Mead to Boas - November 29, 1925: 

Dear Dr. Boas:

In this letter, I shall attempt to give you some idea of the conditions of this particular community and of the possibilities inherent in it. I have only been here three weeks and I spent one of those three in bed so that my survey of the ground is still rather inadequate. However it takes so long for mail to reach me here that I do not wish to delay longer in laying at least some of the elements of the situation before you.

This island has four villages on it. One of them is eight miles away and I do not expect to do much work there except perhaps of a strictly ethnological nature. The other three villages are immediately accessible. The Dispensary where I make my headquarters is situated in Luma, which runs into Siufaga without a perceptible break. Luma and Siufaga, between them have 580 inhabitants. About a mile away is the village of Faleasau, with a population of 259. There is a small copra vessel which runs back and forth to Tutuila every few weeks and the Navy ship also carries passengers, so that many of the Manu’a people have been to Tutuila and a good many of them to Western Samoa. Tattooing was forbidden a good many years ago by the king of Manu’a, and about half of the younger men on the island are tattooed. These all had to go away from the island to receive their tattooing. A much smaller number of the women were sent away for the purpose. There is one family of half castes on the island, and a few scattered half caste children. There has been a Naval Dispensary here for about 13 years, and a wireless station for 8 years. This had meant the presence of at least three white men on the island. They never learn the language and apparently have very little influence aside from the medical aid which they render to the people. There is small store, formerly run by a white man, but at present that is also in the hands of a Samoan. The governor of Manu’a lives in Siufaga, and he speaks English and finished High School in Honolulu. There are no white missionaries on the island, and neither Mormons nor Catholics have ever been able to establish themselves here. So the religious scene is perfectly homogeneous, what the natives call "Lot Tahiti"[?] the London Missionary Society’s sponsoring. The conduct of religious matters is in the hands of native pastors who were trained in the Missionary training school in Western Samoa. Economically the islands are practically self sufficient. There is no bakery, and such articles as soap and matcher are great luxuries. They buy clothes a few dishes and kerosene and paper from the store. The island was swept by a hurricane which completely demolished houses and fruit trees in 1915, so that all the houses have been built since that time, and the plantations replanted.

The two principal disturbing factors in the native milieu are the Church and the Government School. The Church, its teaching in the matter of sex morality and modesty of wearing apparel excepted, is not a particularly disturbing factor. The oldest people on the island have almost all always been Christian. The phraseology of the Samoan Bible is thoroughly ingrained into the most set of their ceremonial speeches. The native pastors hold schools in which they teach the children to read and write in Samoan and to read the Bible. Church services consume a great deal of time, as does choir practice, but there is no attempt at revivals or of any sort of emotional appeal. The church provides goals however for the young people of both sexes, in the form of boarding schools; one for the girls on Tutuila and one for the boys who are to be pastors in Upolu. Attendance at these schools is dependent upon diligence and physical chastity. Manu’a is so far away that very few of the students come home for vacations and very few return afterwards, as the boys go elsewhere as pastors and the girls usually go into training as nurses at the Naval Hospital in Tutuila. So the influence of these schools is mainly as they serve as incentive to special sorts of conduct.

The government school presents a more disturbing influence. The teachers are supposed to teach in English; the chief effect of this ruling is that the teaching is hopelessly ineffective. The teachers cannot speak intelligible English and the children spend year after year in purposeless drill. The teachers also attempt to instill rudimentary notions of hygiene in the children’s heads. The teachers are young men who have possibly completely the sixth grade in the government school in Pago Pago. That school maintains a boarding school for boys and affords another goal for boys who wish more education but do not wish to be pastors. But it is not by what it teaches that the government school is disturbing but the time spent in school. This last year a compulsory school law was enacted, coupled with quite rigorous truancy regulations which are strictly enforced by the native judicial authorities. The children are in school from 9 to 12 and from 12 to 3. As the pastor refuses to yield his title to hold school daily, he has school from 7:30 to 9 and 3 to 4:30. This seriously deranges the original regime under which the children have always lived. The Samoan meals are two, one at 10 A.M. and one about 8 in the evening. The school children have to forage for themselves early in the morning, are entirely robbed of their afternoon naps, and presented with a meaningless hour at noon. Furthermore, they are kept in restraint from early morning until late afternoon. This is bound to produce factors of insubordinancy and rebellion which were quite absent under the old regime.

