Chapter X: Introduction (6)

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.

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.