Schools are now maintained in many villages, where the
COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA
children, seated cross-legged on the floor of a large native house, learn the haziest of English from boys whose knowledge of the language is little more extensive than theirs. They also learn part singing, at which they are extraordinarily adept, and to play cricket and many other games. The schools are useful in instilling elementary ideas of hygiene, and in breaking down the barriers between age and sex groups and narrow residential units. From the pupils in the outlying schools the most promising are selected to become nurses, teachers, and candidates for the native marine corps, the FkafitaSj who constitute the police, hospital corpsmen and interpreters for the naval administration. The Samoans' keen feeling for social distinction makes them particularly able to co-operate with a government in which there is a hierarchy of oflScialdom; the shoulder stars and bars are fitted into their own system of rank without confusion. When the Governor and group of officers pay an official visit, the native-talking chief distributes the kava, first to the Governor, then to the highest chief among the hosts, then to the Commander of the Naval Yard, then to the next highest chief, without any difficulty.
In all the descriptions of Samoan life, one of the points which must have struck the reader most forcibly is the extreme flexibility of the civilisation as it is found to-day. This flexibility is the result of the blending of the various European ideas, beliefs, mechanical devices, with the old primitive culture. It is impossible to say whether it is due to some genius in the Samoan culture itself, or to fortunate accident, that these foreign elements have received such a thorough and harmonious acculturation. In many parts of the South Seas contact with white civilisation has resulted in the complete degeneration of native life, the loss of native techniques, and traditions, and the annihilation of the past. In Samoa this is not so. The growing child is faced by a smaller
APPENDIX III
dilemma than that which confronts the American-born child of European parentage. The gap between parents and children is narrow and painless, showing few of the unfortunate aspects usually present in a period of transition. The new culture, by offering alternative careers to the children has somewhat lightened the parental yoke. But essentially the children are still growing up in a homogeneous community with a uniform set of ideals and aspirations. The present ease of adolescence among Samoan girls which has been described cannot safely be attributed to a period of transition. The fact that adolescence can be a period of unstressed development is just as significant. Given no additional outside stimulus or attempt to modify conditions, Samoan culture might remain very much the same for two hundred years.
But it is only fair to point out that Samoan culture, before white influence, was less flexible and dealt less kindly with the individual aberrant. Aboriginal Samoa was harder on the girl sex delinquent than is present-day Samoa. And the reader must not mistake the conditions which have been described for the aboriginal ones, nor for typical primitive ones. Present-day Samoan civilisation is simply the result of the fortuitous and on the whole fortunate impetus of a complex, intrusive culture upon a simpler and most hospitable indigenous one.
In former times, the head of the household had life and death powers over every individual under his roof. The American legal system and the missionary teachings between them have outlawed and banished these rights. The individual still benefits by the communal ownership of property, by the claims which he has on all family land; but he no longer suffers from an irksome tyranny which could be enforced with violence and possible death. Deviations from chastity were formerly punished in the case of girls by a very severe beating and a stigmatising shaving of the head. Missionaries have discouraged the beating and head shaving, but
COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA
failed to substitute as forceful an inducement to circumspect conduct. The girl whose sex activities are frowned upon by her family is in a far better position than that of her great-grandmother. The navy has prohibited, the church has interdicted the defloration ceremony, formerly an inseparable part of the marriages of girls of rank; and thus the most potent inducement to virginity has been abolished. If for these cruel and primitive methods of enforcing a stricter regime there had been substituted a religious system which seriously branded the sex oifender, or a legal system which prosecuted and punished her, then the new hybrid civilisation might have been as heavily fraught with possibilities of conflict as the old civilisation undoubtedly was.
This holds true also for the ease with which young people change their residence. Formerly it might have been necessary to flee to a great distance to avoid being beaten to death. Now the severe beatings are deprecated, but the running-away pattern continues. The old system of succession must have produced many heartburns in the sons who did not obtain the best titles; to-day two new professions are open to the ambitious, the ministry and the Fitafitas. The taboo system, although never as rigorous in Samoa as in other parts of Polynesia, undoubtedly compelled the people to lead more circumspect lives and stressed more vividly diflFerence in rank. The few economic changes which have been introduced have been just suflficient to slightly upset the system of prestige which was based on display and lavish distribution of property. Acquiring wealth is easier, through raising copra, government employment, or manufacturing curios for the steamer-tourist trade on the main island. Many high chiefs do not find it worth while to keep up the state to which they are entitled, while numerous upstarts have an opportunity to acquire prestige denied to them under a slower method of accumulating wealth. The intensity of local feeling with its resulting
APPENDIX III
feuds, wars, jealousies and conflicts (in the case of intermarriage between villages) is breaking down with the improved facilities for transportation and the co-operation between villages in religious and educational matters.
