Coming of age in Samoa; a psychological study of primitive youth for western civilisation
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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
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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 lextent. Boys masturbati&Jii^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
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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 laltut ("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
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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 unin-volved spectators would have been indecent. This attitude towards non-participants characterised all emotionally charged events, a women's weaving bee which was of a formal, ceremonial nature, a house-building, a candle-nut burning—these were activities at which the presence of a spectator would have been unseemly.
Yet, coupled with the sophistication of the children went no pre-adolescent heterosexual experimentation and very little homosexual activity which was regarded in native theory as imitative of and substitutive for heterosexual. The lack of precocious sex experimentation is probably due less to the parental ban on such precocity than to the strong institutionalised antagonism between younger boys and younger girls and the taboo against any amiable intercourse between them. This rigid sex dichotomy may also be operative in determining the lack of specialisation of sex feeling in adults. Since there is a heavily charged avoidance feeling towards brother and cousins, and a tendency to lump all other males together as the enemy who will some day be one's lovers, there are no males in a girPs age group whom she ever regards simply as individuals without relation to sex.
Such then was the experience of the twenty-eight
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little girls in the three villages. In temperament and character they varied enormously. There was Tita, who at nine acted like a child of seven, was still principally preoccupied with food, completely irresponsible as to messages and commissions, satisfied to point a proud fat finger at her father who was town crier. Only a year her senior was Pele, the precocious little sister of the loosest woman in the village. Pele spent most of her time caring for her sister's baby which, she delighted in telling you, was of disputed parentage. Her dancing in imitation of her sister's was daring and obscene. Yet, despite the burden of the heavy ailing baby which she carried always on her hip and the sor-didness of her home where her fifty-year-old mother still took occasional lovers and her weak-kneed insignificant father lived a hen-pecked ignominious existence, Pele's attitude towards life was essentially gay and sane. Better than suggestive dancing she liked hunting for rare samoana shells along the beach or diving feet first into the swimming hole or hunting for land crabs in the moonlight. Fortunately for her, she lived in the centre of the Luma gang. In a more isolated spot her unwholesome home and natural precocity might have developed very differently. As it was, she differed far less from the other children in her group than her family, the most notorious in the village, differed from the families of her companions. In a Samoan village the influence of the home environment is being continually offset in the next generation by
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group activities through which the normal group standards assert themselves. This was universally true for the boys for whom the many years' apprenticeship in the Aumaga formed an excellent school for disciplining individual peculiarities. In the case of the girls this function was formerly performed in part by the Aualumay but, as I pointed out in the chapter on the girl and her age group, the little girl is much more dependent upon her neighbourhood than is the boy. As an adult she is also more dependent upon her relationship group.
Tuna, who lived next door to Pele, was in a different plight, the unwilling little victim of the great Samoan sin of tautala laUit't. Her sister Lila had eloped at fifteen with a seventeen-year-old boy. A pair of hotheaded children, they had never thoroughly r
e-established themselves with the community, although their families had relented and solemnised the marriage with an appropriate exchange of property. Lila still smarted under the public disapproval of her precocity and lavished a disproportionate amount of affection upon her obstreperous baby whose incessant crying was the bane of the neighbourhood. After spoiling him beyond endurance, she would hand him over to Tuna. Tuna, a stocky little creature with a large head and enormous melting eyes, looked at life from a slightly oblique angle. She was a little more calculating than the other children, a little more watchful for returns, less given to gratuitous outlays of personal service.
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Her sister's overindulgence of the baby made Tuna's task much harder than those of her companions. But she reaped her reward in the slightly extra gentleness with which they treated their most burdened associate, and here again the group saved her from a pronounced temperamental response to the exigencies of her home life.
A little further away lived Fitu and Ula, Maliu and Pola, two pairs of sisters. Fitu and Maliu, girls of about thirteen, were just withdrawing from the gang, turning their younger brothers and sisters over to Ula and Pola, and beginning to take a more active part in the affairs of their households, Ula was alert, pretty, pampered. Her household might in all fairness be compared to oursj it consisted of her mother, her father, two sisters and two brothers. True, her uncle who lived next door was the inatai of the household, but still this little biological family had a strong separate existence of its own and the children showed the results of it. Lalala, the mother, was an intelligent and still beautiful woman, even after bearing six children in close succession. She came from a family of high rank, and because she had had no brothers, her father had taught her much of the genealogical material usually taught to the favourite son. Her knowledge of the social structure of the community and of the minutlas of the ceremonies which had formerly surrounded the court of the king of Manu'a was as full as that of any middle-aged man in the community. She was skilled in the
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handicrafts and her brain was full of new designs and unusual applications of material. She knew several potent medical remedies and had many patients. Married at fifteen, while still a virgin, her marital life, which had begun with the cruel public defloration ceremony, had been her only sex experience. She adored her husband, whose poverty was due to his having come from another island and not to laziness or inability. Lalala made her choices in life with a full recognition of the facts of her existence. There was too much for her to do. She had no younger sisters to bear the brunt of baby-tending for her. There were no youths to help her husband in the plantations. Well and good, she would not wrestle with the inevitable. And so Lalala's house was badly kept. Her children were dirty and bedraggled. But her easy good nature did not fail her as she tried to weave a fine mat on some blazing afternoon, while the baby played with the brittle easily broken pandanus strands, and doubled her work. But all of this reacted upon Fitu, lanky, ill-favoured executive little creature that she was. Fitu combined a passionate devotion to her mother with an obsessive solicitude for her younger brothers and sisters. Towards Ula alone her attitude was mixed. Ula, fifteen months younger, was pretty, lithe, flexible and indolent. While Fitu was often teased by her mother and rebuked by her companions for being like a boy, Ula was excessively feminine. She worked as hard as any other
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child of her age, but Fitu felt that their mother and their home were unusual and demanded more than the average service and devotion. She and her mother were like a pair of comrades, and Fitu bossed and joked with her mother in a fashion shocking to all Samoan onlookers. If Fitu was away at night, her mother went herself to look for her, instead of sending another child. Fitu was the eldest daughter, with a precocity bred of responsibility and an efficiency which was the direct outcome of her mother's laissez-faire attitude. Ula showed equally clearly the effect of being the prettier younger sister, trading upon her superior attractiveness and more meagre sense of duty. These children, as did the children in all three of the biological families in the three villages, showed more character, more sharply defined personality, greater precocity and a more personal, more highly charged attitude toward*; their parents.
