Coming of age in Samoa; a psychological study of primitive youth for western civilisation
Page 14
The child who is unfavourably located in the village is the only real exile. Should the age group last over eight or ten years of age, the exiles would certainly suffer or very possibly as they grew bolder, venture farther from home. But the breakdown of the gang just as the children are bold enough and free enough to go ten houses from home, prevents either of these two results from occurring.
The absence of any important institutionalised rela-
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tlonship to the community is perhaps the strongest cause for lack of conflict here. The community makes no demands upon the young girls except for the occasional ceremonial service rendered at the meetings of older women. Were they delinquent in such duties it would be primarily the concern of their own households whose prestige would suffer thereby. A boy who refuses to attend the meetings of the Aumaga, or to join in the communal work, comes in for strong group disapproval and hostility, but a girl owes so small a debt to her community that it does not greatly concern itself to collect it.
The opportunity to experiment freely, the complete familiarity with sex and the absence of very violent preferences make her sex experiences less charged with possibilities of conflict than they are in a more rigid and self-conscious civilisation. Cases of passionate jea lousy do occur but they are matters for ex tended comment and amazement. During nine months in the islands only tour cases came to my attention, a girl who informed against a faithless lover accusing him of incest, a girl who bit oJ0f part of a rival's ear, a woman whose husband had deserted her and who fought and severely injured her successor, and a girl who falsely accused a rival of stealing. But jealousy is less expected and less sympathised with than among us, and consequently there is less of a pattern to which an individual may respond. Possibly conditions may also be simplified by the Samoan recognition and toleration
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of vindictive detraction and growling about a rivaL There are no standards of good form which prescribe an insincere acceptance of defeat, no insistence on reticence and sportsmanship. So a great deal of slight irritation can be immediately dissipated. Friendships are of so casual and shifting a nature that they give rise to neither jealousy nor conflict. Resentment is expressed by subdued grumblings and any strong resentment results in the angry one's leaving the household or sometimes the village.
In the girl's religious life the attitude of the missionaries was the decisive one. The missionaries require chastity for church membership and discouraged church membership before marriage, except for the young people in the missionary boarding schools who could be continually supervised. This passive acceptance by the religious authorities themselves of pre-marital irregularities went a long way towards minimising the girls' sense of guilt. Continence became not a passport to heaven but a passport to the missionary schools which in turn were regarded as a social rather than a religious adventure. The girl who indulged in sex experiments was expelled from the local pastor's school, but it was notable that almost every older girl in the community, including the most notorious sex offenders, had been at one time resident in the pastors' households. The general result of the stricter supervision provided by these schools seemed to be to postpone the first sex experience two or three years. The seven girls
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in the household of one native pastor, the three in the household of the other, were all, although past puberty, living continent lives, in strong contrast to the habits of the rest of their age mates.
It might seem that there was fertile material for conflict between parents who wished their children to live in the pastor's house and children who did not wish to do so, and also between children who wished it and parents who did not.* This conflict was chiefly reduced by the fact that residence in the pastor's house actually made very little difference in the child's status in her own home. She simply carried her roll of mats, her pillow and her mosquito net from her home to the pastor's, and the food which she would have eaten at home was added to the quota of the food which her family furnished to the pastor. She ate her evening meal and slept at the pastor's j one or two days a week she devoted to working for the pastor's family, washing, weaving, weeding and sweeping the premises. The rest of her time she spent at home performing the usual tasks of a girl of her age, so that it was seldom that a parent objected strongly to sending a child to the pastor's. It involved no additional expense and was likely to reduce the chances of his daughter's conduct becoming embarrassing, to improve her mastery of the few foreign techniques, sewing, ironing, embroidery, which she could learn from the more skilled and schooled pastor's wife and thus increase her economic value.
*See Appendix, page 257.
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If, on the other hand, the parents wished their children to stay and the children were unwilling to do so, the remedy was simple. They had but to transgress seriously the rules of the pastor's household, and they would be expelled J if they feared to return to their i parents, there were always other relatives.
