Coming of age in Samoa; a psychological study of primitive youth for western civilisation
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THE EDUCATION OF THE SAMOAN CHILD
bamboo knife and then all wait eagerly for the cord to fall off, the signal for a feast. If the baby is a girl, the cord is buried under a paper mulberry tree (the tree from which bark cloth is made) to ensure her -S^-^ growing up to be industrious at household tasks j for C^^ a boy it is thrown into the sea that he may be a skjlled fisherman, or planted under a taro plant to give him industry in farming, y Then the visitors go home, the mother rises and goes about her daily tasks, and thq new baby ceases to be of much interest to any one. The day, the month in which it was born, is forgotteni;^^-. Its first steps or first word are remarked without exuberant comment, without ceremony. It has lost all ceremonial importance and will not regain it again until after pubertyj in most Samoan villages a girl.-'^ will be ceremonially ignored until she is married. And even the mother remembers only that Losa is older than Tupu, and that her sister's little boy, Fale, j younger than her brother's child, Vigo. Relative, agf is of great importance, for the elder may always command the younger—until the positions of adult life upset the arrangement—but actual age may well be forgotten'i^
Babies are always nursed, and in the few cases where the mother's milk fails her, a wet nurse is sought among the kinsfolk. From the first week they are also given other food, papaya, cocoanut milk, sugar-cane juicej the food is either masticated by the mother and then put into the baby's mouth on her finger, or if it is
COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA
liquid, a piece of bark cloth is dipped into it and the child allowed to suck it, as shepherds feed orphaned lambs. The babies are nursed whenever they cry and there is no attempt at regularity. Unless a woman expects another child, she will nurse a baby until it is two or three years old, as the simplest device for pacifying its crying. Babies sleep with their mothers as long as they are at the breast j after weaning they are usually handed over to the care of some younger girl in the household. They are bathed frequently with the juice of a wild orange and rubbed with cocoanut oil until their skins glisten.
/The chief nurse-maid is usually a child of six or seven who is not strong enough to lift a baby over six months old, but who can carry the child straddling the left hip, or on the small of the back. A child of six or seven months of age will assume this straddling position naturally when it is picked up. Their diminutive nurses do not encourage children to walk, as babies who can walk about are more complicated charges. They walk before they talk, but it is impossible to give the age of walking with any exactness, though I saw two babies walk whom I knew to be only nine months old, and my Impression is that the average age is about a year. The life on the floor, for all activities within a Samoan house are conducted on the floor, encourages crawling, and children under three or four years of age optionally crawl or walk.
From birth "^^-j *-^^ ^g^rfr^*^^ ^r fiir^ o child's
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THE EDUCATION OF THE SAMOAN CHILD
education is^exceedinglY simple. They must be house-broken, a matter made more difficult by an habitual indifference to the activities of very small children. They must learn to sit or crawl within the house and never to stand upright unless it is absolutely necessary; never to address an adult in a standing position; to stay out of the sun J not to tangle the strands of the weaver j not to scatter the cut-up cocoanut which is spread out to dry J to keep their scant loin cloths at least nominally fastened to their persons j to treat fire and knives with proper caution j not to touch the kava bowl, or the kava cup J and, if their father is a chief, not to crawl on his bed-place when he is by. These are reallyfsimply^a^ series of avoidances, enforced by occasional cuffings andj a deal of exasperated shouting and ineffectual conver^J sation.
The weight of the punishment usually falls upon the t next oldest child, who learns to shout, "Come out ofj the sun," before she has fully appreciated the necessity of doing so herself. By the time Samoan girls and boys have reached sixteen or seventeen years of age these perpetual admonitions to the younger ones have become an inseparable part of their conversation, a monotonous, irritated undercurrent to all their comments. ..I have known them to intersperse their remarks every two or three minutes with, "Keep still," "Sit still," "Keep your mouths shut," "Stop that noise," uttered quite mechanically although all of the little ones present may have been behaving as quietly as a
COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA
row of intimidated mice. On the whole, this last requirement o£.5ilence is contmually mentioned and never enforced. The little nurses are more interested in -^eace than in forming the characters of their small charges and when a child begins to howl, it is simply /yrdragged out of earshot of its elders. No mother will y 1^*1 ever exert herself to discipline a younger child if an tolder one can be made responsible. -^
If small families of parents and children prevailed in Samoa, this system would result in making half of the population solicitous and self-sacrificing and the other half tyrannous and self-indulgent. But just as a child is getting old enough so that its wilfulness is becoming unbearable, a younger one is saddled upon it, and the whole process is repeated again, each child being disciplined and socialised through responsibility for a still younger oner'^
This fear of the disagreeable consequences resulting from a child's crying, is so firmly fixed in the minds of the older children that long after there is any need for it, they succumb to some little tyrant's threat of making a scene, and five-year-olds bully their way into expeditions on which they will have to be carried, into weaving parties where they will tangle the strands, and cook houses where they will tear up the cooking leaves or get thoroughly smudged with the soot and have to be washed—all because an older boy or girl has become so accustomed to yielding any point to stop an outcry. ,
THE EDUCATION OF THE SAMOAN CHILD
This method of giving in, coaxing, bribing, diverting the infant disturbers is only pursued within the household or the relationship group, where there are duly constituted elders in authority to punish the older children who can't keep the babies still. Towards a neighbour's children or in a crowd the half-grown girls and boys and even the adults vent their full irritation upon the heads of troublesome children. If a crowd of children are near enough, pressing in curiously to watch some spectacle at which they are not wanted, they are soundly lashed with palm leaves, or dispersed with a shower of small stones, of which the house floor always furnishes a ready supply. This treatment does not seem actually to improve the children's behaviour, but merely to make them cling even closer to their frightened and indulgent little guardians. It may be surmised that stoning the children from next door provides a most necessary outlet for those who have spent so many weary hours placating their own young relatives. And even these bursts of anger are nine-tenths gesture. No one who throws the stones actually means to hit a child, but the children know that if they repeat their intrusions too often, by the laws of chance some of the flying bits of coral will land in their faces. Even Samoan dogs have learned to estimate the proportion of gesture that there is in a Samoan's "get out of the house." They simply stalk out between one set of posts and with equal dignity and all casualness stalk in at the next opening.
COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA
By the time a child is six or seven she has all the essential avoidances well enough by heart to be trusted with the care of a younger child. And she also develops a number of simple techniques., She learns to weave firm square balls from palm leaves, to make pin-wheels of palm leaves or frangipani blossoms, to climb a cocoanut tree by walking up the trunk on flexible little feet, to break open a cocoanut with one firm well-directed blow of a knife as long as she is tall, to play a number of group games and sing the songs which go with them, to tidy the house by picking up the litter on the stony floor, to bring water from the sea, to spread out the copra to dry and to help gather it in when rain threatens, to roll the pandanus leaves for weaving, to go to a neighbouring house and bring back a lighted fagot for the chief's p
ipe or the cook-house fire, and to exercise tact in begging slight favours from relatives.
But in the case of the little girls all of these tasks are merely supplementary to the main business of baby-tending. Very small boys also have some care of the younger children, but at eight or nine years of age they are usually relieved of it. Whatever rough edges have not been smoothed off by this responsibility for younger children are worn off by their contact with older boys. For little boys are admitted t-) interesting and important activities only so long as their behaviour is circumspect and helpful. Where small girls are brusquely pushed aside, small boys will be patiently tolerated and they become adept at making themselves useful. The four
THE EDUCATION OF THE SAMOAN CHILD
or five little boys who all wish to assist at the important business of helping a grown youth lasso reef eels, organise themselves into a highly efficient working teamj one boy holds the bait, another holds an extra lasso, others poke eagerly about in holes in the reef looking for prey, while still another tucks the captured eels into his lavalava. The small girls , burdened with ,,-heavy babies or the care of little staggerers who are too small to adventure on the reef, discouraged by the hostility of the small boys and the scorn of the older ones, h ave litt le opportunity for learning the more adventurous forms of work and play. So while the little boys first undergo the chastening effects of baby-tending and then have many opportunities to learn effective cooperation under the supervision of older boys, the girls' ' education is less comprehensive. They have a high standard of individual responsibility but the community | provides them with no lessons in co-operation with one I another. This' is particularly apparent in the activities ■• of young people J the boys organise quickly; the girls waste hours in bickering, innocent of any technique for quick and efficient co-operation.
And as the woman who goes fishing can only get away by turning the babies over to the little girls of the household, the little girls cannot accompany their aunts and mothers. So they learn even the simple processes of reef fishing much later than do the boys. They are kept at the baby-tending, errand-running stage until they are old enough and robust enough to
COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA
work on the plantations and carry foodstuffs down to the village.
