Margaret Mead

“ And a matai he wishes to be, some day, some far-off day when his limbs have lost a little of their suppleness and his heart the love of fun and of dancing. As one chief of twenty-seven told me: “I have been a chief only four years and look, my hair is grey, although in Samoa grey hair comes very slowly, not in youth, as it comes to the white man. But always, I must act as if I were old. I must walk gravely and with a measured step. I may not dance except upon most solemn occasions, neither may I play games with the young men. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Each primitive people has selected one set of human gifts, one set of human values, and fashioned for themselves an art, a social organisation, a religion, which is their unique contribution to the history of the human spirit.
Samoa is only one of these diverse and gracious patterns, but as the traveller who has been once from home is wiser than he who has never left his own door step, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinise more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own. ”

“ In the same way, all of an individual’s acts are public property. An occasional love affair may slip through the fingers of gossip, and an occasional moetotolo go uncaught, but there is a very general cognisance on the part of the whole village of the activity of every single inhabitant. I shall never forget the outraged expression with which an informant told me that nobody, actually nobody at all, knew who was the father of Fa’amoana’s baby. The oppressive atmosphere of the small town is all about them; in an hour children will have made a dancing song of their most secret acts. ”

“ The youngest, Siva, was like Lola, intelligent, passionate, easily aroused, but she was only eleven and merely profited by her sister’s bad example. Lola was quarrelsome, insubordinate, impertinent. She contended every point, objected to every request, shirked her work, fought with her sisters, mocked her mother, went about the village with a chip upon her shoulder. When she was fourteen, she became so unmanageable at home that her uncle sent her to live in the pastor’s household. ”

“ A girl whose father has beaten her over severely in the morning will be found living in haughty sanctuary, two hundred feet away, in a different household. So cherished is this system of consanguineous refuge, that an untitled man or a man of lesser rank will beard the nobler relative who comes to demand a runaway child. With great politeness and endless expressions of conciliation, he will beg his noble chief to return to his noble home and remain there quietly until his noble anger is healed against his noble child. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A white-clad, ghostly throng will gather in a circle about the gaily lit house, a circle from which every now and then a few will detach themselves and wander away among the trees. Sometimes sleep will not descend upon the village until long past midnight; then at last there is only the mellow thunder of the reef and the whisper of lovers, as the village rests until dawn. ”

“ But so sharp is our sense of difference between the concerns of children and of adults that the child does not learn to judge its own behaviour in relationship to adult life. So children often learn to regard play as something inherently undignified, and as adults mangle pitifully their few moments of leisure. But the Samoan child measures her every act of work or play in terms of her whole community; each item of conduct is dignified in terms of its realised relationship to the only standard she knows, the life of a Samoan village. ”

“ A society which is clamouring for choice, which is filled with many articulate groups, each urging its own brand of salvation, its own variety of economic philosophy, will give each new generation no peace until all have chosen or gone under, unable to bear the conditions of choice. The stress is in our civilisation, not in the physical changes through which our children pass, but it is none the less real nor the less inevitable in twentieth-century America. ”

“ Half-clad, unhurried women, with babies at their breasts, or astride their hips, pause in their tale of Losa’s outraged departure from her father’s house to the greater kindness in the home of her uncle, to wonder who is dead. Poor relatives whisper their requests to rich relatives, men make plans to set a fish trap together, a woman begs a bit of yellow dye from a kinswoman, and through the village sounds the rhythmic tattoo which calls the young men together. ”

“ Is adolescence a period of mental and emotional distress for the growing girl as inevitably as teething is a period of misery for the small baby? Can we think of adolescence as a time in the life history of every girl child which carries with it symptoms of conflict and stress as surely as it implies a change in the girl’s body? ”

“ They are only the barest skeleton, hardly the raw materials for a study of family situations and sex relations, standards of friendship, of loyalty, of personal responsibility, all those impalpable storm centres of disturbances in the lives of our adolescent girls. And because these less measurable parts of their lives were so similar, because one girl’s life was so much like another’s, in an uncomplex, uniform culture like Samoa, I feel justified in generalising although I studied only fifty girls in three small neighbouring villages. ”