It would be easy to lay too much stress on the differences between children in large households and children in small ones. There were, of course, too few cases to draw any final conclusions. But the small family in Samoa did demand from the child the very qualities which were frowned upon in Samoan society, based upon the ideal of great households in which there were many youthful labourers who knew their place. And in these small families where responsibility and initiative were necessary, the children seemed to develop
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them much earlier than in the more usual home environment in which any display of such qualities was sternly frowned upon.
This was the case with Malui and Meta, Ipu and Vi, Mata, Tino and Lama, little girls just approaching puberty who lived in large heterogeneous households. They were giving over baby-tending for more productive work. They were reluctantly acquiring some of the rudiments of etiquette j they were slowly breaking their play affiliations with the younger children. But all of this was an enforced change of habits rather than any change in attitude. They were conscious of their new position as almost grown girls who could be trusted to go fishing or work on the plantations. Under their short dresses they again wore lavalavas which they had almost forgotten how to keep fastened. These dragged about their legs and cramped their movements and fell oif if they broke into a sprint. Most of all they missed the gang life and eyed a little wistfully the activities of their younger relatives. Their large impersonal households provided them with no personal drives, invested them with no intriguing responsibilities. They were simply little girls who were robust enough to do heavy work and old enough to learn to do skilled work, and so had less time for play.
In general attitude, they differed not at all from Tolo, from Tulipa, from Lua, or Lata, whose first menstruation was a few months past. No ceremony had marked the difference between the two groups. No
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social attitude testified to a crisis past. They were told not to make kava while menstruating, but the participation in a restriction they'd known about all their lives was unimpressive. Some of them had made kava before puberty, others had not. It depended entirely upon whether there was an available girl or boy about when a chief wished to have some kava made. In more rigorous days a girl could not make kava nor marry until she menstruated. But the former restriction had yielded to the requirements of expediency. The menstruating girl experienced very little pain which might have served to stress for her her new maturity. All of the girls reported back or abdominal pains which, however, were so slight that they seldom interfered in any way with their usual activities. In the table I have counted it unusual pain whenever a girl was incapacitated for work, but these cases were in no sense comparable to severe cases of menstrual cramps in our civilisation. They were unaccompanied by dizziness, fainting spells, or pain sufficient to call forth groaning or writhing. The idea of such pain struck all Samoan women as bizarre and humorous when it was described to them. And no special solicitude for her health, mental or physical, was shown to the menstruating girl. From foreign medical advice they had learned that bathing during menstruation was bad, and a mother occasionally cautioned her daughter not to bathe. There was no sense of shame connected with puberty nor any need of concealment. Pre-adolescent children
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took the news that a girl had reached puberty, a woman had had a baby, a boat had come from Ofu, or a pig had been killed by a falling boulder with the same insouciance—all bits of diverting gossip j and any girl could give accurate testimony as to the development of any other girl in her neighbourhood or relationship groups. Nor was puberty the immediate forerun
ner of sex experience. Perhaps a year, two or even three years would pass before a girPs shyness would relax, or her figure appeal to the roving eye of some older boy. To be a virgin's first lover was considered the high point of pleasure and amorous virtuosity, so that a girPs first lover was usually not a boy of her own age, equally shy and inexperienced. The girls in this group were divided into little girls like Lua, and gawky overgrown Tolo, who said frankly that they did not want to go walking with boys, and girls like Pala, who while still virgins, were a little weary of their status and eager for amorous experience. That they remained in this passive untouched state so long was mainly due to the conventions of love-making, for while a youth liked to woo a virgin, he feared ridicule as a cradle-snatcher, while the girls also feared the dreaded accusation of tautala laititi ("presuming above one's age"). The forays of more seasoned middle-aged marauders among these very young girls were frowned upon, and so the adolescent girls were given a valuable interval in which to get accustomed to new work, greater isolation and an unfamiliar physical development.