Coming of age in Samoa; a psychological study of primitive youth for western civilisation
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The next older girls were definitely divided as to whether or not they lived in the pastor's households. A glance at the table in the appendix will show that among the girls a couple of years past puberty, there is a definite inverse correlation between residence at home and chastity, with only one exception, Ela, who had been forgiven and taken back into the household of a pastor where workers were short. Ela's best friend was her cousin, Talo, the only girl in the group who had sex experience before menstruation had begun. But Talo was clearly a case of delayed menstruation 3 all the other signs of puberty were present. Her aunt shrugged her shoulders in the face of Talo's obvious sophistication and winning charm and made no attempt to control her. The friendship between these two girls was one of the really important friendships in the whole group. Both girls definitely proclaimed their preference, and their homosexual practices were undoubtedly instrumental in producing Talo's precocity and solacing Ela for the stricter regime of the pastor's household.
These casual homosexual relations between girls never assumed any long-time importance. On the part of growing girls or women who were working together they were regarded as a pleasant and natural diversion, just tinged with the salacious. "Where heterosexual relationships were so casual, so shallowly channelled, there was no pattern into which homosexual relationships could fall. Native theory and vocabulary recog-
COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA
nised the real pervert who was incapable of normal heterosexual response, and the very small population is probably sufficient explanation for the rarity of these types. I saw only one, Sasi, a boy of twenty who was studying for the ministry. He was slightly but not pronouncedly feminine in appearance, was skilled at women's work and his homosexual drive was strong enough to goad him into making continual advances to other boys. He spent more time casually in the company of girls, maintained a more easy-going friendship with them than any other boy on the island. Sasi had proposed marriage to a girl in a pastor's household in a distant village and been refused, but as there was a rule that divinity students must marry before ordination, this has little significance. I could find no evidence that he had ever had heterosexual relations and the girls' casual attitude towards him was significant. They regarded him as an amusing freak while the men to whom he had made advances looked upon him with mingled annoyance and contempt. There were no girls who presented such a clear picture although three / of the deviants discussed in the next chapter were clearly mixed types, without, however, showing convincing evidence of genuine perversion.
The general preoccupation with sex, the attitude that
(minor sex activities, suggestive dancing, stimulating salacious conversation, salacious songs and definitely motivated tussling are all acceptable and attractive diversions, is mainly responsible for the native attitude
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towards homosexual practices. They are simply flay^ neither frowned upon nor given much consideration. As heterosexual relations are given significance not by love and a tremendous fixation upon one individual, the only forces which can make a homosexual relationship lasting and important, but by children and the place of marriage in the economic and social structure of the village, it is easy to understand why very prevalent homosexual practices have no more important or striking results. The recognition and use in heterosexual relations of all the secondary variations of sex activity which loom as primary in homosexual relations are instrumental also in minimising their importance. The effects of chance childhood perversions, the fixation of attention on unusual erogenous zones with consequent transfer of sensitivity from the more normal centres, the absence of a definite and accomplished specialisation of erogenous zones—all the accidents of emotional development which in a civilisation, recognising only one narrow form of sex activity, result in unsatisfactory marriages, casual homosexuality and prostitution, are here rendered harmless. The Samoan puts the burden of amatory success upon the man and believes that women need more initiating, more time for the maturing of sex feeling. A man who fails to satisfy a woman is looked upon as a clumsy, inept blunderer, a fit object for village ridicule and contempt. The women in turn are conscious that their lovers use a definite technique which they regard with a sort of
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fatalism as if all men had a set of slightly magical, wholly irresistible, tricks up their sleeves. But amatory lore is passed down from one man to another and is looked upon much more self-consciously and analytically by men than by women. Parents are shy of going beyond the bounds of casual conversation (naturally these are much wider than in our civilisation) in the discussion of sex with their children, so that definite instruction passes from the man of twenty-five to the boy of eighteen rather than from father to son. The girls learn from the boys and do very little confiding in each other. All of a man's associates will know every detail of some unusual sex experience while the girl involved will hardly have confided the bare outlines to any one. Her lack of any confidants except relatives towards whom there is always a slight barrier of reserve (I have seen a girl shudder away from acting as an ambassador to her sister) may partly account for this.