“ She and her mother were like a pair of comrades, and Fitu bossed and joked with her mother in a fashion shocking to all Samoan onlookers. If Fitu was away at night, her mother went herself to look for her, instead of sending another child. Fitu was the eldest daughter, with a precocity bred of responsibility and an efficiency which was the direct outcome of her mother’s laissez-faire attitude. Ula showed equally clearly the effect of being the prettier younger sister, trading upon her superior attractiveness and more meagre sense of duty. ”

“ The Samoan background which makes growing up so easy, so simple a matter, is the general casualness of the whole society. For Samoa is a place where no one plays for very high stakes, no one pays very heavy prices, no one suffers for his convictions or fights to the death for special ends. Disagreements between parent and child are settled by the child’s moving across the street, between a man and his village by the man’s removal to the next village, between a husband and his wife’s seducer by a few fine mats. ”

“ The attitude of the elders towards precocity in singing, leading the singing or dancing, is in striking contrast to their attitude towards every other form of precocity. On the dance floor the dreaded accusation, “You are presuming above your age,” is never heard. Little boys who would be rebuked and possibly whipped for such behaviour on any other occasion are allowed to preen themselves, to swagger and bluster and take the limelight without a word of reproach. ”

“ In the houses, where the pebbly floors have been swept bare with a stiff long-handled broom, the women great with child and the nursing mothers, sit and gossip with one another. Old men sit apart, unceasingly twisting palm husk on their bare thighs and muttering old tales under their breath. The carpenters begin work on the new house, while the owner bustles about trying to keep them in a good humour. Families who will cook to-day are hard at work; the taro, yams and bananas have already been brought from inland ”

“ Does the bridegroom repent of the bargain, he bribes his talking chief (who is usually a young man, not one of the important talking chiefs who will benefit greatly by the marriage itself) to be oversensitive to the behaviour of the bride or the treatment he receives in the bride’s family. And this is the time in which the bride will elope, if her affianced husband is too unacceptable. For while no boy of her own village will risk her dangerous favours, a boy from another village will enormously enhance his prestige if he elopes with the taupo of a rival community. ”

“ The anthropologist, as he pondered his growing body of material upon the customs of primitive people, grew to realise the tremendous rôle played in an individual’s life by the social environment in which each is born and reared. One by one, aspects of behaviour which we had been accustomed to consider invariable complements of our humanity were found to be merely a result of civilisation, present in the inhabitants of one country, absent in another country, and this without a change of race. ”

“ For the first time in her life, she has an income of her own, with no strings of morals or of manners attached to its use. Her parents’ chief instrument of discipline is shattered at one blow, but not their desire to direct their daughters’ lives. They have not pictured their exercise of control as the right of those who provide, to control those for whom they provide. They have pictured it in far more traditional terms, the right of parents to control their children, an attitude reinforced by years of practising such control. ”

“ The home must cease to plead an ethical cause or a religious belief with smiles or frowns, caresses or threats. The children must be taught how to think, not what to think. And because old errors die slowly, they must be taught tolerance, just as to-day they are taught intolerance. They must be taught that many ways are open to them, no one sanctioned above its alternative, and that upon them and upon them alone lies the burden of choice. ”

“ In most marriages there is no sense of setting up a new and separate establishment. The change is felt in the change of residence for either husband or wife and in the reciprocal relations which spring up between the two families. But the young couple live in the main household, simply receiving a bamboo pillow, a mosquito net and a pile of mats for their bed. Only for the chief or the chief’s son is a new house built. The wife works with all the women of the household and waits upon all the men. The husband shares the enterprises of the other men and boys. ”

“ But the seventeen-year-old girl does not wish to marry—not yet. It is better to live as a girl with no responsibility, and a rich variety of emotional experience. This is the best period of her life. There are as many beneath her whom she may bully as there are others above her to tyrannise over her. What she loses in prestige, she gains in freedom. She has very little baby-tending to do. Her eyes do not ache from weaving nor does her back break from bending all day over the tapa board. The long expeditions after fish and food and weaving materials give ample opportunities for rendezvous. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ In a primitive, homogeneous community, disciplinary measures of parents are expended upon securing small concessions from children, in correcting the slight deviations which occur within one pattern of behaviour. But in our society, home discipline is used to establish one set of standards as over against other sets of standards, each family group is fighting some kind of battle, bearing the onus of those who follow a middle course, stoutly defending a cause already lost in the community at large, or valiantly attempting to plant a new standard far in advance of their neighbours. ”