In one way this informal dance floor approximates more closely to our educational methods than does any other aspect of Samoan education. For here the precocious child is applauded, made much of, given more and more opportunities to show its proficiency while the stupid child is rebuked, neglected and pushed to the wall. This difference in permitted practice is reflected in increasing differences in the skill of the children as they grow older. Inferiority feeling in the classic picture which is so frequent in our society is rare in Samoa. Inferiority there seems to be derived from two sources, clumsiness in sex relations which affects the young men after they are grown and produces the moetotolo, and clumsiness upon the dance floor. I have already told the story of the little girl, shy beyond her fellows, whom prospective high rank had forced into the limelight and made miserably diffident and self-conscious.
And the most unhappy of the older girls was Masina, a girl about three years past puberty. Masina could not dance. Every one in the village knew that she could not dance. Her contemporaries deplored it; the younger children made fun of her. She had little charm, was deprecating in her manner, awkward, shy and ill at ease. All of her five lovers had been casual, all temporary, all unimportant. She associated with girls much younger than herself. She had no self-confidence. No one sought her hand in marriage and she would not marry until her family needed the kind of property which forms a bride price.
It is interesting to notice that the one aspect of life in which the elders actively discriminate against the less proficient children seems to be the most powerful determinant in giving the children a feeling of inferiority.
The strong emphasis upon dancing does not discriminate against the physically defective. Instead every defect is capitalised in the form of the dance or compensated for by the perfection of the dance. I saw one badly hunchbacked boy who had worked out a most ingenious imitation of a turtle and also a combination dance with another boy in which the other supported him on his back. Ipu, the little albino, danced with aggressive facility and with much applause, while mad Laki, who suffered from a delusion that he was the high chief of the island, was only too delighted to dance for any one who addressed him with the elaborate courtesy phrases suitable to his rank. The dumb brother of the high chief of one village utilised his deaf mute gutturals as a running accompaniment to his dance, while the brothers of a fourteen-year-old feeble-minded mad boy were accustomed to deck his head with branches which excited him to a frenzied rhythmical activity, suggesting a stag whose antlers had been caught in the bush. The most precocious girl dancer in Taū was almost blind. So every defect, every handicap was included in this universal, specialised exploitation of personality.
The dancing child is almost always a very different person from her everyday self. After long acquaintance it is sometimes possible to guess the type of dance which a particular girl will do. This is particularly easy in the case of obviously tom-boy girls, but one is continually fooled by the depths of sophistication in the dancing of some pensive, dull child, or the lazy grace of some noisy little hoodlum.
Formal dancing displays are a recognised social entertainment and the highest courtesy a chief can offer his guest is to have his taupo dance for him. So likewise the boys dance after they have been tattooed, the manaia dances when he goes to woo his bride, the bride dances at her wedding. In the midnight conviviality of a malaga the dance often becomes flagrantly obscene and definitely provocative in character, but both of these are special developments of less importance than the function of informal dancing in the development of individuality and the compensation for repression of personality in other spheres of life.
IX
THE ATTITUDE TOWARDS PERSONALITY
The ease with which personality differences can be adjusted by a change of residence prevents the Samoans from pressing one another too hard. Their evaluations of personality are a curious mixture of caution and fatalism. There is one word musu which expresses unwillingness and intractability, whether in the mistress who refuses to welcome a hitherto welcome lover, the chief who refuses to lend his kava bowl, the baby who won’t go to bed, or the talking chief who won’t go on a malaga. The appearance of a musu attitude is treated with almost superstitious respect. Lovers will prescribe formulæ for the treatment of a mistress, “lest she become musu,” and the behaviour of the suppliant is carefully orientated in respect to this mysterious undesirability. The feeling seems to be not that one is dealing with an individual in terms of his peculiar preoccupations in order to assure a successful outcome of a personal relationship, appealing now to vanity, now to fear, now to a desire for power, but rather that one is using one or another of a series of potent practices to prevent a mysterious and widespread psychological phenomenon from arising. Once this attitude has appeared, a Samoan habitually gives up the struggle without more detailed inquiry and with a minimum of complaint. This fatalistic acceptance of an inexplicable attitude makes for an odd incuriousness about motives. The Samoans are not in the least insensitive to differences between people. But their full appreciation of these differences is blurred by their conception of an obstinate disposition, a tendency to take umbrage, irascibility, contra-suggestibility, and particular biases as just so many roads to one attitude—musu.
