Coming of Age in Samoa/Appendix 3
APPENDIX III
SAMOAN CIVILISATION AS IT IS TO-DAY
The scene of this study was the little island of Taū. Along one coast of the island, which rises precipitately to a mountain peak in the centre, cluster three little villages, Lumā and Siufaga, side by side, and Faleasao, half a mile away. On the other end of the island is the isolated village of Fitiuta, separated from the other three villages by a long and arduous trail. Many of the people from the other villages have never been to Fitiuta, eight miles away. Twelve miles across the open sea are the two islands of Ofu and Olesega, which with Taū, make up the Manu'a Archipelago, the most primitive part of Samoa. Journeys in slender outrigger canoes from one of these three little islands to another are frequent, and the inhabitants of Manu'a think of themselves as a unit as over against the inhabitants of Tutuila, the large island where the Naval Station is situated. The three islands have a population of a little over two thousand people, with constant visiting, inter-marrying, adoption going on between the seven villages of the Archipelago.
The natives still live in their beehive-shaped houses with floors of coral rubble, no walls except perishable woven blinds which are lowered in bad weather, and a roof of sugar-cane thatch over which it is necessary to bind palm branches in every storm. They have substituted cotton cloth for their laboriously manufactured bark cloth for use as everyday clothing, native costume being reserved for ceremonial occasions. But the men content themselves with a wide cotton loin cloth, the lavalava, fastened at the waist with a dexterous twist of the material. This costume permits a little of the tattooing which covers their bodies from knee to the small of the back, to appear above and below the folds of the lavalava. Tattooing has been taboo on Manu'a for two generations, so only a part of the population have made the necessary journey to another island in search of a tattooer. Women wear a longer lavalava and a short cotton dress falling to their knees. Both sexes go barefoot and hats are worn only to Church, on which occasions the men don white shirts and white coats, ingeniously tailored by the native women in imitation of Palm Beach coats which have fallen into their hands. The women's tattooing is much sparser than the men's, a mere matter of dots and crosses on arms, hands, and thighs. Garlands of flowers, flowers in the hair, and flowers twisted about the ankles, serve to relieve the drabness of the faded cotton clothing, and on gala days, beautifully patterned bark cloth, fine mats, gaily bordered with red parrot feathers, headdresses of human hair decorated with plumes and feathers, recall the more picturesque attire of pre-Christian days.
Sewing-machines have been in use for many years, although the natives are still dependent upon some deft-handed sailor for repairs. Scissors have also been added to the household equipment, but wherever possible a Samoan woman still uses her teeth or a piece of bamboo. At the Missionary boarding-schools a few of the women have learned to crochet and embroider, using their skill particularly to ornament the plump, hard pillows which are rapidly displacing the little bamboo head rests. Sheets of white cotton have taken the place of sheets of firmly woven mats or of bark cloth. Mosquito nets of cotton netting make a native house much more endurable than must have been the case when bark cloth tents were the only defence against insects. The netting is suspended at night from stout cords hung across the house, and the edges weighted down with stones, so that prowling dogs, pigs, and chickens wander through the house at will without disturbing the sleepers.
Agate buckets share with hollowed cocoanut shells the work of bringing water from the springs and from the sea, and a few china cups and glasses co-operate with the cocoanut drinking cups. Many households have an iron cook pot in which they can boil liquids in preference to the older method of dropping red hot stones into a wooden vessel containing the liquid to be heated. Kerosene lamps and lanterns are used extensively; the old candle-nut clusters and cocoanut oil lamps being reinstated only in times of great scarcity when they cannot afford to purchase kerosene. Tobacco is a much-prized luxury; the Samoans have learned to grow it, but imported varieties are very much preferred to their own.
Outside the household the changes wrought by the introduction of European articles are very slight. The native uses an iron knife to cut his copra and an iron adze blade in place of the old stone one. But he still binds the rafters of his house together with cinet and sews the parts of his fishing canoes together. The building of large canoes has been abandoned. Only small canoes for fishing are built now, and for hauling supplies over the reef the natives build keeled rowboats. Only short voyages are made in small canoes and rowboats, and the natives wait for the coming of the Naval ship to do their travelling. The government buys the copra and with the money so obtained the Samoans buy cloth, thread, kerosene, soap, matches, knives, belts, and tobacco, pay their taxes (levied on every man over a certain height as age is an indeterminate matter), and support the church.
