Coming of age in Samoa

by Margaret Mead

So while the girl rests upon her “pass” proficiency, the boy is spurred to greater efforts. A boy is shy of a girl who does not have these proofs of efficiency and is known to be stupid and unskilled; he is afraid he may come to want to marry her. Marrying a girl without proficiency would be a most imprudent step and involve an endless amount of wrangling with his family. So the girl who is notoriously inept must take her lovers from among the casual, the jaded, and the married who are no longer afraid that their senses will betray them into an imprudent marriage.

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. Proficiency would mean more work, more confining work, and earlier marriage, and marriage is the inevitable to be deferred as long as possible.

IV

THE SAMOAN HOUSEHOLD

A Samoan village is made up of some thirty to forty households, each of which is presided over by a headman called a matai. These headmen hold either chiefly titles or the titles of talking chiefs, who are the official orators, spokesmen and ambassadors of chiefs. In a formal village assembly each matai has his place, and represents and is responsible for all the members of his household. These households include all the individuals who live for any length of time under the authority and protection of a common matai. Their composition varies from the biological family consisting of parents and children only, to households of fifteen and twenty people who are all related to the matai or to his wife by blood, marriage or adoption, but who often have no close relationship to each other. The adopted members of a household are usually but not necessarily distant relatives.

Widows and widowers, especially when they are childless, usually return to their blood relatives, but a married couple may live with the relatives of either one. Such a household is not necessarily a close residential unit, but may be scattered over the village in three or four houses. No one living permanently in another village is counted as a member of the household, which is strictly a local unit. Economically, the household is also a unit, for all work upon the plantations under the supervision of the matai who in turn parcels out to them food and other necessities.

Within the household, age rather than relationship gives disciplinary authority. The matai exercises nominal and usually real authority over every individual under his protection, even over his father and mother. This control is, of course, modified by personality differences, always carefully tempered, however, by a ceremonious acknowledgment of his position. The newest baby born into such a household is subject to every individual in it, and his position improves no whit with age until a younger child appears upon the scene. But in most households the position of youngest is a highly temporary one. Nieces and nephews or destitute young cousins come to swell the ranks of the household and at adolescence a girl stands virtually in the middle with as many individuals who must obey her as there are persons to whom she owes obedience. Where increased efficiency and increased self-consciousness would perhaps have made her obstreperous and restless in a differently organised family, here she has ample outlet for a growing sense of authority.

This development is perfectly regular. A girl’s marriage makes a minimum of difference in this respect, except in so far as her own children increase most pertinently the supply of agreeably docile subordinates. But the girls who remain unmarried even beyond their early twenties are in nowise less highly regarded or less responsible than their married sisters. This tendency to make the classifying principle age, rather than married state, is reinforced outside the home by the fact that the wives of untitled men and all unmarried girls past puberty are classed together in the ceremonial organisation of the village.

Relatives in other households also play a rôle in the children’s lives. Any older relative has a right to demand personal service from younger relatives, a right to criticise their conduct and to interfere in their affairs. Thus a little girl may escape alone down to the beach to bathe only to be met by an older cousin who sets her washing or caring for a baby or to fetch some cocoanut to scrub the clothes. So closely is the daily life bound up with this universal servitude and so numerous are the acknowledged relationships in the name of which service can be exacted, that for the children an hour’s escape from surveillance is almost impossible.

This loose but demanding relationship group has its compensations also. Within it a child of three can wander safely and come to no harm, can be sure of finding food and drink, a sheet to wrap herself up in for a nap, a kind hand to dry casual tears and bind up her wounds. Any small children who are missing when night falls, are simply “sought among their kinsfolk,” and a baby whose mother has gone inland to work on the plantation is passed from hand to hand for the length of the village.