals, reached the natives. The Samoans have
only taken such parts of our culture as made their life more comfortable,
their culture more flexible, the concept of the mercy of God without the
doctrine of original sin.

APPENDIX IV
THE MENTALLY DEFECTIVE AND THE MENTALLY DISEASED

Without any training in the diagnosis of the mentally diseased and
without any apparatus for exact diagnosis of the mentally defective, I can
simply record a number of amateur observations which may be of interest
to the specialist interested in the possibilities of studying the pathology of
primitive peoples. In the Manu’a Archipelago with a population of a little
over two thousand people, I saw one case which would be classed as idiocy,
one imbecile, one boy of fourteen who appeared to be both feeble-minded
and insane, one man of thirty who showed a well-systematised delusion of
grandeur, and one sexual invert who approximated in a greater development
of the breasts, mannerism and attitudes of women and a preference for
women’s activities, to the norm of the opposite sex. The idiot child was one
of seven children; he had a younger brother who had walked for over a year,
and the mother declared that there were two years between the children. His
legs were shrunken and withered, he had an enormous belly and a large
head set very low on his shoulders. He could neither walk nor talk, drooled
continually, and had no command over his excretory functions. The
imbecile girl lived on another island and I had no opportunity to observe her
over any length of time. She was one or two years past puberty and was
pregnant at the time that I saw her. She could talk and perform the simple
tasks usually performed by children of five or six. She seemed to only half
realise her condition and giggled foolishly or stared vacantly when it was
mentioned. The fourteen-year-old boy was at the time when I saw him
definitely demented, giving an external picture of catatonic dementia
præcox. He took those attitudes which were urged upon him, at times,
however, becoming violent and unmanageable. The relatives insisted that he
had always been stupid but only recently become demented. For this I have
only their word as I was only able to observe the boy during a few days. In
no one of these three cases of definite mental deficiency was there any
family history which threw any light upon the matter. Among the girls

whom I studied in detail only one, Sala, discussed in Chapter X, was
sufficiently inferior to the general norm of intelligence to approximate to a
moron.
The man with the systematised delusion of grandeur was said to be about
thirty years of age. Gaunt and emaciated, he looked much older. He
believed that he was Tufele, the high chief of another island and the
governor of the entire archipelago. The natives conspired against him to rob
him of his rank and to exalt an usurper in his stead. He was a member of the
Tufele family but only very remotely so that his delusion bore no relation to
reality as he would never have had any hope of succeeding to the title. The
natives, he said, refused to give him food, mocked him, disallowed his
claims, did their best to destroy him, while a few white people were wise
enough to recognise his rank. (The natives instructed visitors to address him
in the chief’s language because he consented to dance, a weird pathetic
version of the usual style, only when so opportuned.) He had no outbreaks
of violence, was morose, recessive, only able to work at times and never
able to do heavy work or to be trusted to carry through any complicated
task. He was treated with universal gentleness and toleration by his relatives
and neighbours.
From informants I obtained accounts of four cases on Tutuila which
sounded like the manic stage of manic depressive insanity. All four of these
individuals had been violently destructive, and uncontrollable for a period
of time, but had later resumed what the natives considered normal
functioning. An old woman who had died some ten years before was said to
have compulsively complied with any command that was given her. There
was one epileptic boy in Taū, a member of an otherwise normal family of
eight children. He fell from a tree during a seizure and died from a fractured
skull soon after I came to Manu’a. A little girl of about ten who was
paralysed from the waist down was said to be suffering from an overdose of
salvarsan and to have been normal until she was five or six years old.
Only two individuals, one a married woman of thirty or so, the other a
girl of nineteen, discussed in Chapter X, showed a definite neurasthenic
constitution. The married woman was barren and spent a great deal of time
explaining her barrenness as need of an operation. The presence of an
excellent surgeon at the Samoan hospital during the preceding two years
had greatly enhanced the prestige of operations. On Tutuila, near the Naval