So the attitude of the church in respect to chastity held only the germs of a conflict which was seldom realised, because of the flexibility with which it adapted itself to the nearly inevitable. Attendance at the girls' main boarding school was an attractive prospect. The fascination of living in a large group of young people where life was easier and more congenial than at home, was usually a sufficient bribe to good behaviour, or at least to discretion. Confession of sin was a rare phenomenon in Samoa. The missionaries had made a rule that a boy who transgressed the chastity rule would be held back in his progress through the preparatory school and seminary for two years after the time his offence was committed. It had been necessary to change this ruling to read two years from the detection of the ojfencey because very often the off^ence was not detected until after the student had been over two years! in the seminary, and under the old ruling, he would not have been punished at all. Had the young people been inspired with a sense of responsibility to a heavenly rather than an earthly decree and the boy or girl been answerable to a recording angel, rather than a spying neighbour, religion would have provided a real
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setting for conflict. If such an attitude had been coupled with emphasis upon church membership for the young and an expectation of religious experience in the lives of the young, crises in the lives of the young people would very likely have occurred. As it is, the whole religious setting is one of formalism, of compromise, of acceptance of half measure. The great number of native pastors with their peculiar interpretations of Christian teaching have made it impossible to establish the rigour of western Protestantism with its inseparable association of sex offences and an individual consciousness of sin. And the girls upon whom the religious setting makes no demands, make no demands upon it. They are content to follow the advice of their elders to defer church membership until they are older. Laitki d*u. Fia siva ("For I am young and like to dance"). The church member is forbidden to dance or to witness a large night dance. One of the three villages boasted no girl church members. The second village had only one, who had, however, long since transgressed her vows. But as her lover was a youth whose equivocal position in his family made it impossible to marry, the neighbours did not tattle where their sympathies were aroused, so Lotu remained tacitly a church member. In the third village there were two unmarried girls who were church members, Lita and Ana.
Lita had lived for years in the pastor's household and with one other girl, showed most clearly the results of
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a slightly alien environment. She was clever and executive, preferred the society of girls to that of boys, had made the best of her opportunities to learn English, worked hard at school, and wished to go to Tutuila and become a nurse or a teacher. Her ideals were thus just such as might frequently be found from any random selection of girls in a freshman class in a girls' college in this country. She
coupled this set of individual ambitions with a very unusual enthusiasm for a pious father, and complied easily with his expressed wish for her to become a church member. After she left the pastor's household, she continued to go to school and apply herself vigorously to her studies, and her one other interest in life was a friendship with an older cousin who spoke some English and had had superior educational advantages in another island. Although this friendship had most of the trappings of a "crush" and was accompanied by the casual homosexual practices which are the usual manifestations of most associations between young people of the same sex, Lita's motivation was more definitely ambition, a desire to master every accessible detail of this alien culture in which she wished to find a place.
Sona, who was two years younger than Lita and had also lived for several years in the pastor's household, presented a very similar picture. She was overbearing in manner, arbitrary and tyrannous towards younger people, impudently deferential towards her elders. Without exceptional intellectual capacity she had excep-
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tional persistence and had forced her way to the head of the school by steady dogged application. Lita, more intelligent and more sensitive, had left school for one year because the teacher beat her and Sona had passed above her, although she was definitely more stupid. Sona came from another island. Both her parents were dead and she lived in a large, heterogeneous household, at the beck and call of a whole series of relatives. Intent on her own ends, she was not enthusiastic about all this labour and was also unenthusiastic about most of her relatives. But one older cousin, the most beautiful girl in the village, had caught her imagination. This cousin, Manita, was twenty-seven and still unmarried. She had had many suitors and nearly as many lovers but she was of a haughty and aggressive nature and men whom she deemed worthy of her hand were wary of her sophisticated domineering manner. By unanimous vote she was the most beautiful girl in the village. Her lovely golden hair had contributed to half a dozen ceremonial headdresses. Her strategic position in her own family was heightened by the fact that her uncle, who had no hereditary right to make a taupOy had declared Manita to be his tawpo. There was no other taupo in the village to dispute her claim. The murmurings were dying out J the younger children spoke of her as a taupo without suspicion 5 her beauty and ability as a dancer made it expedient to thus introduce her to visitors. Her family did not press her to marry, for the longer she remained unmarried, the stronger waxed the upstart legend.
[i66]
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Her last lover had been a widowe;', a talking chief of intelligence and charm. He had loved Manita but he would not marry her. She lacked the docility which he demanded in a wife. Leaving Manita he searched in other villages for some very young girl whose manners were good but whose character was as yet unformed.
All this had a profound effect upon Sona, the ugly little stranger over whose lustreless eyes cataracts were already beginning to form. "Her sister" has no use for marriage j neither had she, Sona. Essentially unfemi-nine in outlook, dominated by ambition, she bolstered up her preference for the society of girls and a career by citing the example of her beautiful, wilful cousin. Without such a sanction she might have wavered in her ambitions, made so difficult by her already failing eyesight. As it was she went forward, blatantly proclaiming her pursuit of ends different from those approved by her fellows. Sona and Lita were not friends j the difference in their sanctions was too great; their proficiency at school and an intense rivalry divided them. Sona was not a church member. It would not have interfered with her behaviour in the least but it was part of her scheme of life to remain a school girl as long as possible and thus fend off responsibilities. So she, as often as the others, would answer, Laititi a^u ("I am but young"). While Lita attached herself to her cousin and attempted to learn from her every detail of another life, Sona identified herself passionately with the slightly more Europeanlsed family of the pastor, assert-
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ing always their greater relationship to the new civilisation, calling loane's wife, Mrs. Johns, building up a pitiable platform of fafalagi (foreign) mannerisms as a springboard for future activities.
