Coming of age in Samoa; a psychological study of primitive youth for western civilisation
Page 21
EDUCATION FOR CHOICE
For it must be realised by any_ studerit i)f civilisa-tion .
that we pay heavily for our heterogeneous, rapidly -
changing civilisation j we pay in high proportions_ of ^/
crime and delinquency, we pay in the conflicts of youth, we pay in an ever-increasing number of neuroses, we pay in the lack of a coherent tradition without which the development of art is sadly handicapped. In such a list of "prices, 'we must count our gains carefully, not to be discouraged. And chief among our gains must be reckoned this possibility of choice, the recognition of many possible ways of life, where other civilisations have recognised only one. Where other civilisations give a satisfactory outlet to only one temperamental type, be he mystic or soldier, business man or artist, a civilisation in which there are many standards ofFers a possibility of satisfactory adjustment to individuals of many different temperamental types, of diverse gifts and varying interests.
At the present time we live in a period of transition. We have many standards but we still believe that only one standard can be the right one. We present to our children the picture of a battle-field where each group is fully armoured in a conviction of the righteousness of its cause. And each of these groups make forays among the next generation. But it is unthinkable that a final recognition of the great number of ways in which man, during the course of history and at the present time, is solving the problems of life, should not bring with it in turn the downfall of our belief in
COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA
a single standard. And when no one group claims ethical sanction for its customs, and each group welcomes to its midst only those who are temperamentally fitted for membership, then we shall have realised the high point of individual choice and universal toleration which a heterogeneous culture and a heterogeneous culture alone can attain. Samoa knows but one way of life and teaches it to her children. Will we, who have the knowledge of many ways, leave our children free to choose among them?
APPENDIX I
NOTES TO CHAPTERS
CHAPTER IV Pages 43 to 45.
In the Samoan classification of relatives two principles, sex and age, are of the most primary importance. Relationship terms are never used as terms of address, a name or nickname being used even to father or mother. Relatives of the same age or within a year or two younger to five or ten years older are classified as of the speaker's generation, and of the same sex or of the opposite sex. Thus a girl will call her sister, her aunt, her niece, and her female cousin who are nearly of the same age, usoy and a boy will do the same for his brother, uncle, nephew, or male cousin. For relationships between siblings of opposite sex there are two terms, tuafafine and tuaganey female relative of the same age group of a male, and male relative of the same age group of a female. (The term uso has no such subdivisions.)
The next most important term is applied to younger relatives of either sex, the word tet. Whether a child is so classified by an older relative depends not so much on how many years younger the child may be, but rather on the amount of care that the elder has taken of it. So a girl will call a cousin two years younger than herself her teiy if she has lived near by, but an equally youthful cousin who has grown up in a distant village until both are grown will be called uso. It is notable that there is no term for elder relative. The terms usoy tufa-fine and tuagane all carry the feeling of contemporaneousness,
COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA
and if it is necessary to specify seniority, a qualifying adjective must be used.
Tamay the term for father, is applied also to the matai of a household, to an uncle or older cousin with whose authority a younger person comes into frequent contact and also to a much older brother who in feeling is classed with the parent generation. Tina is used only a little less loosely for the mother, aunts resident in the household, the wife of the matai and only very occasionally for an older sister.
A distinction is also made in terminology between men's terms and women's terms for the children. A woman will say tama (modified by the addition of the suffixes tane and fa fine y male and female) and a man will say ataliiy son and afafinCy daughter. Thus a woman will say, "Losa is my tama" specifying her sex only when necessary. But Losa's father will speak of Losa as his afafine. The same usage is followed in speaking to a man or to a woman of a child. All of these terms are further modified by the addition of the word, moniy real, when a blood sister or blood father or mother is meant. The elders of the household are called roughly matuay and a grandparent is usually referred to as the toa^inuy the "old man" or olamatuay "old woman," adding an explanatory clause if necessary. All other relatives are described by the use of relative clauses, "the sister of the husband of the sister of my mother," "the brother of the wife of my brother," etc. There are no special terms for the inlaw group.
CHAPTER V
Neighbourhood Maps
Pages 60 to 65.
For the sake of convenience the households were numbered in sequence from one end of each village to the other. The
APPENDIX I
houses did not stretch in a straight line along the beach, but were located so unevenly that occasionally one house was directly behind another. A schematic linear representation will, however, be sufficient to show the effect of location in the formation of neighbourhood groups.
VILLAGE I
(The name of the girl will be placed under the number of the household. Adolescent girls' names in capitals, girls' just reaching puberty in lower case and the pre-adolescent children in italics.)
Siufaga
(Household 38 in Siufaga is adjacent to household i in Luma. The two villages are geographically continuous but socially they are separate units.)
COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA
123456 Vina Namu Lita *
TOLO TOLU
Lusina
7 8 Tulima
II 12 13
Tatala
21 22 23
Pulona Ipu Tasi
31 32 33
LuA Simina
14 15 16 17 il Lilina Tino Mala
24 25
26 Tua
27 28
10
19 20
Lola *
29 30 Timu Meta
34 35 36 37
38
Fala So lata
VILLAGE III
Faleasao
(Faleasao was separated from Luma by a high cliff which jutted out into the sea and made it necessary to take an inland trail to get from one seaside village to the other. This was about a twenty-minute walk from Tau. Faleasao children were looked upon with much greater hostility and suspicion than that which the children of Luma and Siufaga showed to each other. The pre-adolescent children from this village are not discussed by name and will be indicated by an x.)
* Girls to whom a change of residence made important differences, see Chap. XI, "The Girl in Conflict."
APPENDIX I
21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29
CHAPTER IX
Pages 123 to 125.
The first person singular of the verb "to know," used in the negative, has two forms:
Ta ilo (Contraction of Ta te le iloa)
I euphonic neg. know particle and
Ua le iloa a'u
Pres. neg. know I
Part.
The former of these expressions has a very different meaning from the latter although linguistically they represent optional syntactic forms, the second being literally, "I do not know," while the first can best be rendered by the slang phrase, "Search me." This "Search me" carries no implication of lack of actual knowledge or information about the subject in question but is merely an indication either of lack of interest or unwillingness to explain. That the Samoans feel this distinction very clearly is shown by the frequent use of both forms in the same sentence: Ta ilo ua le iloa a^u. "Search me, I don't know."
Page 126.
Sample Character Sketches Given of Members of Their Households by Adolescent Girl
s
(Literal translations from dictated texts)
I
He is an untitled man. He works hard on the plantation. He is tall, thin and dark-skinned. He is not easily angered.
COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA
He goes to work and comes again at night. He is a policeman. He does work for the government. He is not filled with unwillingness. He is attractive looking. He is not married.
II
She is an old woman. She is very old. She is weak. She is not able to work. She can only remain in the house. Her hair is black. She is fat. She has elephantiasis in one leg. She has no teeth. She is not irritable. She does not hate. She is clever at weaving mats, fishing baskets and food trays.
Ill
She is strong and able to work. She goes inland. She weeds and makes the oven and picks breadfruit and gathers paper mulberry bark. She is kind. She is of good conduct. She is clever at weaving baskets and mats and fine mats and food trays, and painting tapa cloth and scraping and pounding and pasting paper mulberry bark. She is short, black-haired and dark-skinned. She is fat. She is good. If any one passes by she is kindly disposed towards them and calls out, "Po'o fea 'e te maliu i ai?" (a most courteous way of asking, "Where are you going?")
IV
She is fat. She has long hair. She is dark-skinned. She is blind in one eye. She is of good behaviour. She is clever at weeding taro and weaving floor mats and fine mats. She is short. She has borne children. There is a baby. She remains in the house on some days and on other days she goes inland. She also knows how to weave baskets.
He is a boy. His skin is dark. So is his hair. He goes to the bush to work. He works on the taro plantation. He
APPENDIX I
likes every one. He is clever at weaving baskets. He sings in the choir of the young men on Sunday. He likes very much to consort with the girls. He was expelled from the pastor's house.
VI
Portrait of herself
I am a girl. I am short. I have long hair. I love my sisters and all the people. I know how to weave baskets and fishing baskets and how to prepare paper mulberry bark. I live in the house of the pastor.
vn
He is a man. He is strong. He goes inland and works upon the plantation of his relatives. He goes fishing. He goes to gather cocoanuts and breadfruit and cooking leaves and makes the oven. He is tall. He is dark-skinned. He is rather fat. His hair is short. He is clever at weaving baskets. He braids the palm leaf thatching mats for the house.* He is also clever at house-building. He is of good conduct and has a loving countenance.
VIII
She is a woman. She can't work hard enough (to suit herself). She is also clever at weaving baskets and fine mats and at bark cloth making. She also makes the ovens and clears away the rubbish around the house. She keeps her house in fine condition. She makes the fire. She smokes. She goes fishing and gets octopuses and tu'itu'i (sea eggs) and comes back and eats them raw. She is kind-hearted and of loving countenance. She is never angry. She also loves her children.
* Women's work.
COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA
IX
She is a woman. She has a son, is his name. She
is lazy. She is tall. She is thin. Her hair is long. She is clever at weaving baskets, making bark cloth and weaving fine mats. Her husband is dead. She does not laugh often. She stays in the house some days and other days she goes inland. She keeps everything clean. She lives well upon bananas. She has a loving face. She is not easily out of temper. She makes the oven.
X
She is the daughter of . She is a little girl about
my age. She is also clever at weaving baskets and mats and fine mats and blinds and floor mats. She is good in school. She also goes to get leaves and breadfruit. She also goes fishing when the tide is out. She gets crabs and jelly fish. She is very loving. She does not eat up all her food if others ask her for it. She shows a loving face to all who come to her house. She also spreads food for all visitors.