Station, I encountered several middle-aged women obsessed with
operations which they had undergone or were soon to undergo. Whether
this vogue of modern surgery, by giving it special point, has added to the
amount of apparent neurasthenia or not, it is impossible to say.
Of hysterical manifestations, I encountered only one, a girl of fourteen or
fifteen with a bad tic in the right side of her face. I only saw her for a few
minutes on a journey and was unable to make any investigations. I neither
saw nor heard of any cases of hysterical blindness or deafness, nor or any
anæsthesias nor paralyses.
I saw no cases of cretinism. There were a few children who had been
blind from birth. Blindness, due to the extremely violent methods used by
the native practitioners in the treatment of “Samoan conjunctivitis,” is
common.
The pathology which is immediately apparent to any visitor in a Samoan
village is mainly due to the diseased eyes, elephantiasis, and abscesses and
sores of various sorts, but the stigmata of degeneration are almost entirely
absent.
There was one albino, a girl of ten, with no albinism in the recorded
family history, but as one parent, now dead, had come from another island,
this was not at all conclusive data.

APPENDIX V
MATERIALS UPON WHICH THE ANALYSIS IS BASED

This study included sixty-eight girls between the ages of eight and nine and nineteen or twenty
—all the girls between these ages in the three villages of Faleasao, Lumā and Siufaga, the three
villages on the west coast of the island of Taū in the Manu’a Archipelago of the Samoan Islands.
Owing to the impossibility of obtaining accurate dates of birth except in a very few cases, the
ages must all be regarded as approximate. The approximations were based upon the few known
ages and the testimony of relatives as to the relative age of the others. For purpose of description
and analysis I have divided them roughly into three groups, the children who showed no
mammary signs of puberty, twenty-eight in number, ranging in age from eight or nine to about
twelve or thirteen; the children who would probably mature within the next year or year and a
half, fourteen in number, ranging in age from twelve or thirteen to fourteen or fifteen; and the
girls who were past puberty, but who were not yet considered as adults by the community,
twenty-five in number, ranging in age from fourteen or fifteen to nineteen or twenty. These two
latter groups and eleven of the younger children were studied in detail, making a group of fifty.
The remaining fourteen children in the youngest group were studied less carefully as individuals.
They formed a large check group in studying play, gang life, the development of brother and
sister avoidance, the attitude between the sexes, the difference in the interests and activities of
this age and the girls approaching puberty. They also provided abundant material for the study of
the education and discipline of the child in the home. The two tables present in summary form
the major statistical facts which were gathered about the children specially studied, order of birth,
number of brothers and sisters, death or remarriage or divorce of parents, residence of the child,
type of household in which the child lived and whether the girl was the daughter of the head of
the household or not. The second table relates only to the twenty-five girls past puberty and gives
length of time since first menstruation, frequency of menstruation, amount and location of
menstrual pain, the presence or absence of masturbation, homosexual and heterosexual
experience, and the very pertinent fact of residence or non-residence in the pastor’s household. A
survey of the summary analyses joined to these tables will show that these fifty girls present a
fairly wide range in family organisation, order of birth, and relation to parents. The group may be
fairly considered as representative of the various types of environment, personal and social,
which are found in Samoan civilisation as it is to-day.

DISTRIBUTION OF GROUP OF ADOLESCENTS IN RELATION TO FIRST MENSTRUATION
Within last six months 6
Within last year 3
Within last two years 5
Within last three years 7
Within last four years 3
Within last five years 1

—
Total 25

SAMPLE RECORD SHEET FILLED OUT FOR EACH GIRL

Household number Girl’s number Name Age (How estimated)
Matai Rank Father Rank Father’s residence
Mother Residence of mother Either parent been married before?
Economic status of household Church membership of father, mother, guardian
Menstruated? Date of commencement? Pain Regularity Estimate of physical
development
Grade in government school? In pastor’s school? Any knowledge of English?
Foreign experience (outside Taū) Physical defects
Order of birth?
Best friends in order?