There was one other girl church member of Siufaga, Ana, a girl of nineteen. Her motives were entirely diflFerent. She was of a mild, quiescent nature, highly intelligent, very capable. She was the illegitimate child of a chief by a mother who had later married, run away, married again, been divorced, and finally gone oflF to another island. She formed no tie for Ana. Her father was a widower, living in a brother's house and Ana had been reared in the family of another brother. This family approximated to a biological onej there were two married daughters older than Ana, a son near her age, a daughter of fourteen and a crowd of little children. The father was a gentle, retiring man who had built his house outside the village, "to escape from the noise," he said. The two elder daughters married young and went away to live in their husbands' households. Ana and her boy cousin both lived in the pastor's household, while the next younger girl slept at home. The mother had a great distrust of men, especially of the young men of her own village. Ana should grow up to marry a pastor. She was not strong enough for the heavy work of the average Samoan wife. Her aunt's continuous harping on this strain, which was prompted mainly by a dislike of Ana's mother and a fear of the daughter's leaving home to follow in her
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mother's footsteps, had convinced Ana that she was a great deal too delicate for a normal existence. This theory received complete verification in the report of the doctor who examined the candidates for the nursing school and rejected her because of a heart murmur. Ana, influenced by her aunt's gloomy foreboding, was now convinced that she was too frail to bear children, or at least not more than one child at some very distant date. She became a church member, gave up dancing, clung closer to the group of younger girls in the pastor's school and to her foster home, the neurasthenic product of a physical defect, a small, isolated family group and the pastor's school.
These girls all represented the deviants from the pattern in one direction j they were those who demanded a different or improved environment, who rejected the traditional choices. At any time, they, like all deviants, might come into real conflict with the group. That they did not was an accident of environment. The younger girls in the pastor's group as yet showed fewer signs of being influenced by their slightly artificial environment. They were chaste where they would not otherwise have been chaste, they had friends outside their relationship group whom they would otherwise have viewed with suspicion, they paid more attention to their lessons. They still had not acquired a desire to substitute any other career for the traditional one of marriage. This was, of course, partly due to the fact that the pastor's school was simply one influence in their lives. The girls
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still spent the greater proportion of their waking time at home amid conventional surroundings. Unless a girl was given some additional stimulus, such as unusual home conditions, or possessed peculiarities of temperament, she was likely to pass through the school essentially unchanged in her fundamental view of life. She would acquire a greater respect for the church, a preference for slightly more fastidious living, greater confidence in other girls. At the same time the pastor's school offered a sufficient contrast to traditional Samoan life to furnish the background against which deviation could flourish. Girls who left the village and spent several years in the boarding school under the tutelage of white teachers were enormously influenced. Many of them became nursesj the majority married pastors, usually a deviation in attitude, involving as it did, acceptance of a different style of living.
So, while religion itself offered little field for con-flict^ the institutions promoted by religion might act as stimuli to' new choices and when sufficiently reinforced by other conditions might produce a type of girl who deviated markedly from her companions*". That the majority of S
amoan girls are still unaffected by thesef influences and pursue uncritically the traditional mode of life is simply a testimony to the resistance of the native culture, which in' its present slightly Euro-peanised state, is replete with easy solutions for all conflicts} and to the apparent fact that adolescent girls in
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Samoa do not generate their own conflicts, but require a' vigorous stimulus to produce them.
These conflicts which have been discussed are conflicts of children who deviate upwards, who wish to exercise more choice than is traditionally permissible, and who, in making their choices, come to unconventional and bizarre solutions. The untraditional choices which are encouraged by the educational system inaugurated by the missionaries are education and the pursuit of a career and marriage outside of the local group (in the case of native pastors, teachers and nurses), prefer-rence for the society of one's own sex through prolonged and close association in school, a self-conscious evaluation of existence, and the consequent making of self-conscious choices. All of these make for increased specialisation, increased sophistication, greater emphasis upon individuality, where an individual makes a conscious choice between alternate or opposing lines of conduct. In the case of this group of girls, it is evident that the mere presentation of conflicting choices was not sufficient but that real conflict required the yeast of a need for choice and in addition a culturally favourable batter in which to work.