[The introduction and conclusion from what became Coming of Age in Samoa as originally submitted to the National Research Council as Mead's report of her fellowship]

THE ADOLESCENT GIRL IN SAMOA

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction

Chapter

I       The Education of the Samoan Child

II      The Samoan Household

III     The Girl and Her Age Group

IV     The Girl in the Community

V      Formal Sex Relations

VI     The Role of the Dance

VII    The Attitude towards Personality

VIII   The Experience and Individuality of the Average Girl

IX      The Girl in Conflict

X       Maturity and Old Age

XI      Samoan Civilization as it is Today

Conclusions

INTRODUCTION

    This study is an attempt to answer one small part of the great body of questions which students of human behaviour are asking. Are the attitudes, the conflicts, the perplexities, the ambitions of the adolescent girl correlates of a special period of physiological development or are they rather to be attributed to the civilization in which she lives. Is adolescence inevitably a period of stress, of painful adjustments, of conflicts with authority? Is it always accompanied by an efflorescence of idealism, by a marked heightening in emotional tone? In our education programs and our reformatory measures should we assume that all or any of these phenomena are inevitable at adolescence and direct all our energies towards coping with them? Or are these characteristic of our adolescents not inevitable at all, but merely manifestations of adolescence in a given civilization?

To answer these questions it was necessary to make a study of adolescence under different cultural conditions, where a girl at physiological maturity was surrounded by entirely different expectations and a different ritual recognition of the change. A village community of about six hundred people on a remote island in American Samoa was chosen as the scene of the investigation. On this tiny South Sea island the natives still live in their primitive houses, raise the same kind of food which they have eaten for many centuries, order their lives in accordance with traditions and attitudes many hundreds of years old. With the introduction of Christianity over ninety-five years ago, many of the more barbarous aspects of their culture were eliminated. But most of their civilization remained unchanged, a primitive Polynesian community delicately adapted to their remote island environment, living radically different from the lives of individuals born into western civilization, a fit group in which to watch the behaviour of the adolescent and compare her behavior with adolescent girl in America.

    Such a study is an attempt to coordinate the tasks of psychologist and ethnologist at a point where they overlap. In the last fifty years, while the psychologist has been working out a technique for studying the reactions of the individual within a given culture, the ethnologist had devoted himself to perfecting a technique for the study of the culture itself and of the individual in as much as he expresses himself through his culture. It is the ethnologist’s duty to evaluate the significance of the civilization in the behavior which the psychologist has painstakingly described, to criticize the generalities made within one culture in the light of his knowledge of many other and diverse cultures, to use the material from other civilizations as a check and a guide in the interpretation of the psychologist’s results.

    This is the service which the ethnologist gives to the psychologist; it is in no sense an attempt to undervaluate or discredit the validity of his results within our civilization, but is rather a further contribution in an arduous undertaking, the determination of which aspects of human behavior should be assigned to original nature and which to original nature only as is skewed and moulded by a particular social environment.

    In any study of development, the part which the civilization plays is in particular need of rigorous scrutiny. Every society has found it expedient and desirable to recognize different periods in the growth of the individual, either in terms of his participation in the life of his community, or in terms of the bodily changes which accompany physiological development, or of both of these. And once a society has singled out segments of human life for special treatment and special attitudes, given to them a name and evolved a set of expectation in respect to the members of given groups, any one of these group becomes as fruitful subject for investigation. This is true whether the categories are artificial ones, disregarding actual physical development, as in categories such as "below the age of consent", "of age", "below school age", "les jeunes filles", of "the superannuated clerk under a fixed age of retirement", or not. Any analysis of the individuals in such categories reveals at once that the similarities between then are due to their being members of a culturally defined class rather than to any more fundamental similarity. But the existence of such an attitude of classification makes it possible for the "jeune fille" of sixteen and the "jeune fille" of thirty in French society to have a great deal more in common than the flapper of sixteen and the business woman of thirty in an American city, although the physiological basis of the first classification, virginity, may be present in the case of the two Americans also. In the same way the diverse attitudes of different civilizations towards the right to the father to control his daughter’s life, until eighteen, until twenty-one, until marriage, results in a community of attitude among dependent daughters which is the result of a cultural definition, not of a stage of development or of an equal degree of intellectual and emotional maturity.

    But while groups like these are quite obviously socially determined, the case is not so clear for classifications based on physiological development. "Under school age" is indeed a legal fiction which disregards differences between the children who are grouped together. But the same thing cannot be said for "children who have not learned to talk", "children before walking", or "before puberty". Classifications such as these have universal reference; are grounded in the order of physiological development of all members of the human species. And by a simple mental sleight of hand, the behaviour of any group of individuals who all fall within one of these physiologically determined categories is conceived of as being equally grounded in human nature, and laid down as a universal characteristic of that age, sex, or developmental stage. But such an assumption is dangerous and in urgent need of examination.