A girl is given these more strenuous tasks near the age of puberty, but it is purely a question of her physical size and ability to take responsibility, rather than of her physical maturity. Before this time she has occasionally accompanied the older members of the family to the plantations if they were willing to take the babies along also. But once there, while her brothers and cousins are collecting cocoanuts and roving happily about in the bush, she has again to chase and shepherd and pacify the ubiquitous babies. ^■As soon as the girls are strong enough to carry heavy loads, it pays the family to shift the responsibility for the little children to the younger girls and the adolescent girls are released from baby-tending. It may be said with some justice that the worst period of their "^ I lives is over. Never again will they be so incessantly at the beck and call of their elders, never again so ^tyrannised over by two-year-old tyrants. All the irritating, detailed routine of housekeeping, which in our civilisation is accused of warping the souls and souring the tempers of grown women, is here performed by children under fourteen years of age. A fire or a pipe to be kindled, a call for a drink, a lamp to be lit, the baby's cry, the errand of the capricious adult—these haunt them from morning until night. With the introduction of several months a year of government schools these children are being taken out of their
THE EDUCATION OF THE SAMOAN CHILD
homes for most of the day. This brings about a complete disorganisation of the native households which have no precedents for a manner of life where mothers have to stay at home and take care of their children and adults have to perform small routine tasks and run errands. . Before their release from baby-tending the little girls have a very limited knowledge of any of the more complicated techniques. Some of them can do the simpler work in preparing food for cooking, such as skinning bananas, grating cocoanuts, or scraping taro. A few of them can weave the simple carrying basket. But now they must learn to weave all their own baskets for carrying supplies j learn to select taro leaves of the right age for cooking, to dig only mature taro. In the cook-house they learn to make palusami, to grate the cocoanut meat, season it with hot stones, mix it with sea water and strain out the husks, pour this milky mixture into a properly made little container of taro leaves from which the aromatic stem has been scorched off, wrap these In a breadfruit leaf and fasten the stem tightly to make a durable cooking jacket. They must learn to lace a large fish into a palm leaf, or roll a bundle of small fish in a breadfruit leaf j to select the right kind of leaves for stuffing a pig, to judge when the food in the oven of small heated stones is thoroughly baked. Theoretically the bulk of the cooking is done by the boys and where a girl has to do the heavier work, it is a matter for comment:
COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA
"Poor Losa, there are no boys in her house and always she must make the oven." But the girls always help and often do a great part of the work.
Once they are regarded as individuals who can devote a long period of time to some consecutive activity, girls are sent on long fishing expeditions. . They learn to weave fish baskets, to gather and arrange the bundles of fagots used in torch-light fishing, to tickle a devil fish until it comes out of its hole and climbs obediently upon the waiting stick, appropriately dubbed a "come hither stick"j to string the great rose-coloured jellyfish, loley a name which Samoan children give to candy also, on a long string of hibiscus bark, tipped with a palm leaf rib for' a needle j to know good fish from bad fish, fish that are in season from fish which are dangerous at some particular time of the yearj and never to take two octopuses, found paired on a rock, lest bad luck come upon the witless fisher.
Before this time their knowledge of plants and trees is mainly a play one, the pandanus provides them with seeds for necklaces, the palm tree with leaves to weave balls J the banana tree gives leaves for umbrellas and half a leaf to shred into a stringy "choker" j cocoanut shells cut in half, with cinet strings attached, make a species of stilt j the blossoms of the Pua tree can be sewed into beautiful necklaces. Now they must learn to recognise these trees and plants for more serious purposes j they must learn when the pandanus leaves are ready for the cutting and how to cut the long leaves
THE EDUCATION OF THE SAMOAN CHILD
with one sure quick stroke j they must distinguish between the three kinds of pandanus used for different grades of mats. The pretty orange seeds which made such attractive and also edible necklaces must now be gathered as paint brushes for ornamenting bark cloth. Banana leaves are gathered to protect the woven platters, to wrap up puddings for the oven, to bank the steaming oven full of food. Banana, bark must be stripped at just the right point to yield the even, pliant, black strips, needed to ornament mats and baskets. Bananas themselves must be distinguished as to those which are ripe for burying, or the golden curved banana ready for eating, or bananas ready to be sun-dried for making fruit-cake rolls. Hibiscus bark can no longer be torn off at random to give a raffia-like string for a handful of shellsj long journeys must be made inland to si^ect bark of the right quality for use in weaving. .^ln the house the girPs principal task is to learn to weave. She has to master several different techniques. First, she learns to weave palm branches where the central rib of the leaf serves as a rim to her basket or an edge to her mat and where the leaflets are already arranged for weaving. From palm leaves she first learns to weave a carrying basket, made of half a leaf, by plaiting the leaflets together and curving the rib into a rim. Then she learns to weave the Venetian blinds which hang between the house posts, by laying one-half leaf upon another and plaiting the leaflets together. More difficult are the floor mats, woven of
COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA
four great palm leaves, and the food platters with their intricate de
signs. There are also fans to make, simple two-strand weaves which she learns to make quite well, more elaborate twined ones which are the prerogative of older and more skilled weavers. Usually some older woman in the household trains a girl to weave and sees to it that she makes at least one of each kind of article, but she is only called upon to produce in quantity the simpler things, like the Venetian blinds. From the pandanus she learns to weave the common floor mats, one or two types of the more elaborate bed mats, and then, when she is thirteen or fourteen, she begins her first fine mat. The fine mat represents the high point of Samoan weaving virtuosity. Woven of the finest quality of pandanus which has been soaked and baked and scraped to a golden whiteness and paperlike thinness, of strands a sixteenth of an inch in width, these mats take a year or two years to weave and are as soft and pliable as linen. They form the unit of value, and must always be included in the dowry of the bride. Girls seldom finish a fine mat until they are nineteen or twenty, but the mat has been started, and, wrapped up in a coarser one, it rests among the rafters, a testimony to the girPs industry and manual skill. She learns the rudiments of bark cloth making j she can select and cut the paper mulberry wands, peel off the bark, beat it after it has been scraped by more expert hands. The patterning of the cloth with a pat-