Test Scores Religious attitudes
Colour naming
Rote memory for digits
Digit symbol substitution
Opposites
Picture Interpretation
Ball and Field

Judgments on individuals in the village Personality
Most beautiful girl
Handsomest boy
Wisest man
Cleverest woman Attitude towards household
Worst boy
Worst girl
Best boy
Best girl
Attitude towards contemporaries

TABLE I
TABLE SHOWING LENGTH OF TIME SINCE PUBERTY, PERIODICITY, AMOUNT OF PAIN DURING MENSES,
MASTURBATION, HOMOSEXUAL EXPERIENCE, HETEROSEXUAL EXPERIENCE, AND RESIDENCE OR NON-
RESIDENCE IN PASTOR’S HOUSEHOLD
Time
Elapsed Residence
Since Homosexual Heterosexual in Pastor’s
No. Name Puberty Periodicity Pain[12] Masturbation Experience Experience Household
1. Luna 3 years monthly abdo. yes yes yes no

2. Masina 3 ” ” ” ” ” ” ”

Time
Elapsed Residence
Since Homosexual Heterosexual in Pastor’s
No. Name Puberty Periodicity Pain[12] Masturbation Experience Experience Household
3. Losa 2 ” ” abdo. no ” no yes
back
4. Sona 3 ” semi- ” yes ” ” ”
monthly
5. Loto 2 monthly back ” ” ” ”
months
6. Pala 6 ” ” none ” ” ” no

7. Aso 18 ” semi- back ” no ” ”
monthly
8. Tolo 3 ” ” extreme ” ” ” ”

9. Lotu 3 years monthly ” ” yes yes ”

10. Tulipa 2 ” abdo. ” ” no yes
months back
14. Lita 2 years ” back ” ” ” no

16. Namu 3 ” ” ” ” ” yes ”

17. Ana 2 ” Every ” ” ” no yes
three
months
18. Lua 3 monthly ” no no ” no
months
19. Tolu 4 years semi- ” yes yes yes ”
monthly
21. Mala 2 monthly ” ” no no ”
months
22. Fala 1 year ” ” ” yes yes ”

23. Lola 1 ” semi- abdo. ” ” ” ”
monthly
23a. Tulipa 3 years monthly back ” ” ” ”

24. Leta 2 ” none ” ” ” yes
months
25. Ela 2 years ” extreme ” ” ” ”

27. Mina 5 ” ” ” ” no no ”

Time
Elapsed Residence
Since Homosexual Heterosexual in Pastor’s
No. Name Puberty Periodicity Pain[12] Masturbation Experience Experience Household
28. Moana 4 ” bi-monthly abdo. ” ” yes no
back
29. Luina 4 ” monthly extreme ” ” no yes

30. Sala 3 ” semi- ” yes ” yes no
monthly
[12] Abdomen—pain only there; back—pain only there; extreme—so characterized by girl, never so ill that she
couldn’t work.

TABLE II
FAMILY STRUCTURE
No.
Pre- Name 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21
Ads.
1. Tuna 1 3 x x

2. Vala 1- 3- x x x

3. Pele 3 4 x

4. Timu x x x

5. Suna x x x

6. Pola 3 2 1 x x

7. Tua 1 4 1 x

8. Sina 1 1 2 3 x x

9. Fiva 1 1 3 x

10. Ula 1 1 1 2 x x

11. Siva 1 4 x x

Midways
1. Tasi 1 4 x x x

2. Fitu 1 2 2 x x

No.
Pre- Name 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21
Ads.
3. Mata 1 1 3 x x x

4. Vi 3 3 1 1 x

6. Ipu 2 1 x x x

7. Selu 3

8. Pula 2 1 1 x x

9. Meta 3 1 1 x

10. Maliu 2 2 2 x x

11. Fiatia 3- 2- x x 1⁄2 1⁄2 x

13. Tino 1 2 1 x x x

14. Vina 1 2 2 1 x x

15. Talo 2 4 x

Adolescents
1. Luna 2 5 1 x x x x

2. Masina 3 2 2 x x

3. Losa 2 1 x x x

4. Sona 2 x x x

5. Loto 4 1 x x x

6. Pala 3 3 1 x

7. Iso 1 3 1 x x

8. Tolo 1 2 x x

9. Lotu 5 x x

10. Tulipa 5 3

No.
Pre- Name 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21
Ads.
14. Lita 4 2 1 x