Superior tools have partially done away with the tyranny of the master craftsman. The man who is poor, but ambitious, finds it easier to acquire a guest house than it would have been when the laborious highly specialised work was done with stone tools. The use of some money and of cloth, purchased from traders, has freed women from part of the immense labour of manufacturing mats and tapa as units of exchange and for clothing. On the other hand, the introduction of schools has taken an army of useful little labourers out of the home, especially in the case of the little girls who cared for the babies, and so tied the adult women more closely to routine domestic tasks.
Puberty was formerly much more stressed than it is to-day. The menstrual taboos against participation in the kava ceremony and in certain kinds of cooking were felt and enforced. The girl's entrance into the Aualuma was always, not just occasionally, marked by a feast. The unmarried girls and the widows slept, at least part of the time, in the house of the taufo. The taufo herself had a much harder life. Today she pounds the kava root, but in her mother's day it was chewed until jaws ached from the endless task. Formerly, should a defection from chastity be disclosed at her marriage, she faced being beaten to death. The adolescent boy faced tattooing, a painful, wearisome proceeding, additionally stressed by group ceremony and taboo. To-day, scarcely half of the young men are tattooed; the tattooing is performed at a much more advanced age and has no connection with puberty; the ceremonies have vanished and it has become a mere matter of a fee to the artist.
The prohibitions against blood revenge and personal vio-
COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA
lence have worked like a yeast in giving greater personal freedom. As many of the crimes which were formerly punished in this fashion are not recognised as crimes by the new authorities, no new mechanism of punishment has been devised for the man who marries the divorced wife of a man of higher rank, the miscreant who gossips outside his village and so brings his village into disrepute, the insolent detractor who recites another's genealogy, or the naughty boy who removes the straws from the pierced cocoanuts and thus offers an unspeakable affront to
visitors. And the Samoan is not in the habit of committing many of the crimes listed in our legal code. He steals and is fined by the government as he was formerly fined by the village. But he comes into very slight conflict with the central authorities. He is too accustomed to taboos to mind a quarantine prohibition which parades under the same guise; too accustomed to the exactions of his relations to fret under the small taxation demands of the government. Even the stern attitude formerly taken by the adults towards precocity has now been subdued, for what is a sin at home becomes a virtue at school.
The new influences have drawn the teeth of the old culture. Cannibalism, war, blood revenge, the life and death power of the matai^ the punishment of a man who broke a village edict by burning his house, cutting down his trees, killing his pigs, and banishing his family, the cruel defloration ceremony, the custom of laying waste plantations on the way to a funeral, the enormous loss of life in making long voyages in small canoes, the discomfort due to widespread disease —all these have vanished. And as yet their counterparts in producing misery have not appeared.
Economic instability, poverty, the wage system, the separation of the worker from his land and from his tools, modern warfare, industrial disease, the abolition of leisure, the irk-someness of a bureaucratic government—these have not yet
invaded an island without resources worth exploiting. Nor have the subtler penalties of civilisation, neuroses, philosophical perplexities, the individual tragedies due to an increased consciousness of personality and to a greater specialisation of sex feeling, or conflicts between religion and other ideals, reached the natives. The Samoans have only taken such parts of our culture as made their life more comfortable, their culture more flexible, the concept of the mercy of God without the doctrine of original sin.
[277]
APPENDIX IV
THE MENTALLY DEFECTIVE AND THE MENTALLY DISEASED
Without any training in the diagnosis of the mentally diseased and without any apparatus for exact diagnosis of the mentally defective, I can simply record a number of amateur observations which may be of interest to the specialist interested in the possibilities of studying the pathology of primitive peoples. In the Manu'a Archipelago with a population of a little over two thousand people, I saw one case which would be classed as-idiocy, one imbecile, one boy of fourteen who appeared to be both feeble-minded and insane, one man of thirty who showed a well-systematised delusion of grandeur, and one sexual invert who approximated in a greater development of the breasts, mannerism and attitudes of women and a preference for women's activities, to the norm of the opposite sex. The idiot child was one of seven children; he had a younger brother who had walked for over a year, and the mother declared that there were two years between the children. His legs were shrunken and withered, he had an enormous belly and a large head set very low on his shoulders. He could neither walk nor talk, drooled continually, and had no command over his excretory functions. The imbecile girl lived on another island and I had no opportunity to observe her over any length of time. She was one or two years past puberty and was pregnant at the time that I saw her. She could talk and perform the simple tasks usually performed by children of five or six. She seemed to only half realise her condition and giggled foolishly or stared vacantly when it was
APPENDIX IV
mentioned. The fourteen-year-old boy was at the time when I saw him definitely demented, giving an external picture of catatonic dementia pra^cox. He took those attitudes which were urged upon him, at times, however, becoming violent and unmanageable. The relatives insisted that he had always been stupid but only recently become demented. For this I have only their word as I was only able to observe the boy during a few days. In no one of these three cases of definite mental deficiency was there any family history which threw any light upon the matter. Among the girls whom I studied in detail only one, Sala, discussed in Chapter X, was sufficiently inferior to the general norm of intelligence to approximate to a m oron .