And yet, while the Samoans use these products of a more complex civilisation, they are not dependent upon them. With the exception of making and using stone tools, it is probably safe to say that none of the native arts have been lost. The women all make bark cloth and weave fine mats. Parturition still takes place on a piece of bark cloth, the umbilical cord is cut with a piece of bamboo, and the new baby is wrapped in a specially prepared piece of white bark cloth. If soap cannot be obtained, the wild orange provides a frothy substitute. The men still manufacture their own nets, make their own hooks, weave their own eel traps. And although they use matches when they can get them, they have not lost the art of converting a carrying stick into a fire plow at a moment's notice.
Perhaps most important of all is the fact that they still depend entirely upon their own foods, planted with a sharpened pole in their own plantations. Breadfruit, bananas, taro, yams, and cocoanuts form a substantial and monotonous accompaniment for the fish, shell fish, land crabs, and occasional pigs and chickens. The food is carried down to the village in baskets, freshly woven from palm leaves. The cocoanuts are grated on the end of a wooden "horse," pointed with shell or iron; the breadfruit and taro are supported on a short stake, tufted with cocoanut husk, and the rind is grated off with a piece of cocoanut shell. The green bananas are skinned with a bamboo knife. The whole amount of food for a family of fifteen or twenty for two or three days is cooked at once in a large circular pit of stones. These are first heated to white heat; the ashes are then raked away; the food placed on the stones and the oven covered with green leaves, under which the food is baked thoroughly. Cooking over, the food is stored in baskets which are hung up inside the main house. It is served on palm leaf platters, garnished with a fresh banana leaf. Fingers are the only knives and forks, and a wooden finger bowl is passed ceremoniously about at the end of the meal.
Furniture, with the exception of a few chests and cupboards, has not invaded the house. All life goes on on the floor. Speaking on one's feet within the house is still an unforgivable breach of etiquette, and the visitor must learn to sit cross- legged for hours without murmuring.
The Samoans have been Christian for almost a hundred years. With the exception of a small number of Catholics and Mormons, all the natives of American Samoa are adherents of the London Missionary Society, known in Samoa as the "Church of Tahiti," from its local origin. The Congregationalist missionaries have been exceedingly successful in adapting the stern doctrine and sterner ethics of a British Protestant sect to the widely divergent attitudes of a group of South Sea islanders. In the Missionary boarding-schools they have trained many boys as native pastors and as missionaries for other islands, and many girls to be the pastors' wives. The pastor's house is the educational as well as the religious centre of the village. In the pastor's school the children learn to read and write their own language, to which the early missionaries adapted our script, to do simple sums and sing hymns. The missionaries have been opposed to teaching the natives English, or in any way weaning them away from such of the simplicity of their primitive existence as they have not accounted harmful. Accordingly, although the elders of the church preach excellent sermons and in many cases have an extensive knowledge of the Bible (which has been translated into Samoan), although they keep accounts, and transact lengthy business affairs, they speak no English, or only very little of it. On Taŭ there were never more than half a dozen individuals at one time who had any knowledge of English.
The Naval Government has adopted the most admirable policy of benevolent non-interference in native affairs. It establishes dispensaries and conducts a hospital where native nurses are trained. These nurses are sent out into the villages where they have surprising success in the administration of the very simple remedies at their command, castor oil, iodine, argyrol, alcohol rubs, etc. Through periodic administrations of salvarsan the more conspicuous symptoms of yaws are rapidly disappearing. And the natives are learning to come to the dispensaries for medicine rather than aggravate conjunctivitis to blindness by applying irritating leaf poultices to the inflamed eyes.