    Adolescence in both girls and boys is a period which has lent itself particularly well to the ends of the theorist. The physiological manifestations are so conspicuous as to compel a certain amount of attention. The theorists stood in no danger of having their stage attacked as a fiction; it was realistically documented without a chance of refutation. So recent years have given us a great amount of generalization upon Adolescence and the Adolescent, not the American Adolescent, nor the English Adolescent, nor the western European Adolescent, but THE ADOLESCENT, - a straight forward attempt to project the data gathered from the behavior of adolescents in our own civilization upon the pubescent young of the entire human race.

    This book is an attempt to approach the study of the adolescent girl from a different angle. Its purpose is twofold: to furnish a description of the behavior of the adolescent girl in Samoa, a society much simpler and very different from our own, and to furnish a check upon the generalizations which are made about adolescence on the basis of our own civilization alone. If the behavior of the adolescent girl in Samoa is found to conform closely to the behavior of the adolescent girl in America and Europe as already recorded by students of child and developmental psychology, the case of the theorist within our culture is that much strengthened but is not proved. For different cultural conditions may produce the same result and yet the result in each case be due to the influence of the civilization and not to the original nature of man alone. If, on the other hand, the behavior of the Samoan adolescent is found to be different, then that difference must be allotted to the difference between the civilizations. No psychological accompanyment of adolescence which is lacking in any human society can be assumed as an inevitable, physiologically-determined accompaniment of adolescence.

    The ethnologist feels that only by painstaking, detailed studies of individuals and groups, at different ages, and under the stimulus and the restraint provided by different culture patterns, will it be possible to collect the kind of material which will equip us to estimate adequately and describe that substratum of human behavior which may justifiably be called, original nature.

                    METHODOLOGY OF THIS STUDY

    It is impossible to present a single and unified picture of the adolescent girl in Samoa and at the same time to answer most satisfactorily the various kinds of questions which such a study will be expected to answer. For the ethnologist in search of data upon the usages and rites connected with adolescence it is necessary to include descriptions of customs which have fallen into partial decay under the impact of western propaganda and foreign example. Traditional observances and attitudes are also important in the study of the adolescent girl in present day Samoa because they still form a large part of the thought pattern of her parents even if they are no longer given concrete expression in the girl’s cultural life. But this double necessity of describing not only the present environment and the girl’s reaction to it, but also of interpolating occasionally some description of the more rigid cultural milieu of her mother’s girlhood, mars to some extent the unity of the study.

    The detailed observations were all made upon a group of girls living in three practically contiguous villages on one coast of the island of Tau. The data upon the ceremonial usages surrounding birth, adolescence and marriage was gathered from all of the seven villages in the Manu’a Archipelago.

    The method of approach is based upon the assumption that a detailed intensive investigation will be of more value than a more diffused and general study based upon a less accurate knowledge of a greater number of individuals. Dr. Van Waters study of The Adolescent Girl Among Primitive Peoples has exhausted the possibilities of an investigation based upon the merely external observations of the ethnologist who is giving a standardized description of a primitive culture. We have a huge mass of general descriptive material without the detailed observations and the individual cases in the light of which it would be possible to interpret it.

    The writer therefore chose to work in one small locality, in a group numbering only six hundred people, and spend six months accumulating an intimate and detailed knowledge of all the adolescent girls in this community. As there were only sixty eight girls between the ages of nine and twenty, quantitative statements are practically valueless for several obvious reasons: the probable error of the group is too large; the age classes are too small, etc. The only point at which quantitative statements can have any relevance is in regard to the variability with the group, as the smaller the variability with the sample, the greater the general validity of the results.

    Furthermore, the type of data which we needed is not of the sort which lends itself readily to quantitative treatment. The reaction of a girl to her stepmother, to relatives acting as foster parents, to her younger sister, or to her older brother - these are incommensurable in quantitative terms. As the physician and the psychiatrist have found it necessary to describe each case separately and to use their cases as illumination of a thesis rather than as irrefutable proof such as it is possible to adduce in the physical sciences, so the student of the more intangible and psychological aspects of human behaviour is forced to illuminate rather than demonstrate a thesis. The composition of the background against which the girl acts can be described in accurate and general terms, but her reactions are a function of her own personality and cannot be described without reference to it. The generalizations which are found in the subsequent chapters are based upon a careful and detailed observation of a small group of subjects. Theses results will be illuminated and illustrated by case histories.

    The conclusions are also all subject to the limitation of the personal equation. They are the judgments of one individual upon a mass of data, many of the most significant aspects of which can, by their very nature, be known only to herself. This was inevitable and it can only be claimed in the extenuation that as the personal equation was held absolutely constant, the different parts of the data are strictly commensurable. The judgment of the reaction of Lola to her uncle and of Sona to her cousin are made on exactly the same basis.