16. Namu 4 2 x x x

17. Ana 3- x x

18. Lua 7 1

19. Tolu x x x

21. Mala 3 1 x x x

22. Fala 1 3 3 1 x x x

23. Lola 1 2 2 x x x

23a. Tulipa 2 2 x x x

24. Leta 1 4 x

25. Ela 2 1 1 x x

27. Mina 1 x x x x

28. Moana 1 4 1 1x 1x x x x

29. Luina 1 x x

30. Sala 3 1 x x

KEY TO TABLE ON FAMILY STRUCTURE
Column Subject
1 Number of older brothers
2 Number of older sisters
3 Number of younger brothers
4 Number of younger sisters
5 Half brother, plus, number older, minus, number younger
6 Half sister, plus, number older, minus, number younger
7 Mother dead
8 Father dead
9 Child of mother’s second marriage

Column Subject
10 Child of father’s second marriage
11 Mother remarried
12 Father remarried
13 Residence with both parents and patrilocal
14 Residence with both parents and matrilocal
15 Residence with mother only
16 Residence with father only
17 Parents divorced
18 Residence with paternal relatives
19 Residence with maternal relatives
20 Father is matai of household
21 Residence in a biological family, i.e., household of parents, children, and no more than
two additional relatives.
x in the table means the presence of trait. For example, x in column 7 means that the mother is
dead.

ANALYSIS OF TABLE ON FAMILY STRUCTURE
There were among the sixty-eight girls:
7 only children
15 youngest children
5 oldest children
5 with half brother or sister in the same household
5 whose mother was dead
14 whose father was dead
3 who were children of mother’s second marriage
2 children of father’s second marriage
7 whose mother had remarried
5 whose father had remarried
4 residence with both parents patrilocal
8 residence with both parents matrilocal
9 residence with mother only
1 residence with father only
7 parents divorced
12 residence with paternal relatives (without either parent)
6 residence with maternal relatives (without either parent)
15, or 30%, whose fathers were heads of households
12 who belonged to a qualified biological family (i.e., a family which during my stay on the
island comprised only two relatives beside the parents and children).

INTELLIGENCE TESTS USED

It was impossible to standardise any intelligence tests and consequently my results are
quantitatively valueless. But as I had had some experience in the diagnostic use of tests, I found
them useful in forming a preliminary estimate of the girls’ intelligence. Also, the natives have
long been accustomed to examinations which the missionary authorities conduct each year, and
the knowledge that an examination is in progress makes them respect the privacy of investigator
and subject. In this way it was possible for me to get the children alone, without antagonising
their parents. Furthermore, the novelty of the tests, especially the colour-naming and picture
interpretation tests, served to divert their attention from other questions which I wished to ask
them. The results of the tests showed a much narrower range than would be expected in a group
varying in age from ten to twenty. Without any standardisation it is impossible to draw any more
detailed conclusions. I shall, however, include a few comments about the peculiar responses
which the girls made to particular tests, as I believe such comment is useful in evaluating
intelligence testing among primitive peoples and also in estimating the possibilities of such
testing.
Tests Used
Colour Naming. 100 half-inch squares, red, yellow, black and blue.
Rote Memory for Digits. Customary Stanford Binet directions were used.
Digit Symbol Substitution. 72 one-inch figures, square, circle, cross, triangle and diamond.
Opposites. 23 words. Stimulus words: fat, white, long, old, tall, wise, beautiful, late, night,
near, hot, win, thick, sweet, tired, slow, rich, happy, darkness, up, inland, inside, sick.
Picture Interpretation. Three reproductions from the moving picture Moana, showing, (a)
Two children who had caught a cocoanut crab by smoking it out of the rocks above
them, (b) A canoe putting out to sea after bonito as evidenced by the shape of the canoe
and the position of the crew, (c) A Samoan girl sitting on a log eating a small live fish
which a boy, garlanded and stretched on the ground at her feet, had given her.
Ball and Field. Standard-sized circle.

