welfare, and a father whose authority is to be deferred to, the Samoan baby learns that its world is composed of a hierarchy of male and female adults, all of whom can be depended upon and must be deferred to. •*^^'The lack of specialised feeling which results from this diffusion of affection in the household is further reinforced by the segregation of the boys from the girls, so that a child regards the children of the opposite sex as taboo relatives, regardless of individuality, or as present enemies and future lovers, again regardless of individuality. And the substitution of relationship for preference in forming friendships completes the work. By the time she reaches puberty the Samoan girl has learned to subordinate choice in the selection of friends or lovers to an observance of certain categories. Friends must be relatives of one's own sexj lovers, non-relatives. All claim of personal attraction or congeniality between relatives of opposite sex must be flouted. All of this means that casual sex relations carry no onujjQf_strong_ attachment, that the marriage of convenience dictated by economic and social considerations is easily born and casually broken without strong emotion.
Nothing could present a sharper contrast to the average American home, with its small number of children, the close, theoretically permanent tie between the parents, the drama of the entrance of each new child upon the scene and the deposition of the last baby. Here the growing girl learns to depend upon a few individuals, to expect the rewards of life from cer-
OUR EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS
tain kinds of personalities. With this first set towards preference in personal relations she grows up playing with boys as well as with girls, learning to know well brothers and cousins and schoolmates. She does not think of boys as a class but as individuals, nice ones like the brother of whom she is fond, or disagreeable, domineering ones, like a brother with whom she is always on bad terms. Preference in physical make-up, in temperament, in character, develops and forms the foundations for a very different adult attitude in which choice plays a vivid role. The Samoan girl never tastes the rewards of romantic love as we know it, nor does she suffer as an oT3 mald^wHoTias appealed to no lover or found no Iov"er appealing to her, or as the frustrated wife in a marriage which hasnot fulfilled her high demands.
Having learned a little of the art of disciplining sex feeling into special channels approved by the whole personality, we will be inclined to account our solution better than the Samoans. To attain what we consider a more dignified standard of personal relations we are willing to pay the penalty of frigidity in marriage and a huge toll of barren, unmarried women who move in unsatisfied procession across the American and English stage. But while granting the desirability of this development of sensitive, discriminating response to personality, as a better basis for dignified human lives than an automatic, undifferentiated response to sex attraction, we may still, in the light of Samoan solutions, count our methods exceedingly expensive.
COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA
The strict segregation of related boys and girls, the institutionalised hostility between pre-adolescent children of opposite sexes in Samoa are cultural features with which we are completely out of sympathy. For the vestiges of such attitudes, expressed in our one-sex schools, we are trying to substitute coeducation, to habituate one sex to another sufficiently so that difference of sex will be lost sight of in the more important and more striking differences in personality. There are no recognisable gains in the Samoan system of taboo and segregation, of response to a group rather than response to an individual. But when we contrast the other factor of difference the conclusion is not so sure. What are the rewards of the tiny, ingrown, biological family opposing Its closed circle of affection to a forbidding world, of the strong ties between parents and children, ties which imply an active personal relation from birth until death? Specialisation of affection, it is true, but at the price of many individuals' preserving through life the attitudes of dependent children, of ties between parents and children which successfully defeat the children's attempts to make other adjustments, of necessary choices made unnecessarily poignant because they become Issues in an intense emotional relationship. Perhaps these are too heavy prices to pay for a ^ecialisation of emotion which might be brought about in other ways, notably through coeducation. And with such a question in our minds it is interesting to note that a larger family community, in which there
OUR EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS
are several adult men and women, seems to ensure the child against the development of the crippling attitudes^ * which have been labelled CEdipus complexes, Electra complexes, and so on.
The Samoan picture shows that it is not necessary to channel so deeply the affection of a child for its parents and suggests that while we would reject that part of the Samoan scheme which holds no rewards for us, the segregation of the sexes before puberty, we may learn from a picture in which the home does not dominate and distort the life of the child.
The presence of many strongly held and contradictory points of view and the enormous influence of individuals in the lives of their children in our country play into each other's hands in producing situations fraught with emotion and pain. In Samoa the fact that one girl's father is a domineering, dogmatic person, her cousin's father a gentle, reasonable person, and another cousin's father a vivid, brilliant, eccentric person, will influence the three girls in only one respect, choice of ^' residence if any one of the three fathers is the head of a household. But the attitudes of the three girls towards sex, and towards religion, will not be affected by the different temperaments of their three fathers, for the fathers play too slight a role in their lives. A They are schooled not by an individual but by an army of rela-tives into a general conformity upon which the personality of their parents has a very slight effect. And through an endless chain of cause and effect, individual
COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA
differences of standard are not perpetuated through the children's adherence to the parents' position, nor are children thrown into bizarre, untypical attitudes which
rmight form the basis for departure and change. It is , possible that where our own culture is so charged with choke, it would be desirable to mitigate, at least in some slight measure, the strong role which parents play in children's lives, and so eliminate one of the most powerful accidental factors In the choices of any individual life.