    Another methodological device which possibly needs explanation is the substitution of a cross sectional study for a linear one. Twenty-eight children who as yet showed no signs of puberty, fourteen children who would probably mature within the next year or year and a half, and twenty five girls who had passed puberty within the last four years but were not yet classed by the community as adults, were studied in detail. Less intensive observations were also made upon the very little children and the young married women. This method of taking cross sections, samples of individuals at different periods of physical development, and arguing that the characteristics of a group in an earlier stage will agree with the characteristics which appear in another group at a later stage is, of course, inferior to a linear study in which the same groups is under observation for a number of years. A very large number of cases has usually been the only acceptable defense of a such a procedure. The number of cases included in this investigation, while very small in comparison with the numbers mustered by any student of American children, is never-the-less a fair sized sample in terms of the very small population of Samoa (a rough eight thousand in all four islands of American Samoa) and because the only selection was geographical. It may further be argued that the almost drastic character of the conclusions, the exceedingly few exceptions which need to be made, further validate the size of the sample. The adoption of the cross section was, of course, a matter of expediency, but the results when carefully derived from a fair sample, may be fairly compared with results obtained by using the linear method, when the same subjects are under observation over a period of years. This is true when the conclusions to be drawn are general and not individual. For the purpose of psychological theory it is sufficient to know that children in a certain society walk, on the average, at twelve months, and talk, on the average, at fifteen months. For the purposes of the diagnostician it is necessary to know that John walked at eighteen months and did not talk until twenty months. So, for general theoretical purposes, it is enough to state that little girls just past puberty develop a shyness and lack of self-possession in the presence of boys, but if we are to understand the delinquency of Mala, it is necessary to know that she prefers the company of boys to that of girls and has done so for several years.

Particular Methods Used

    The description of the cultural background was obtained in orthodox fashion, first through interviews with carefully chosen informants, followed by checking up their statements with other informants and by the use of many examples and test cases. With a few unimportant exceptions this material was obtained in the Samoan language and not through the medium of interpreters. All of the work with individuals was done in the native language, as there were no young people on the island who spoke English.

    Although a knowledge of the entire culture was essential for the accurate evaluation of any particular individual’s behaviour, a detailed description will be given only of those aspects of the culture which are immediately relevant to the problem of the adolescent girl. For example, if I observe Pele refuse point blank to carry a message to the house of a relative, it is important to know whether she is actuated by stubbornness, dislike of the relative, fear of the dark, or fear of the ghost which lives near by and has a habit of jumping on people’s backs. But to the reader a detailed exposition of the names and habits of all the local ghost population would be of little assistance in the appreciation of the main problem. So all descriptions of the culture which are not immediately relevant are omitted from the discussion but were not omitted from the original investigation. Their irrelevancy has, therefore, been definitely ascertained.

    The knowledge of the general cultural pattern was supplemented by a detailed study of the social structure of the three villages under consideration. Each household was analyzed from the standpoint of rank, wealth, location, contiguity to other households, relationship to other households, and the age, sex, relationship, marital status, number of children, former residence, etc., of each individual in the household. This material furnished a general descriptive basis for a further and more careful analysis of the households of the subjects, and also provided a check on the origin of feuds or alliances between individuals, the use of relationship terms, etc. Each child was thus studied against a background which was known in detail.

    A further mass of detailed information was obtained about the subjects: approximate age (actual age can never be determined accurately in Samoa), order of birth, numbers of brothers and sisters, older and younger than the subject, number of marriages of each parent, patrilocal or matrilocal residence, years spent in the pastor’s school and in the government school and achievement there, whether the child had even been out off the island or out of the village, sex experience, etc. The children were also given a makeshift intelligence test, colour naming, rote memory, opposites, substitution, ball and field, and picture interpretation. These tests were all given in Samoan; standardization was of course impossible and ages were known only relatively; they were mainly useful in assisting me in placing the child within her group and have no value for comparative purposes. The results of the tests did indicate, however, a very low variability within the group. The tests were supplemented by a questionnaire which was not administered formally but filled in by random questioning from time to time. This questionnaire gave a measure of their industrial knowledge, the extent to which they participated in the lore of the community, of the degree to which they had absorbed European teaching in matters like telling time, reading the calendar, and also of the extent to which they had participated in or witnessed scenes of death, birth, miscarriage, etc.

    But this quantitative data represents the barest skeleton of the material which was gathered through months of observation of the individuals and of groups, alone, in their households, and at play. From these observations the bulk of the conclusions are drawn concerning the attitudes of the children toward their families and towards each other, their religious interests or the lack of them, and the details of their sex lives. This information cannot be reduced to tables or to statistical statement. Naturally in many cases it was not as full as in others. In some cases it was necessary to pursue a more extensive enquiry in order to understand some baffling aspect of the child’s behavior. In all cases the investigation was pursued until I felt that I understood the girl’s motivation and the degree to which her family group and present affiliation in her age group explained her attitudes.

    The existence of the pastor’s boarding school for girls past puberty provided me with a rough control group. These girls were so severely watched that heterosexual activities were impossible; they were grouped together with other girls of the same age regardless of relationship; they lived a more ordered and regular life than the girls who remained in their households. The ways in which they differed from other girls of the same age and more resembled European girls of the same age, follow with surprising accuracy the lines suggested by the specific differences in environment. However, as they lived part of the time at home, the environmental break was not complete and their value as a control group is strictly limited.

    In such fashion then, was the material collected which is presented in the following chapters. It has been thought advisable to avoid the use of technical terms and bare quantitative statement as much as possible so that this material will be intelligible and useful to those who, while not deeply interested in the theoretical implications of such an investigation, are deeply interested in problems of the adolescent girl.