Standard directions were given throughout in all cases entirely in Samoan. Many children,
unused to such definitely set tasks, although all are accustomed to the use of slate and of pencil
and paper, had to be encouraged to start. The ball and field test was the least satisfactory as in
over fifty per cent of the cases the children followed an accidental first line and simply
completed an elaborate pattern within the circle. When this pattern happened by accident to be
either the Inferior or Superior solution, the child’s comment usually betrayed the guiding idea as
æsthetic rather than as an attempt to solve the problem. The children whom I was led to believe
to be most intelligent, subordinated the æsthetic consideration to the solution of the problem, but
the less intelligent children were sidetracked by their interest in the design they could make much
more easily than are children in our civilisation. In only two cases did I find a rote memory for
digits which exceeded six digits; two girls completing seven successfully. The Samoan
civilisation puts the slightest of premiums upon rote memory of any sort. On the digit-symbol
test they were slow to understand the point of the test and very few learned the combinations
before the last line of the test sheet. The picture interpretation test was the most subject to
vitiation through a cultural factor; almost all of the children adopted some highly stylized form of
comment and then pursued it through one balanced sentence after another: “Beautiful is the boy
and beautiful is the girl. Beautiful is the garland of the boy and beautiful is the wreath of the
girl,” etc. In the two pictures which emphasised human beings no discussion could be

commenced until the question of the relationship of the characters had been ascertained. The
opposites test was the one which they did most easily, a natural consequence of a vivid interest in
words, an interest which leads them to spend most of their mythological speculation upon
punning explanations of names.

Check List USED IN INVESTIGATION OF EACH GIRL’S EXPERIENCE

In order to standardise this investigation I made out a questionnaire which I filled out for each
girl. The questions were not asked consecutively but from time to time I added one item of
information after another to the record sheets. The various items fell into the loose groupings
indicated below.
Agricultural proficiency. Weeding, selecting leaves for use in cooking, gathering bananas,
taro, breadfruit, cutting cocoanuts for copra.
Cooking. Skinning bananas, grating cocoanut, preparing breadfruit, mixing palusami,[13]
wrapping palusami, making tafolo,[14] making banana poi, making arrow-root pudding.
Fishing. Daylight reef fishing, torchlight reef fishing, gathering lole, catching small fish on
reef, using the “come hither” octopus stick, gathering large crabs.
Weaving. Balls, pin-wheels, baskets to hold food gifts, carrying baskets, woven blinds, floor
mats, fishing baskets, food trays, thatching mats, roof bonetting mats, plain fans,
pandanus floor mats, bed mats (number of designs known and number of mats
completed), fine mats, dancing skirts, sugar-cane thatch.
Bark cloth making. Gathering paper mulberry wands, scraping the bark, pounding the bark,
using a pattern board, tracing patterns free hand.
Care of clothing. Washing, ironing, ironing starched clothes, sewing, sewing on a machine,
embroidering.
Athletics. Climbing palm trees, swimming, swimming in the swimming hole within the reef,
[15]
playing cricket.
Kava making. Pounding the kava root, distributing the kava, making the kava, shaking out
the hibiscus bark strainer.
Proficiency in foreign things. Writing a letter, telling time, reading a calendar, filling a
fountain pen.
Dancing.
Reciting the family genealogy.
Index of knowledge of the courtesy language. Giving the chiefs’ words for: arm, leg, food,
house, dance, wife, sickness, talk, sit. Giving courtesy phrases of welcome, when
passing in front of some one.
Experience of life and death. Witnessing of birth, miscarriage, intercourse, death, Cæsarian
post-mortem operation.
Marital preferences, rank, residence, age of marriage, number of children.
Index of knowledge of the social organisation. Reason for Cæsarian post-mortem, proper
treatment of a chief’s bed, exactions of the brother and sister taboo, penalties attached to
cocoanut tapui,[16] proper treatment of a kava bowl, the titles and present incumbents of
the titles of the Manaia of Lumā, Siufaga and Faleasao, the Taupo of Fitiuta, the
meaning of the Fale Ula[17], the Umu Sa,[18] the Mua o le taule’ale’a,[19] the proper kinds
of property for a marriage exchange, who was the high chief of Lumā, Siufaga, Faleasao
and Fitiuta, and what constituted the Lafo[20] of the talking chief.