The fact that educating one sex in detail and merely fortifying the other sex with enough knowledge and familiarity with sex to prevent shock produces normal sex adjustments is due to the free experimentation which is permitted and the rarity with which both lovers are amateurs. I knew of only one such case, where two children, a sixteen-year-old boy and a fifteen-year-old girl, both in boarding schools on another island, ran away together. Through inexperience they bungled badly. They were both expelled
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from school, and the boy is now a man of twenty-four crif<. with high intelligence and real .charm, but a notorious moetotoloy execrated by every girl in his village. Familiarity with sex, and t he recognition of a ne ed of a techniqueto dea l with sex as an art, hav e produced a sche me of personal r elations in which there are no neurotic pictures, no frigidity^ no impotence, excep t as the temporary result of severe illness, and the capacityTor intercourse only once in a night is counted as senility. Of the twenty-five girls past puberty, eleven had had heterosexual experience. Fala, Tolu, and Namu were three cousins who were popular with the youths of their own village and also with visitors from distant Fitiuta. The women of Fala's family were of easy virtue; Tolu's father was dead and she lived with her blind mother in the home of Namu's parents, who, burdened with six children under twelve years of age, were not going to risk losing two efficient workers by too close supervision. The three girls made common rendezvous with their lovers and their liaisons were frequent and gay. Tolu, the eldest, was a little weary after three years of casual adventures and professed herself willing to marry. She later moved into the household of an important chief in order to improve her chances of meeting strange youths who might be interested In matrimony. Namu was genuinely taken with a boy from Fitiuta whom she met in secret while a boy of her own village whom her parents favoured courted her openly. Occasional assignations with other
COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA
boys of her own village relieved the monotony of life between visits from her preferred lover. Fala, the youngest, was content to let matters drift. Her lovers were friends and relatives of the lovers of her cousins and she was still sufficiently childlike and uninvolved to get almost as much enjoyment out of her cousins' love affairs as out of her own. All three of these girls worked hard, doing the full quota of work for an adult. All day they fished, washed, worked on the plantation, wove mats and blinds. Tolu was exceptionally clever at weaving. They were valuable economic assets to their families} they would be valuable to the husbands whom their families were not over anxious to find for them.
In the next village lived Luna, a lazy good-natured girl, three years past puberty. Her mother was dead. Her father had mar
ried again, but the second wife had gone back to her own people. Luna lived for several years in the pastor's household and had gone home when her stepmother left her father. Her father was a very old chief, tremendously preoccupied with his prestige and reputation in the village. He held an important titlej he was a master craftsman} he was the best versed man in the village in ancient lore and details of ceremonial procedure. His daughter was a devoted and efficient attendant. It was enough. Luna tired of the younger girls who had been her companions in the pastor's household and sought instead two young married women among her relatives. One of
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these, a girl who had deserted her husband and was living with a temporary successor came to live in Luna's household. She and Luna were constant companions, and Luna, quite easily and inevitably took one lover, then two, then a third—all casual affairs. She dressed younger than her years, emphasised that she was still a girl. Some day she would marry and be a church member, but now: Laititi a^u ("I am but young"). And who was she to give up dancing.
Her cousin Lotu was a church member, and had attended the missionary boarding school. She had had only one accepted lover, the illegitimate son of a chief who dared not jeopardise his very slender chance of succeeding to his father's title by marrying her. She was the eldest of nine children, living in the third strictly biological family in the village. She showed the effects of greater responsibility at home by a quiet maturity and decision of manner, of her school training in a greater neatness of person and regard for the nicety of detail. Although she was transgressing, the older church members charitably closed their eyes, sympathising with her lover's family dilemma. Her only other sex experience had been with a moetotoloy a relative. Should her long fidelity to her lover lead to pregnancy, she would probably bear the child. (When a Samoan woman does wish to avoid giving birth to a child, exceedingly violent massage and the chewing of kava is resorted to, but this is only in very exceptional cases, as even illegitimate children are enthusiastically
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welcomed.) Lotu's attitudes were more considered, more sophisticated than those o£ the other girls of her age. Had it not been for the precarious social status of her lover, she would probably have been married already. As it was, she laboured over the care of her younger brothers and sisters, and followed the routine of relationship duties incumbent upon a young girl in the largest family on the island. She reconciled her church membership and her deviation from chastity by the tranquil reflection that she would have married had it been possible, and her sin rested lightly upon her.
In the household of one high chief lived the Samoan version of our devoted maiden aunts. She was docile, efficient, responsible, entirely overshadowed by several more attractive girls. To her were entrusted the newborn babies and the most difficult diplomatic errands. Hard work which she never resented took up all her time and energy. When she was asked to dance, she did so negligently. Others dancing so much more brilliantly, why make the effort? Hers was the appreciative worshipping disposition which glowed over Tolu's beauty or Fala's conquests or Alofi's new baby. She played the ukulele for others to dance, sewed flower necklaces for others to wear, planned rendezvous for others to enjoy, without humiliation or a special air of martyrdom. She admitted that she had had but one lover. He had come from far awayj she didn't even know from what village, and he had never come back.
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Yes, probably she would marry some day if her chief so willed it, and was that the baby crying? She was the stuff of whom devoted aunts are made, depended upon and loved by all about her. A malaga to another village might have changed her life, for Samoa boys sought strange girls merely because they were strangers. But she was always needed at home by some one and younger girls went journeying in her stead.