Reservoirs have been constructed in most of the villages, providing an unpolluted water supply at a central fountain where all the washing and bathing is done. Copra sheds in each village store the copra until the government ship comes to fetch it. Work on copra sheds, on village boats used in hauling the copra over the reef, on roads between villages, on the repairs of the water system, is carried through by a levy upon the village as a whole, conforming perfectly to the native pattern of communal work. The government operates through appointed district governors and county chiefs, and elected "mayors" in each village. The administrations of these officials are peaceful and effective in proportion to the importance of their rank in the native social organisation. Each village also has two policemen who act as town criers, couriers on government inspections, and carriers of the nurses' equipment from village to village. There are also county judges. A main court is presided over by an American civil judge and a native judge. The penal code is a random combination of government edicts, remarkable for their tolerance of native custom. When no pronouncement on a point of law is found in this code, the laws of the state of California, liberally interpreted and revised, are used to provide a legalistic basis for the court's decision. These courts have taken over the settlement of disputes concerning important titles, and property rights; and the chief causes of litigation in the "courthouse" at Pago Pago are the same which agitated the native fonos some hundred years ago.
Schools are now maintained in many villages, where the children, seated cross-legged on the floor of a large native house, learn the haziest of English from boys whose knowledge of the language is little more extensive than theirs. They also learn part singing, at which they are extraordinarily adept, and to play cricket and many other games. The schools are useful in instilling elementary ideas of hygiene, and in breaking down the barriers between age and sex groups and narrow residential units. From the pupils in the outlying schools the most promising are selected to become nurses, teachers, and candidates for the native marine corps, the Fitafitas, who constitute the police, hospital corpsmen and interpreters for the naval administration. The Samoans' keen feeling for social distinction makes them particularly able to co-operate with a government in which there is a hierarchy of officialdom; the shoulder stars and bars are fitted into their own system of rank without confusion. When the Governor and group of officers pay an official visit, the native-talking chief distributes the kava, first to the Governor, then to the highest chief among the hosts, then to the Commander of the Naval Yard, then to the next highest chief, without any difficulty.
In all the descriptions of Samoan life, one of the points which must have struck the reader most forcibly is the extreme flexibility of the civilisation as it is found to-day. This flexibility is the result of the blending of the various European ideas, beliefs, mechanical devices, with the old primitive culture. It is impossible to say whether it is due to some genius in the Samoan culture itself, or to fortunate accident, that these foreign elements have received such a thorough and harmonious acculturation. In many parts of the South Seas contact with white civilisation has resulted in the complete degeneration of native life, the loss of native techniques, and traditions, and the annihilation of the past. In Samoa this is not so. The growing child is faced by a smaller dilemma than that which confronts the American-born child of European parentage. The gap between parents and children is narrow and painless, showing few of the unfortunate aspects usually present in a period of transition. The new culture, by offering alternative careers to the children has somewhat lightened the parental yoke. But essentially the children are still growing up in a homogeneous community with a uniform set of ideals and aspirations. The present ease of adolescence among Samoan girls which has been described cannot safely be attributed to a period of transition. The fact that adolescence can be a period of unstressed development is just as significant. Given no additional outside stimulus or attempt to modify conditions, Samoan culture might remain very much the same for two hundred years.
But it is only fair to point out that Samoan culture, before white influence, was less flexible and dealt less kindly with the individual aberrant. Aboriginal Samoa was harder on the girl sex delinquent than is present-day Samoa, And the reader must not mistake the conditions which have been described for the aboriginal ones, nor for typical primitive ones. Present-day Samoan civilisation is simply the result of the fortuitous and on the whole fortunate impetus of a complex, intrusive culture upon a simpler and most hospitable indigenous one.
In former times, the head of the household had life and death powers over every individual under his roof. The American legal system and the missionary teachings between them have outlawed and banished these rights. The individual still benefits by the communal ownership of property, by the claims which he has on all family land; but he no longer suffers from an irksome tyranny which could be enforced with violence and possible death. Deviations from chastity were formerly punished in the case of girls by a very severe beating and a stigmatising shaving of the head. Missionaries have discouraged the beating and head shaving, but failed to substitute as forceful an inducement to circumspect conduct. The girl whose sex activities are frowned upon by her family is in a far better position than that of her great-grandmother. The navy has prohibited, the church has interdicted the defloration ceremony, formerly an inseparable part of the marriages of girls of rank; and thus the most potent inducement to virginity has been abolished. If for these cruel and primitive methods of enforcing a stricter régime there had been substituted a religious system which seriously branded the sex offender, or a legal system which prosecuted and punished her, then the new hybrid civilisation might have been as heavily fraught with possibilities of conflict as the old civilisation undoubtedly was.