The man with the systematised delusion of grandeur was said to be about thirty years of age. Gaunt and emaciated, he looked much older. He believed that he was Tufele, the high chief of another island and the governor of the entire archipelago. The natives conspired against him to rob him of his rank and to exalt an usurper in his stead. He was a member of the Tufele family but only very remotely so that his delusion bore no relation to reality as he would never have had any hope of succeeding to the title. The natives, he said, refused to give him food, mocked him, disallowed his claims, did their best to destroy him, while a few white people were wise enough to recognise his rank. (The natives instructed visitors to address him in the chief's language because he consented to dance, a weird pathetic version of the usual style, only when so opportuned.) He had no outbreaks of violence, was morose, recessive, only able to work at times and never able to do heavy work or to be trusted to carry through any complicated task. He was treated with universal gentleness and toleration by his relatives and neighbours.
From informants I obtained accounts of four cases on Tutuila which sounded like the manic stage of manic depressive insanity. All four of these individuals had been vio-
COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA
lently destructive, and uncontrollable for a period of time, but had later resumed what the natives considered normal functioning. An old woman who had died some ten years before was said to have compulsively complied with any command that was given her. There was one epileptic boy in Tau, a member of an otherwise normal family of eight children. He fell from a tree during a seizure and died from a fractured skull soon after I came to Manu'a. A little girl of about ten who was paralysed from the waist down was said to be suffering from an overdose of salvarsan and to have been normal until she was live or six years old.
Only two individuals, one a married woman of thirty or so, the other a girl of nineteen, discussed in Chapter X, showed a definite neurasthenic constitution. The married woman was barren and spent a great deal of time explaining her barrenness as need of an operation. The presence of an excellent surgeon at the Samoan hospital during the preceding two years had greatly enhanced the prestige -of operations. On Tutuila, near the Naval Station, I encountered several middle-aged women obsessed with operations which they had undergone or were soon to undergo. Whether this vogue of modern surgery, by giving it special point, has added to the amount of apparent neurasthenia or not, it is impossible to say.
Of hysterical manifestations, I encountered only one, a girl of fourteen or fifteen with a bad tic in the right side of her face. I only saw her for a few minutes on a journey and was unable to make any investigations. I neither saw nor heard of any cases of hysterical blindness or deafness, nor or any anaesthesias nor paralyses.
I saw no cases of cretinism. There were a few children who had been blind from birth. Blindness, due to the extremely violent methods used by the native practitioners in the treatment of "Samoan conjunctivitis," is common.
The pathology which is immediately apparent to any visitor
APPENDIX IV
in a Samoan village is mainly due to the diseased eyes, elephantiasis, and abscesses and sores of various sorts, but the stigmata of degeneration are almost entirely absent.
There was one albino, a girl of ten, with no albinism in the recorded family history, but as one parent, now dead, had come from another island, this was not at all conclusive data.
APPENDIX V
MATERIALS UPON WHICH THE ANALYSIS IS BASED
This study included sixty-eight girls between the ages of eight and nine and nineteen or twenty—all the girls between these ages in the three villages of Faleasao, Luma and Siufaga, the three villages on the west coast of the island of Tau in the Manu'a Archipelago of the Samoan Islands.
Owing to the impossibility of obtaining accurate dates of birth except in a very few cases, the ages must all be regarded as approximate. The approximations were based upon the few known ages and the testimony of relatives as to the relative age of the others
. For purpose of description and analysis I have divided them roughly into three groups, the children who showed no mammary signs of puberty, twenty-eight in number, ranging in age from eight or nine to about twelve or thirteen; the children who would probably mature within the next year or year and a half, fourteen in number, ranging in age from twelve or thirteen to fourteen or fifteen; and the girls who were past puberty, but who were not yet considered as adults by the community, twenty-five in number, ranging in age from fourteen or fifteen to nineteen or twenty. These two latter groups and eleven of the younger children were studied in detail, making a group of fifty. The remaining fourteen children in the youngest group were studied less carefully as individuals. They formed a large check group in studying play, gang life, the development of brother and sister avoidance, the attitude between the sexes, the difiFerence in the interests and activities of this age and the girls approaching puberty. They also provided abundant material for
Coming of age in Samoa; a psychological study of primitive youth for western civilisation Page 23