/ The Samoan parent would reject as unseemly and odious an ethical plea made to a child in terms of personal affection. "Be good to please mother." "Go to church for father's sake." "Don't be so disagreeable to your sister, it makes father so unhappy." Where there is one standard of conduct and only one, such undignified confusion of ethics and affection is blessedly eliminated. )But where there are many standards and all adults are striving desperately to bind their own children to the particular courses which they themselves have chosen, recourse is had to devious and non-reputable means. Beliefs, practices, courses of action, are pressed upon the child in the name of filial loyalty. In our ideal picture of the freedom of the individual and the dignity of human relations it is not pleasant to realise that we have developed a form of family organisation which often cripples the emotional life, and warps and confuses the growth of many individuals' power to consciously live their own lives.
OUR EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS
The third element in the Samoan pattern of lack of personal relationships and lack of speci_alised affection, is the case of friendship. Here, most of all, individuals are placed in categories and the response is to the category, "relative," or "wife of my husband's talking chief," or "son of my father's talking chief," or "daughter of my father's talking chief." ^^Considera-tion of congeniality, of like-mindedness, are all ironed out in favour of regimented associations.^ Such attitudes we would of course reject completelv. ^ ^^
f SJ Li ■■
Drawing the threads of this particular discussion together, we may say that one striking difference between Samoan society and our own is the lack of the specialisa- /h tion of feeling, and particul
arly of sex feeling^ among ^ Ihe Samoans. To this difference is uncfoubtedly due a part of the lack of difficulty of marital adjustments in a marriage of convenience, and the lack of frigidity or psychic impotence. This lack of specmlisation_ of feeling must be attributed to l:he large_heterog;eneous household, the segregation of the sexes before adoles-cence, and the reg^imen^tation _af _friendship—chiefly along relationship lines. And yet, altTiough we deplore the prices.Jn maladjusted and frustrated lives, which we.must pay for the greater specialisation of sex feeling in our own society, we nevertheless vote the development of specialised response as a gain which we would not relinquish. But an examination of these three causal factors suggests that we might accomplish our desired end, the development of a consciousness of
COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA
personality, through coeducation and free and un-regirner^djEriendships, and possibly do away with the evils inherent in the too intimate family organisation, thus eliminating a part of our penalty of maladjust-
^jnent without sacrificing any of our dearly bought gains.
, f^yThe next great difference between Samoa and our own culture which may be credited with a lower production of maladjusted individuals is the difference in the attitude towards sex and the education of the children In matters pertaining to birth and death. None of the facts of sex or of birth are regarded as unfit for children, no child has to conceal its knowledge for fear of punishment or ponder painfully over little-understood occurrences. Secrecy, ignorance, guilty knowledge, faulty speculations resulting in grotesque conceptions which may have far-reaching results, a knowledge of the bare physical facts of sex without a knowledge of the accompanying excitement, of the fact of birth without the pains of labour, of the fact of death without the fact of corruption—all the chief flaws in our fatal philosophy of sparing children a knowledge of the dreadful truth— are absent In Samoa. Furthermore, the Samoan child who participates intimately In the lives of a host of relatives has many and varied experiences upon which
" to base its emotional attitudes. Our children, confined within one family circle (and such confinement is becoming more and more frequent with the growth of cities and the substitution of apartment houses with a transitory population for a neighbourhood of house-
OUR EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS
holders), often owe their only experience with birth or death to the birth of a younger brother or sister or the death of a parent or grandparent. Their knowledge of sex, aside from children's gossip, comes from an accidental glimpse of parental activity. This has several very obvious disadvantages. In the first place, the child is dependent for its knowledge upon birth and death entering its own home 3 the youngest child in a family 1)
where there are no deaths may grow to adult life with- ^ ■ out ever having had any close knowledge of pregnancy, ' '' experience with young children, or contact with death. -K
A host of ill-digested fragmentary conceptions of life and death will fester in the ignorant, Inexperienced ,y mind and provide a fertile field for the later growth ^0
of unfortunate attitudes. Second, such children draw their experiences from too emotionally toned a field j one birth may be the only one with which they come in close contact for the first twenty years of their lives. And upon the accidental aspects of this particular birth their whole attitude is dependent. If the birth is that of a younger child who usurps the elder's place, if the mother dies In child bed, or if the child which Is born is deformed, birth may seem a horrible thing, fraught with only unwelcome consequences. If the only death bed at which one has ever watched Is the death bed of one's mother, the bare fact of death may carry all the emotion which that bereavement aroused, carry forever an effect out of all proportion to the particular deaths encountered later in life. And inter-
COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA
course seen only once or twice, between relatives towards whom the child has complicated emotional attitudes, may produce any number of false assumptions. Our records of maladjusted children are full of cases where children have misunderstood the nature of the sexual act, have interpreted it as struggle accompanied by anger, or as chastisement, have recoiled in terror from one highly charged experience. So our children are dependent upon accident for their experience of life and death j and those experiences which they are vouchsafed, lie within the intimate family circle and so are the worst possible way of learning general facts about which it is important to acquire no special, distorted attitudes. One death, two births, one sex experience, is a generous total for the child brought up under living conditions which we consider consonant with an American standard of living. And considering the number of illustrations which we consider it necessary to give of how to calculate the number of square feet of paper necessary to paper a room eight feet by twelve feet by fourteen feet, or how to parse an English sentence, this is a low standard of illustration. It might be argued that these are experiences of such high emotional tone that repetition is unnecessary. It might also be argued if a child were severely beaten before being given its first lesson in calculating how to paper a room, and as a sequel to the lesson, saw its father hit its mother with the poker, it would always remember that arithmetic lesson. But what it would
OUR EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS
know about the real nature of the calculations involved in room-papering is doubtful. In one or two experiences, the child is given no perspective, no chance to relegate the grotesque and unfamiliar physical details of the life process to their proper place. False impressions, part impressions, repulsion, nausea, horror, grow up about some fact experienced only once under intense emotional stress and in an atmosphere unfavourable to the child's attaining any real understanding.
