Such a child was Fitu. In September she was one of the dominant members of the gang, a little taller than the rest, a little lankier, more strident and executive, but very much a harum-scarum little girl among little girls, with a great baby always on her hip. But by April she had turned the baby over to a younger sister of nine; the still younger baby was entrusted to a little sister of five and Fitu worked with her mother on the plantations, or went on long expeditions after hibiscus bark, or for fish. She took the family washing to the sea and helped make the oven on cooking days. Occasionally in the evening she slipped away to play games on the green with her former companions but usually she was too tired from the heavy unaccustomed work, and also a slight strangeness had crept over her. She felt that her more adult activities set her off from the rest of the group with whom she had felt so much at home the fall before. She made only abortive attempts to associate with the older girls in the neighbourhood. Her mother sent her to sleep in the pastor’s house next door, but she returned home after three days. Those girls were all too old, she said. “Laititi a’u” (“I am but young”). And yet she was spoiled for her old group. The three villages numbered fourteen such children, just approaching puberty, preoccupied by unaccustomed tasks and renewed and closer association with the adults of their families, not yet interested in boys, and so forming no new alliances in accordance with sex interests. Soberly they perform their household tasks, select a teacher from the older women of their family, learn to bear the suffix, meaning “little” dropped from the “little girl” which had formerly described them. But they never again amalgamate into such free and easy groups as the before-the-teens gang. As sixteen- and seventeen-year-old girls, they will still rely upon relatives, and the picture is groupings of twos or of threes, never more. The neighbourhood feelings drop out and girls of seventeen will ignore a near neighbour who is an age mate and go the length of the village to visit a relative. Relationship and similar sex interests are now the deciding factor in friendships. Girls also followed passively the stronger allegiance of the boys. If a girl’s sweetheart has a chum who is interested in a cousin of hers, the girls strike up a lively, but temporary, friendship. Occasionally such friendships even go outside of the relationship group.
Although girls may confide only in one or two girl relatives, their sex status is usually sensed by the other women of the village and alliances shift and change on this basis, from the shy adolescent who is suspicious of all older girls, to the girl whose first or second love affair still looms as very important, to the girls who are beginning to centre all their attention upon one boy and possibly matrimony. Finally the unmarried mother selects her friends, when possible, from those in like case with herself, or from women of ambiguous marital position, deserted or discredited young wives.
Very few friendships of younger for older girls cut across these groupings after puberty. The twelve-year-old may have a great affection and admiration for her sixteen-year-old cousin (although any of these enthusiasms for older girls are pallid matters compared to a typical school girl “crush” in our civilisation). But when she is fifteen and her cousin nineteen, the picture changes. All of the adult and near-adult world is hostile, spying upon her love affairs in its more circumspect sophistication, supremely not to be trusted. No one is to be trusted who is not immediately engaged in similarly hazardous adventures.
It may safely be said that without the artificial conditions produced by residence in the native pastor’s household or in the large missionary boarding school, the girls do not go outside their relationship group to make friends. (In addition to the large girls’ boarding school which served all of American Samoa, the native pastor of each community maintained a small informal boarding school for boys and girls. To these schools were sent the girls whose fathers wished to send them later to the large boarding school, and also girls whose parents wished them to have three or four years of the superior educational advantages and stricter supervision of the pastor’s home.) Here unrelated girls live side by side sometimes for years. But as one of the two defining features of a household is common residence, the friendships formed between girls who have lived in the pastor’s household are not very different psychologically from the friendship of cousins or girls connected only by affinity who live in the same family. The only friendships which really are different in kind from those formed by common residence or membership in the same relationship group, are the institutionalised relationships between the wives of chiefs and the wives of talking chiefs. But these friendships can only be understood in connection with the friendships among boys and men.