This holds true also for the ease with which young people change their residence. Formerly it might have been necessary to flee to a great distance to avoid being beaten to death. Now the severe beatings are deprecated, but the running-away pattern continues. The old system of succession must have produced many heartburns in the sons who did not obtain the best titles; to-day two new professions are open to the ambitious, the ministry and the Fitafitas. The taboo system, although never as rigorous in Samoa as in other parts of Polynesia, undoubtedly compelled the people to lead more circumspect lives and stressed more vividly difference in rank. The few economic changes which have been introduced have been just sufficient to slightly upset the system of prestige which was based on display and lavish distribution of property. Acquiring wealth is easier, through raising copra, government employment, or manufacturing curios for the steamer-tourist trade on the main island. Many high chiefs do not find it worth while to keep up the state to which they are entitled, while numerous upstarts have an opportunity to acquire prestige denied to them under a slower method of accumulating wealth. The intensity of local feeling with its resulting feuds, wars, jealousies and conflicts (in the case of intermarriage between villages) is breaking down with the improved facilities for transportation and the co-operation between villages in religious and educational matters.
Superior tools have partially done away with the tyranny of the master craftsman. The man who is poor, but ambitious, finds it easier to acquire a guest house than it would have been when the laborious highly specialised work was done with stone tools. The use of some money and of cloth, purchased from traders, has freed women from part of the immense labour of manufacturing mats and tapa as units of exchange and for clothing. On the other hand, the introduction of schools has taken an army of useful little labourers out of the home, especially in the case of the little girls who cared for the babies, and so tied the adult women more closely to routine domestic tasks.
Puberty was formerly much more stressed than it is to-day. The menstrual taboos against participation in the kava ceremony and in certain kinds of cooking were felt and enforced. The girl's entrance into the Aualuma was always, not just occasionally, marked by a feast. The unmarried girls and the widows slept, at least part of the time, in the house of the taupo. The taupo herself had a much harder life. To-day she pounds the kava root, but in her mother's day it was chewed until jaws ached from the endless task. Formerly, should a defection from chastity be disclosed at her marriage, she faced being beaten to death. The adolescent boy faced tattooing, a painful, wearisome proceeding, additionally stressed by group ceremony and taboo. To-day, scarcely half of the young men are tattooed; the tattooing is performed at a much more advanced age and has no connection with puberty; the ceremonies have vanished and it has become a mere matter of a fee to the artist.
The prohibitions against blood revenge and personal violence have worked like a yeast in giving greater personal freedom. As many of the crimes which were formerly punished in this fashion are not recognised as crimes by the new authorities, no new mechanism of punishment has been devised for the man who marries the divorced wife of a man of higher rank, the miscreant who gossips outside his village and so brings his village into disrepute, the insolent detractor who recites another's genealogy, or the naughty boy who removes the straws from the pierced cocoanuts and thus offers an unspeakable affront to visitors. And the Samoan is not in the habit of committing many of the crimes listed in our legal code. He steals and is fined by the government as he was formerly fined by the village. But he comes into very slight conflict with the central authorities. He is too accustomed to taboos to mind a quarantine prohibition which parades under the same guise; too accustomed to the exactions of his relations to fret under the small taxation demands of the government. Even the stern attitude formerly taken by the adults towards precocity has now been subdued, for what is a sin at home becomes a virtue at school.
The new influences have drawn the teeth of the old culture. Cannibalism, war, blood revenge, the life and death power of the matai, the punishment of a man who broke a village edict by burning his house, cutting down his trees, killing his pigs, and banishing his family, the cruel defloration ceremony, the custom of laying waste plantations on the way to a funeral, the enormous loss of life in making long voyages in small canoes, the discomfort due to widespread disease—all these have vanished. And as yet their counterparts in producing misery have not appeared.
Economic instability, poverty, the wage system, the separation of the worker from his land and from his tools, modern warfare, industrial disease, the abolition of leisure, the irksomeness of a bureaucratic government—these have not yet invaded an island without resources worth exploiting. Nor have the subtler penalties of civilisation, neuroses, philosophical perplexities, the individual tragedies due to an increased consciousness of personality and to a greater specialisation of sex feeling, or conflicts between religion and other ideals, reached the natives. The Samoans have only taken such parts of our culture as made their life more comfortable, their culture more flexible, the concept of the mercy of God without the doctrine of original sin.