Adultery does not necessarily mean a broken marriage. A chief’s wife who commits adultery is deemed to have dishonoured her high position, and is usually discarded, although the chief will openly resent her remarriage to any one of lower rank. If the lover is considered the more culpable, the village will take public vengeance upon him. In less conspicuous cases the amount of fuss which is made over adultery is dependent upon the relative rank of the offender and offended, or the personal jealousy which is only occasionally aroused. If either the injured husband or the injured wife is sufficiently incensed to threaten physical violence, the trespasser may have to resort to a public ifoga, the ceremonial humiliation before some one whose pardon is asked. He goes to the house of the man he has injured, accompanied by all the men of his household, each one wrapped in a fine mat, the currency of the country; the suppliants seat themselves outside the house, fine mats spread over their heads, hands folded on their breasts, heads bent in attitudes of the deepest dejection and humiliation. “And if the man is very angry he will say no word. All day he will go about his business; he will braid cinet with a quick hand, he will talk loudly to his wife, and call out greetings to those who pass in the roadway, but he will take no notice of those who sit on his own terrace, who dare not raise their eyes or make any movement to go away. In olden days, if his heart was not softened, he might take a club and together with his relatives go out and kill those who sit without. But now he only keeps them waiting, waiting all day long. The sun will beat down upon them; the rain will come and beat on their heads and still he will say no word. Then towards evening he will say at last: ‘Come, it is enough. Enter the house and drink the kava. Eat the food which I will set before you and we will cast our trouble into the sea.’” Then the fine mats are accepted as payment for the injury, the ifoga becomes a matter of village history and old gossips will say, “Oh, yes, Lua! no, she’s not Iona’s child. Her father is that chief over in the next village. He ifod to Iona before she was born.” If the offender is of much lower rank than the injured husband, his chief, or his father (if he is only a young boy) will have to humiliate himself in his place. Where the offender is a woman, she and her female relatives will make similar amends. But they will run far greater danger of being roundly beaten and berated; the peaceful teachings of Christianity—perhaps because they were directed against actual killing, rather than the slightly less fatal encounters of women—have made far less change in the belligerent activities of the women than in those of the men.
If, on the other hand, a wife really tires of her husband, or a husband of his wife, divorce is a simple and informal matter, the non-resident simply going home to his or her family, and the relationship is said to have “passed away.” It is a very brittle monogamy, often trespassed and more often broken entirely. But many adulteries occur—between a young marriage-shy bachelor and a married woman, or a temporary widower and some young girl—which hardly threaten the continuity of established relationships. The claim that a woman has on her family’s land renders her as independent as her husband, and so there are no marriages of any duration in which either person is actively unhappy. A tiny flare-up and a woman goes home to her own people; if her husband does not care to conciliate her, each seeks another mate.
Within the family, the wife obeys and serves her husband, in theory, though of course, the hen-pecked husband is a frequent phenomenon. In families of high rank, her personal service to her husband is taken over by the taupo and the talking chief but the wife always retains the right to render a high chief sacred personal services, such as cutting his hair. A wife’s rank can never exceed her husband’s because it is always directly dependent upon it. Her family may be richer and more illustrious than his, and she may actually exercise more influence over the village affairs through her blood relatives than he, but within the life of the household and the village, she is a tausi, wife of a talking chief, or a faletua, wife of a chief. This sometimes results in conflict, as in the case of Pusa who was the sister of the last holder of the highest title on the island. This title was temporarily extinct. She was also the wife of the highest chief in the village. Should her brother, the heir, resume the higher title, her husband’s rank and her rank as his wife would suffer. Helping her brother meant lowering the prestige of her husband. As she was the type of woman who cared a great deal more for wire pulling than for public recognition, she threw her influence in for her brother. Such conflicts are not uncommon, but they present a clear-cut choice, usually reinforced by considerations of residence. If a woman lives in her husband’s household, and if, furthermore, that household is in another village, her interest is mainly enlisted in her husband’s cause; but if she lives with her own family, in her own village, her allegiance is likely to cling to the blood relatives from whom she receives reflected glory and informal privilege, although no status.