The little boys follow the same pattern as do the little girls, running in a gang based upon the double bonds of neighbourhood and relationship. The feeling for the ascendency of age is always much stronger than in the case of girls because the older boys do not withdraw into their family groups as do the girls. The fifteen- and sixteen-year-old boys gang together with the same freedom as do the twelve-year-olds. The borderline between small boys and bigger boys is therefore a continually shifting one, the boys in an intermediate position now lording it over the younger boys, now tagging obsequiously in the wake of their elders. There are two institutionalised relationships between boys which are called by the same name and possibly were at one time one relationship. This is the soa, the companion at circumcision and the ambassador in love affairs. Boys are circumcised in pairs, making the arrangements themselves and seeking out an older man who has acquired a reputation for skilfulness. There seems to be here simply a logical inter-relationship of cause and effect; a boy chooses a friend (who is usually also a relative) as his companion and the experience shared binds them closer together. There were several pairs of boys in the village who had been circumcised together and were still inseparable companions, often sleeping together in the house of one of them. Casual homosexual practices occurred in such relationships. However, when the friendships of grown boys of the village were analysed, no close correspondence with the adolescent allegiance was found and older boys were as often found in groups of three or four as in pairs.
When a boy is two or three years past puberty, his choice of a companion is influenced by the convention that a young man seldom speaks for himself in love and never in a proposal of marriage. He accordingly needs a friend of about his age whom he can trust to sing his praises and press his suit with requisite fervour and discretion. For this office, a relative, or, if the affair be desperate, several relatives are employed. A youth is influenced in his choice by his need of an ambassador who is not only trustworthy and devoted but plausible and insinuating as a procurer. This soa relationship is often, but not necessarily, reciprocal. The expert in love comes in time to dispense with the services of an intermediary, wishing to taste to the full the sweets of all the stages in courtship. At the same time his services are much in demand by others, if they entertain any hope at all of his dealing honourably by his principal. But the boys have also other matters besides love-making in which they must co-operate. Three are needed to man a bonito canoe; two usually go together to lasso eels on the reef; work on the communal taro plantations demands the labour of all the youths in the village. So that while a boy too chooses his best friends from among his relatives, his sense of social solidarity is always much stronger than that of a girl. The Aualuma, the organisation of young girls and wives of untitled men, is an exceedingly loose association gathered for very occasional communal work, and still more occasional festivities. In villages where the old intricacies of the social organisation are beginning to fall into disuse, it is the Aualuma which disappears first, while the Aumaga, the young men’s organisation, has too important a place in the village economy to be thus ignored. The Aumaga is indeed the most enduring social factor in the village. The matais meet more formally and spend a great deal of time in their own households, but the young men work together during the day, feast before and after their labours, are present as a serving group at all meetings of the matais, and when the day’s work is over, dance and go courting together in the evening. Many of the young men sleep in their friends’ houses, a privilege but grudgingly accorded the more chaperoned girls.
Another factor which qualified men’s relationships is the reciprocal relationship between chiefs and talking chiefs. The holders of these two classes of titles are not necessarily related, although this is often the case as it is considered an advantage to be related to both ranks. But the talking chiefs are major domos, assistants, ambassadors, henchmen, and councillors of their chiefs, and these relationships are often foreshadowed among the young men, the heirs-apparent or the heirs aspirant to the family titles.
Among women there are occasional close alliances between the taupo and the daughter of her father’s principal talking chief. But these friendships always suffer from their temporary character; the taupo will inevitably marry into another village. And it is rather between the wife of the chief and the wife of a talking chief that the institutionalised and life-long friendship exists. The wife of the talking chief acts as assistant, advisor, and mouthpiece for the chief’s wife and in turn counts upon the chief’s wife for support and material help. It is a friendship based upon reciprocal obligations having their origins in the relationship between the women’s husbands, and it is the only women’s friendship which oversteps the limits of the relationship and affinity group. Such friendships based on an accident of marriage and enjoined by the social structure should hardly be classed as voluntary. And within the relationship group itself, friendship is so patterned as to be meaningless. I once asked a young married woman if a neighbour with whom she was always upon the most uncertain and irritated terms was a friend of hers. “Why, of course, her mother’s father’s father, and my father’s mother’s father were brothers.” Friendship based on temperamental congeniality was a most tenuous bond, subject to shifts of interest and to shifts of residence, and a woman came to rely more and more on the associates to whose society and interest blood and marriage entitled her.
Association based upon age as a principle may be said to have ceased for the girls before puberty, due to the exceedingly individual nature of their tasks and the need for secrecy in their amatory adventures. In the case of the boys, greater freedom, a more compelling social structure, and continuous participation in co-operative tasks, brings about an age-group association which lasts through life. This grouping is influenced but not determined by relationship, and distorted by the influence of rank, prospective rank in the case of youth, equal rank but disproportionate age in the case of older men.