Chapter VIII: Introduction (4)

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.

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_.

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.