VIII
THE RÔLE OF THE DANCE
Dancing is the only activity in which almost all ages and both sexes participate and it therefore offers a unique opportunity for an analysis of education.
In the dance there are virtuosos but no formal teachers. It is a highly individual activity set in a social framework. This framework varies from a small dancing party at which twelve to twenty people are present to the major festivities of a malaga (travelling party) or a wedding when the largest guest house in the village is crowded within and encircled by spectators without. With the size and importance of the festivity, the formality of the arrangements varies also. Usually the occasion of even a small siva (dance) is the presence of at least two or three strange young people from another village. The pattern entertainment is a division of the performers into visitors and hosts, the two sides taking turns in providing the music and dancing. This pattern is still followed even when the malaga numbers only two individuals, a number of hosts going over to swell the visitors’ ranks.
It is at these small informal dances that the children learn to dance. In the front of the house sit the young people who are the centre and arbiters of the occasion. The matai and his wife and possibly a related matai and the other elders of the household sit at the back of the house, in direct reversal of the customary procedure according to which the place of the young people is in the background. Around the ends cluster women and children, and outside lurk the boys and girls who are not participating in the dancing, although at any moment they may be drawn into it. On such occasions the dancing is usually started by the small children, beginning possibly with seven- and eight-year-olds. The chief’s wife or one of the young men will call out the names of the children and they are stood up in a group of three, sometimes all boys or girls, sometimes with a girl between two boys, which is the conventional adult grouping for the taupo and her two talking chiefs. The young men, sitting in a group near the centre of the house, provide the music, one of them standing and leading the singing to the accompaniment of an imported stringed instrument which has taken the place of the rude bamboo drum of earlier times. The leader sets the key and the whole company join in either in the song, or by clapping, or by beating on the floor with their knuckles. The dancers themselves are the final arbiters of the excellence of the music and it is not counted as petulance for a dancer to stop in the middle and demand better music as the price of continuing. The songs sung are few in number; the young people of one village seldom know more than a dozen airs; and perhaps twice as many sets of words which are sung now to one air, now to another. The verse pattern is simply based upon the number of syllables; a change in stress is permitted and rhyme is not demanded so that any new event is easily set in the old pattern, and names of villages and of individuals are inserted with great freedom. The content of the songs is likely to take on an extremely personal character containing many quips at the expense of individuals and their villages.
The form of the participation of the audience changes according to the age of the dancers. In the case of the smaller children, it consists of an endless stream of good-natured comment: “Faster!” “Down lower! Lower!” “Do it again!” “Fasten your lavalava.” In the dancing of the more expert boys and girls the group takes part by a steady murmur of “Thank you, thank you, for your dancing!” “Beautiful! Engaging! Charming! Bravo!” which gives very much the effect of the irregular stream of “Amens” at an evangelistic revival. This articulate courtesy becomes almost lyric in quality when the dancer is a person of rank for whom dancing at all is a condescension.
The little children are put out upon these public floors with a minimum of preliminary instruction. As babies in their mothers’ arms at just such a party as this, they learned to clap before they learned to walk, so that the beat is indelibly fixed in their minds. As two- and three-year-olds they have stood on a mat at home and clapped their hands in time to their elders’ singing. Now they are called upon to perform before a group. Wide-eyed, terrified babies stand beside some slightly older child, clapping in desperation and trying to add new steps borrowed on the spur of the moment from their companions. Every improvement is greeted with loud applause. The child who performed best at the last party is haled forward at the next, for the group is primarily interested in its own amusement rather than in distributing an equal amount of practice among the children. Hence some children rapidly outdistance the rest, through interest and increased opportunity as well as superior gift. This tendency to give the talented child another and another chance is offset somewhat by rivalry between relatives who wish to thrust their little ones forward.