To now come to the problem of the adolescent girl. Her conduct is subject to the influence of two sets of ideals, one of the Taupou Concept and the other under the missionary one of the Good Christian Girl. Contrary to other parts of Polynesia there’s no prejudice against women as a contaminating influence, no sex taboo, and it is the taupou, the daughter or niece of the highest chief, who enjoys the greatest honor in the village. To her taboo fish are brought, her marriage is the great event of village life, she accompanies the chiefs on important journeys, and her funeral is attended by all the meticulous ceremony and taboo accorded to a high chief. This high prestige of being an ex-taupou is always greater than that of being the present wife of a high chief. The taupous are as carefully ranked as the chiefs, a definite ceremony attends their installation, and the wife of the chief’s principal councillor (talking chief) becomes the taupous chaperon and mentor in all things. On the other hand the chief’s son is not so honored. Until the death of his father he remains a virtual servant, he cannot speak in the council of the men who hold titles as heads of families, he must eat after his sister and wait upon her. Formerly all the unmarried girls and the widows slept in the same house as the taupou, and constituted a sort of court. However, the taupou has begun to pass away in Ta’u. There is only one acting taupou at the present time and she lives in Fitiuta. The younger girls have probably never come into direct contact with the taupou activities. But the concept is still vividly alive. And the central requirement for the taupou was that she should be a virgin. She was chaperoned everywhere she wents [sic] are severely watched. The notion was that she was the village virgin, providing vicarious virtue for the rest of the village. And it is also important to notice that the rest of the girls of the village stood little or no chance of becoming taupou. Only her younger sister or first cousin might be influenced by the chance of succeeding her at her marriage. So that none of the requirements of modesty, dignity, chastity, were made on the other girls of the village.

The Missionary notion of a Good Christian Girl has the following effects. Girls who decide they wish to lead the good life (this means that they would like to go to boarding school someday, or like to live now in a houseful of girls, or that their parents want to appear virtuous, and has nothing to do with a change of heart or any sort of evangelical conversion as nearly as I have been able to ascertain so far) go to live in the household of the pastor. He virtually adopts them; they may or may not go home for meals; they must always sleep there, as must the boarding school girls on vacation, and are very strictly supervised. 11 girls live in the house of the pastor of this village; 4 in the house of the pastor in Faleasau. The group shifts somewhat. 2 girls were recently taken away because their mothers were angry that they did not win prizes in the examinations set by the missionaries each year. Inasmuch as this group does not represent girls of a different emotional makeup, but a fairly typical selection, I think I can use them as a control group. The teachers report that they are by far the most insubordinate in school, and surface contact shows them to be unusually self-conscious and salacious minded when compared with a group as a whole. The pastor is regarded as a sort of policeman and no girl was ever known to voluntarily confess any sort of wrong doing.

The phenomenon of insubordination accompanying adolescence seems entirely absent. The very little children are given unusual license, this is gradually tightened up around 6 or 7, when they become virtual little slaves until a younger one grows old enough to slightly relieve them. The constant exhortation of the parent is "Lai titi 'oe", "you are younger" and this becomes [a] prodigious rebuke in itself if a younger girl is at all slow to perform a task. Among themselves the girls observe age differences meticulously. But there is no observable insubordination, no grumbling and quite prompt obedience, of all except very smallest children who are inefficiently intimidated by threats which are not carried out. The absolute unquestioning obedience is carried right through life as far as obedience to a matai (head of a family) is concerned. There is just one heavily institutionalized form of rebellion and that is the runaway marriage, usually due to differences in rank or wealth. This however, is a phenomenon of the very late teens or the early twenties.

The aspects of these girls lives which are in most striking contrast to the lives of our adolescents and should therefore present the most fruitful points of approach seem to be: complete absence of privacy and of private property; the merging of the biological family in the gross family often necessitating obedience to a father and a matai, the large percentage of children brought up by relatives rather than parents; the communal living making ignorance in sex matters nonexistent; the strong brother and sister taboo; the precedence which blood relationship takes over every other sort of grouping. 

Also I have been unable to find any ceremony from which children are barred except the funeral of a high chief, a rare enough occurrence. There is no sort of ceremonial initiation into secrets of craft or religion, and as a man may not succeed to a title till he is gray haired this hardly produces an age grouping.

I am doubtful as to whether such a report of this has any real value. It cannot reach you before the first in January and I will probably not receive a reply before the middle of February. However, it will at least give you some idea of what I may hope to accomplish, and of the definite limitation imposed by the presence of such things as the school. My first report to the Research Council will have to leave here the first of January, will therefore constitute a report on only a month’s work and that at the height of the hot season. I do not believe that I shall be able to do more than discuss the aspect of subordination. Discussion of sex and religious matters will have to wait upon my obtaining greater linguistic practice. I shall probably ask for reappointment* but I consider such reappointment exceedingly doubtful as I will have so little that is tangible to report. The fact that no one has ever learned this language in less than 18 months has after all very little significance except in demonstrating that I have worked hard, not enough to justify reappointment. 

At present I am very much in favor of work among the Eskimos. We divide our prayers between the coming of a boat (there has been no mail for four weeks) and the coming of rain to temporarily cool us off.

I feel amply justified in my decision to live in a white household. Natives of all ages and sexes and ranks drift on and off my porch in a casual fashion which would be out of the question if I were living in a native house. I have to lock the door to keep the adolescents out, and yawn prodigiously to get rid of them at midnight. This fact more than compensates for the slight loss in linguistic practice. 

With very best wishes to Mrs. Boas and the members of the Department, I am,

Very sincerely,

Margaret Mead

* Editor's note: This would have been a reappointment as a research fellow for the National Research Council to carry on with her Samoan research. She had also applied for a position at the American Museum of Natural History, which she received around this time. See Boas’s letters of July 17 and January 4.