Perhaps the most dramatic story was that of Moana, the last of the group of girls who lived outside the pastors' households, a vain, sophisticated child, spoiled by years of trading upon her older half-sister's devotion. Her amours had begun at fifteen and by the time a year and a half had passed, her parents, fearing that her conduct was becoming so indiscreet as to seriously mar her chances of making a good marriage, asked her uncle to adopt her and attempt to curb her waywardness. This uncle, who was a widower and a sophisticated rake, when he realised the extent of his niece's experience, availed himself also of her complacency. This incident, not common in Samoa, because of the great lack of privacy and isolation, would have passed undetected in this case, if Moana's older sister, Sila, had not been in love with the uncle also. This was the only example of prolonged and intense passion which I found in the three villages. Samoans rate romantic fidelity in terms of days or weeks at most, and are inclined to scoff at tales of life-long devotion. (They greeted the story of Romeo and Juliet with incredulous
COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA
contempt.) But Sila was devoted to Mutu, her stepfather's younger brother, to the point of frenzy. She had been his mistress and still lived in his household, but his dilettantism had veered away from her indecorous intensity. When she discovered that he had lived with her sister, her fury knew no bounds. Masked under a deep solicitude for the younger girl, whom she claimed was an innocent untouched child, she denounced Mutu the length of the three villages. Moana's parents fetched her home again in a great rage and a family feud resulted. Village feeling ran high, but opinion was divided as to whether Mutu was guilty, Moana lying to cover some other peccadillo or Sila gossiping from spite. The incident was in direct violation of the brother and sister taboo for Mutu was young enough for Moana to speak of him as tuagane (brother). But when two months later, another older sister died during pregnancy, it was necessary to find some one stout-hearted enough to perform the necessary Csesarian post-mortem operation. After a violent family debate, expediency triumphed and Mutu, most skilled of native surgeons, was summoned to operate on the dead body of the sister of the girl he had violated. When he later on announced his intention of marrying a girl from another island, Sila again displayed the most uncontrolled grief and despair, although she herself was carrying on a love affair at the time.
The lives of the girls who lived in the pastor's
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household differed from those of their less restricted sisters and cousins only in the fact that they had no love affairs and lived a more regular and ordered existence. For the excitement of moonlight trysts they substituted group activities, letting the pleasant friendliness of a group of girls fill their lesser leisure. Their Interest in salacious material was slightly stronger than the interest of the girls who were free to experiment. They made real friends outside their relationship group, trusted other girls more, worked better in a group, were more at ease with one another but less conscious of their place in their own households than were the others.
With the exception of the few cases to be discussed in the next chapter, adolescence represented no period of crisis or stress, but was Instead an orderly developing of a set of slowly maturing Interests and activities. The girls' minds were perplexed by no conflicts, troubled by no philosophical queries, beset by no remote ambitions. To live as a girl with many lovers as long as possible and then to marry in one's own village, near one's own relatives and to have many children, these were uniform and satisfying ambitions.
THE GIRL IN CONFLICT
WERE there no conflicts, no temperaments which deviated so markedly from the normal that clash was inevitable? Was the diffused affection and the diffused authority of the large families, the ease of moving from one family to another, the knowledge of sex and'the Treedom'F6~experiment a sufficient guar antee td~air^moan girls of a perfect adjustment? In al-most all cases, yes. But I have reserved for this chapter the tales of the few girls who deviated i n tern pera-ment or in conduct, altlTough Tn many cases these devi-ations were~only_chair£ed with posslHilit-ips; nf mnflirtj and actually had no painful results.
The girl between fourteen and twenty stands at the centre of household pressure and can expend her irritation at her elders on those over whom she is in a position of authority. The possibility of escape seems to temper her restiveness under authority and the irritation of her elders also. When to the fear of a useful worker's running away is added also the fear of a daughter's indulging in a public elopement, and thus lowering her marriage value, any marked exercise of parental authority is considerably mitigated. Violen t^ outbursts of wrath and summary chastisements do occur
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but consistent and prolonged disciplinary measures are absent, and a display of temper is likely to be speedily followed by conciliatory measures. This, of course, applies only to the relation between a girl and her elders. Often conflicts of personality between young people of the same age in a household are not so tempered, but the removal of one party to the conflict, the individual with the weakest claims upon the household, is here also the most frequent solution. The fact that the age-group gang breaks up before adolescence and is never resumed except in a highly formal manner, coupled with the decided preference for household rather than group solidarity, accounts for the scarcity of conflict here. The child who shuns her age mates is more available for household work and is never worried by questions as to why she doesn't run and play with the other children. On the other hand, the tolerance of the children in accepting physical defect or slight strangeness of temperament prevents any child's suffering from undeserved ostracism.