[13] Palusami—a pudding prepared from grated cocoanut, flavoured with red hot stone, mixed with sea water, and
wrapped in taro leaves, from which the acrid stem has been scorched, then in a banana leaf, finally in a breadfruit
leaf.
[14] Tafolo—a pudding made of breadfruit with a sauce of grated cocoanut.
[15] Swimming in the hole within the reef required more skill than swimming in still water; it involved diving and
also battling with a water level which changed several feet with each great wave.
[16] Tapui. The hieroglyphic signs used by the Samoans to protect their property from thieves. The tapui calls
down an automatic magical penalty upon the transgressor. The penalty for stealing from property protected by the
cocoanut tapui is boils.
[17] The ceremonial name of the council house of the Tui Manu’a.
[18] The sacred oven of food and the ceremony accompanying its presentation and the presentation of fine mats to
the carpenters who have completed a new house.
[19] The ceremonial call of the young men of the village upon a visiting maiden.
[20] The ceremonial perquisite of the talking chief, usually a piece of tapa, occasionally a fine mat.

GLOSSARY OF NATIVE TERMS USED IN THE
TEXT
Aumaga (’aumāga)—the organisation of untitled men in each Samoan
village.
Aualuma—the organisation of unmarried girls past puberty, wives of
untitled men and widows.
Afafine—daughter (man speaking).
Aiga—relative.
Atali’i—son (man speaking).
Avaga—elopement.

Fa’alupega—the courtesy phrases, recited in formal speeches, which
embody the social pattern of each village.
Fale—house.
Faletua—“she who sits in the back of the house.” The courtesy term
for a chief’s wife.
Fono—a meeting. Specifically the organisation of titled men of a
village, district or island.
Fitafita—a member of the native marine corps.

Ifo—to lower oneself to some one whom one has offended or injured.
Ifoga—the act of doing so.

Lavalava—a loin cloth, fastened by a twist in the material at the waist.
Lole—a sort of jelly fish; applied by the natives to candy.

Malaga—a travelling party; a journey.
Manaia—the heir-apparent of the principal chief; the leader of the
Aumāga; the heir of any important chief whose title carries the

privilege of giving a manaia title to his heir.
Matai—the holder of a title; the head of a household.
Moetotolo—surreptitious rape.
Moni—true, real.
Musu—unwillingness, obstinacy towards any course of action.

Olomatua—old woman.

Papalagi—white men; literally, “sky bursters.” Foreign.
Pua—the frangipani tree.

Soa—a companion in circumcision; an ambassador in love affairs.
Soafafine—a woman ambassador in love affairs.
Siva—to dance; a dance.

Tama—a child, a son (woman speaking).
Tamā—father.
Tamafafine—a child of the distaff side of the house.
Tamatane—a child of the male line.
Tapa—bark cloth.
Taule’ale’a—a member of the Aumaga; an untitled man.
Taupo—the village ceremonial hostess; the girl whom a high chief has
honoured with a title and a distribution of property.
Tausi—the courtesy term for the wife of a talking chief; literally, “to
care for.”
Tei—a younger sibling.
Teine—a girl.
Teinetiti—a little girl.
Tinā—mother.
Toa’ina—an old man.
Tuafafine—female sibling of a male.
Tuagane—male sibling of a female.
Tulafale—a talking chief.

Uso—sibling of the same sex.
NOTE ON THE PRONUNCIATION OF SAMOAN WORDS

The vowels are all pronounced as in Italian.
G is always pronounced like NG.
The Glottal stop is indicated by a (’).

THE END

Transcriber’s Notes:
New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the public domain.
Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected.

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