A standard of reticence which forbids the child any sort of comment upon its experiences makes for the continuance of such false impressions, such hampering emotional attitudes, questions such as, "Why were grandma's lips so bluer" are promptly hushed. In Samoa, where decomposition sets in almost at once, a frank, naive repugnance to the odours of corruption on the part of all the participants at a funeral robs the physical aspect of death of any special significance. So, in our arrangements, the child is not allowed to repeat his experiences, and he is not permitted to discuss those which he has had and correct his mistakes.
With the Samoan child it is profoundly different. Intercourse, pregnancy, child birth, death, are all familiar occurrences. And the Samoan child experiences them in no such ordered fashion as we, were we to decide for widening the child's experimental field, would regard as essential. In a civilisation which suspects privacy, children of neighbours will be accidental and unemotional spectators in a house where the head
COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA
of the household is dying or the wife is delivered of a miscarriage. The pathology of the life processes is known to them, as well as the normal. One impression corrects an earlier one until they are able, as adolescents, to think about life and death and emotion without undue preoccupation with the purely physical details.
It must not be supposed, however, that the mere exposure of children to scenes of birth and death would be a sufficient guarantee against the growth of undesirable attitudes. Probably even more influential than the facts which are so copiously presented to them, is the attitude of mind with which their elders regard the matter. To them, birth and sex and death are the natural, inevitable structure of existence, of an existence in which they expect their youngest children to share. Our so often repeated comment that "it's not natural" for children to be permitted to encounter death would seem as Incongruous to them as if we were to say it was not natural for children to see other people eat or sleep. 'And this calm, matter-of-fact acceptance of their children's presence envelops the children in a protective atmosphere, saves them from shock and binds them closer to the common emotion which is so digni-. fiedly permitted them^) \j As in every case, it is here impossible to separate ' attitude from practice and say which is primary. The distinction is made only for our use i
n another civilisation. The individual American parents, who believe in a practice like the Samoan, and permit their children
OUR EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS
to see adult human bodies and gain a wider experience of the functioning of the human body than is commonly permitted in our civilisation, are building upon sand. For the child, as soon as it leaves the protecting circle • of its home, is blasted by an attitude which regards such y experience in children as ugly and unnatural. As likely as not, the attempt of the individual parents will have ' done the child more harm than good, for the necessary supporting social attitude is lacking. This is just a further example of the possibilities of maladjustment inherent in a society where each home differs from each other home J for it is in the fact of difference that the « strain lies rather than in the nature of the difference.
Upon this quiet acceptance of the physical facts of life, the Samoans build, as they grow older, an acceptance of sex. Here again it is necessary to sort out which parts of their practice seem to produce results which we certainly deprecate, and which produce results which we desire. It is possible to analyse Samoan sex practice from the standpoint of development of personal relationships on the one hand, and of the obviation of specific difficulties upon the other. f
We have seen that the Samoans have a low level of appreciation of personality differences, and a poverty of conception of personal relations. To such an atti- > tude the acceptance of promiscuity undoubtedly contributes. The contemporaneousness of several experiences, their short duration, the definite avoidance of " forming any affectional ties, the blithe acceptance of the
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dictates of a favourable occasion, as in the expectation of infidelity in any wife whose husband is long from home, all serve to make sex an end rather than a means, something which is valued in itself, and deprecated inasmuch as it tends to bind one individual to another. Whether such a disregard of personal relations is completely contingent upon the sex habits of the people is doubtful. Itf'probably is also a reflection of a more general cultural attitude in which personality is consistently disregarded. ; But there is one respect in which these very practices make possible a recognition of personality which is often denied to many in our civilisation, because, from the Samoans' complete knowledge of ^sex^ its possibilities and its rewards, they are able to count it at its true value. And if they have no preference for reserving sex activity for important relationships, neither do they regard relationships as important because they are productive of sex satisfaction. The Samoan girl who shrugs her shoulder over the excellent technique of ^ some young Lothario is nearer to the recognition of sex as an impersonal force without any intrinsic validity, than is the sheltered American girl who falls in love with the first man who kisses her. From their familiarity with the reverberations which accompany sex excitement comes this recognition of the essential impersonality of sex attraction which we may well envy themj from the too slight, too casual practice comes the disregard of personality which seems to us ' unlovely.
Coming of age in Samoa; a psychological study of primitive youth for western civilisation Page 18