XI
Portrait of herself
I am clever at weaving mats and fine mats and baskets and blinds and floor mats. I go and carry water for all of my household to drink and for others also. I go and gather bananas and breadfruit and leaves and make the oven with my sisters. Then we (herself and her sisters) go fishing together and then it is night.
CHAPTER X
Pages 132 to 133.
The children of this age already show a very curious example of a phonetic self-consciousness in which they are almost
APPENDIX I
as acute and discriminating as their elders. When the missionaries reduced the language to writing, there was no k in the language, the k positions in otlier Polynesian dialects being filled in Samoan either with a ^ or a glottal stop. Soon after the printing of the Bible, and the standardisation of Samoan spelling, greater contact with Tonga introduced the k into the spoken language of Savai'i and Upolu, displacing the ty but not replacing the glottal stop. Slowly this intrusive usage spread eastward over Samoa, the missionaries who controlled the schools and the printing press fighting a dogged and losing battle with the less musical k. To-day the t is the sound used in the speech of the educated and in the church, still conventionally retained in all spelling and used in speeches and on occasions demanding formality. The Manu'a children who had never been to the missionary boarding schools, used the k entirely. But they had heard the t in church and at school and were sufficiently conscious of the difference to rebuke me immediately if I slipped into the colloquial ky which was their only speech habit, uttering the t sound for perhaps the first time in their lives to illustrate the correct pronunciation from which I, who was ostensibly learning to speak correctly, must not deviate. Such an ability to disassociate the sound used from the sound heard is remarkable in such very young children and indeed remarkable in any person who is not linguistically sophisticated.
CHAPTER XI
Pages i6i to 163.
During six months I saw six girls leave the pastor's establishment for several reasons: Tasi, because her mother was ill and she, that rare phenomenon, the eldest in a biological household, was needed at home; Tua, because she had come out lowest in the missionaries' annual examination which her
COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA
mother attributed to favouritism on the part of the pastor; Luna, because her stepmother, whom she disliked, left her father and thus made her home more attractive and because under the influence of a promiscuous older cousin she began to tire of the society of younger girls and take an interest in love affairs; Lita, because her father ordered her home, because with the permission of the pastor, but without consulting her family, she went off for a three weeks' visit in another island. Going home for Lita involved residence in the far end of the other village, necessitating a complete change of friends. The novelty of the new group and new interests kept her from in any way chafing at the change. Sala, a stupid idle girl, had eloped from the household of the pastor.
APPENDIX II
METHODOLOGY OF THIS STUDY
It is impossible to present a single and unified picture of the adolescent girl in Samoa and at the same time to answer most satisfactorily the various kinds of questions which such a study will be expected to answer. For the ethnologist in search of data upon the usages and rites connected with adolescence it is necessary to include descriptions of customs which have fallen into partial decay under the impact of western propaganda and foreign example. Traditional observances and attitudes are also important in the study of the adolescent girl in present-day Samoa because they still form a large part of the thought pattern of her parents, even if they are no longer given concrete expression in the girl's cultural life. But this double necessity of describing not only the present environment and the girl's reaction to it, but also of interpolating occasionally some description of the more rigid cultural milieu of her mother's girlhood, mars to some extent the unity of the study.
The detailed observations were all made
upon a group of girls living in three practically contiguous villages on one coast of the island of Tau. The data upon the ceremonial usages surrounding birth, adolescence and marriage were gathered from all of the seven villages in the Manu'a Archipelago.
The method of approach is based upon the assumption that a detailed intensive investigation will be of more value than a more diffused and general study based upon a less accurate knowledge of a greater number of individuals. Dr. Van Waters' study of The Adolescent Girl Among Primitive
COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA
Peoples has exhausted the possibilities of an investigation based upon the merely external observations of the ethnologist vv^ho is giving a standardised description of a primitive culture. We have a huge mass of general descriptive material without the detailed observations and the individual cases in the light of which it would be possible to interpret it.
The writer therefore chose to work in one small locality, in a group numbering only six hundred people, and spend six months accumulating an intimate and detailed knowledge of all the adolescent girls in this community. As there were only sixty-eight girls between the ages of nine and twenty, quantitative statements are practically valueless for obvious reasons: the probable error of the group is too large; the age classes are too small, etc. The only point at which quantitative statements can have any relevance is in regard to the variability within the group, as the smaller the variability within the sample, the greater the general validity of the results.
Furthermore, the type of data which we needed is not of the sort which lends itself readily to quantitative treatment. The reaction of the girl to her stepmother, to relatives acting as foster parents, to her younger sister, or to her older brother, —these are incommensurable in quantitative terms. As the physician and the psychiatrist have found it necessary to describe each case separately and to use their cases as illumination of a thesis rather than as irrefutable proof such as it is possible to adduce in the physical sciences, so the student of the more intangible and psychological aspects of human behaviour is forced to illuminate rather than demonstrate a thesis. The composition of the background against which the girl acts can be described in accurate and general terms, but her reactions are a function of her own personality and cannot be described without reference to it. The generalisations are based upon a careful and detailed observation of a small group of sub-