MAIN PAGE: DEREK FREEMAN: MARGARET MEAD AND SAMOA

15 Samoan Character

Central to Mead's depiction of Samoan character is her claim that among Samoans there are „no strong passions.“ Samoa, she asserts, has taken the road of „eliminating strong emotions.“ „Love, hate, jealousy and revenge, sorrow and bereavement,“ we are told, are all matters of weeks; „the social patterning of personal relationships has to contend with no deeply channeled emotions“; a „lack of deep feeling“ has been „conventionalized“ by Samoans „until it is the very framework of all their attitudes to life.“1

This assertion that Samoans have no strong passions, while consistent with her depiction of them as „easy, balanced human beings,“ is plainly contradicted by Mead's own accounts of Samoan behavior. In Social Organization of Manu'a, for example, she writes of the „loudly proclaimed rage“ of those who

have been „injured“ by offenses such as insult and adultery, and of the „very genuine horror“ of Samoans at the accidental uncov¬ering of unidentified bones. In Coming of Age in Samoa there is an account of a 22-year-old woman, devoted „to the point of frenzy“ to an older man whose mistress she had been, whose „fury“ when she discovered he had seduced her younger sister „knew no bounds,“ and who displayed „the most uncontrolled grief and despair“ when he „announced his intention of marry¬ing a girl from another island.“ 2

As these accounts and the reports of numerous other observ¬ers demonstrate, Samoan behavior, in a wide range of situa¬tions, is very much marked by strong passions. William Har- butt, for example, who witnessed hysterical possession during a religious service in 1841 on Upolu, wrote of Samoan character as being „excess of feeling whether grief or joy has possession of their minds.“ This phenomenon of becoming possessed during a Christian service, which was a direct continuation of the pagan religion of Samoa, greatly astonished the early missionaries, who had never witnessed such outpourings of emotion at revival meetings elsewhere as they did among Samoans. George Lun- die, who attended a service led by the Reverend A. W. Murray in Tutuila in 1840, saw dozens of men and women who became so convulsed „as to drive five or six men about like trees in wind,“ or who dropped down „as dead,“ after „struggling with their bursting emotions until nature could bear no more.“ In his journal, Murray himself recounts a service attended by over a thousand Samoans at Leone in June 1840, at which „the tide of feeling rose higher and higher, and became more and more deep and powerful till bursting through all restraint it vented itself in loud weeping and violent bodily convulsions, or laid its subjects on the floor in helpless prostration,“ in one of the „most af¬fecting scenes“ he had ever witnessed. 3

Mead's assertion that in Samoa „no one feels very strongly,“ is also feelingly dismissed by the Samoans themselves. To'oa Salamasima Malietoa, for example; in a conversation with me in December 1967, rejected this assertion of Mead's, referred to the Samoans as „an intensely emotional people,“ and men¬tioned as an instance that a chief of Fasito'otai, in making a ceremonial apology to Papauta School in 1967 on behalf of an ill-mannered youth of his village, had wept in public. Such reactions, under the sway of intense emotion, are very common in Samoa. For example, when Powell and his family returned to Tutuila in 1869 after a sojourn in England, men, overjoyed at their return, sat „weeping and unable to utter a single word.“ Comparable emotion is displayed at times of parting. Elation at the attainment of some significant victory is also commonly accompanied by tears, even on the part of senior chiefs. For example, in 1966 when a 64-year-old talking chief of Sa'anapu, with the support of his close kindred, foiled an attempt to confer on a disliked rival the same title he himself held, he wept profusely in the presence of his kindred. One of them commented that he wept „from joy at his victory, being unable to contain the pride with which his heart was filled.“ Similarly, as reported in the official gazette of Western Samoa in 1967, when after two hours of heated debate, Mata'afa Fiame Faumuina Mulinu'u II was reelected as prime minister, he was in tears as he thanked the members of the parliament for their confidence in him.4

Weeping is also associated with states of shame and anger. Throughout Samoa children are required each year on White Sunday (a local religious festival) to recite before their assembled community an excerpt from the scriptures which they have sedulously memorized over the previous months. When on White Sunday, 1942, the 7-year-old daughter of the pastor of Sa'anapu, of all people, completely forgot the verses she had learned, her mother collapsed in tears, at which many of the other women present wept in sympathy. Again, in July 1967, during the private conclave of an extended family over the keenly contested succession to its chiefly title, there was also much sympathetically induced weeping, most markedly when a 59-year-old contender for the title, known for his hardness of heart, broke down and sobbed aloud when insistently challenged by his sister's son, a man fully fifteen years younger than himself.

The Samoan language, as Pratt records, contains a term for horripilation and one for trembling with terror, and states of fear, including abject fear, are by no means uncommon in

Samoa. Further, Samoans, like other humans, are apt to panic in highly frightening situations. Williams, for example, had recorded that during a severe earthquake in the early 1830s the people of a settlement in Savai'i „rushed from their houses, threw themselves upon the ground, gnawed the grass, tore up the earth, and vociferated in the most frantic manner“ as they called on Mafui'e, the spirit believed to cause earthquakes, to desist. Many Samoans display comparable extremes of emotion at the death of someone to whom they are behaviorally attached. Turner, having observed Samoan behavior during the years 1841-1861, wrote of the „indescribable lamentation and wailing,“ with doleful cries audible from two hundred yards away, that marked a death. These vocalizations were accompanied by other most frantic expressions of grief such as „rending of garments, tearing the hair, thumping the face and eyes, burning the body with small piercing fire-brands,“ and (as Prit-chard also reports), „beating the head with stones“ until „blood freely flowed.“ Although in twentieth-century Samoa the more extreme of these displays no longer occur, a death is still marked by heartrending expressions of grief. For example, when in April 1967, a 72-year-old woman lost consciousness and was thought to have died, the harrowing screams of her 37-year-old daughter could be heard from at least two hundred yards away. Summoned by these screams, I found the daughter in a distraught and agitated state, clutching frantically at her disheveled hair and tossing her head and body from side to side, as, with tears streaming down her face, she wailed aloud.5

There can be no doubt that Mead was mistaken in claiming that among Samoans there are no strong passions. She was equally in error in asserting that in Samoa emotions such as hatred and revenge are but matters of weeks. As Brown notes, one of the most widely quoted of Samoan proverbs avers that while stones decay, words do not. So, as Turner recounts, reports of an ignominous event involving any member of a Samoan community are „brought up to the shame of the members of his family, for generations afterwards.“ Such reproaches, which are commonly expressed in a succinct phrase, are, as I discovered when I returned to Samoa in 1981, remembered over many

years. For example, in 1929 a 20-year-old youth of Sa'anapu, whom I shall call Manu, assaulted and raped an 18-year-old girl from another family. Manu was subjected to the dire punishment of saisai (see Chapter 13) and as an added indignity had a rope (maea) tied about his neck, as though he were an animal. This ignominy led to the phrase 'o le 'au maea, meaning „they of the rope,“ being applied to the family to which Manu belonged. In 1981, this reproach and the hatred of which it was an expression were, after more than fifty years, still well remembered. Again, at a family conclave that I attended in June 1967, a major issue was a serious intrafamily quarrel that had taken place in 1943, with the resentments that had been generated on that occasion being, after twenty-four years, both deep and active.6

As well as depicting the Samoans as lacking either deep or lasting feelings, Mead also claimed in Coming of Age in Samoa that among Samoans there was an „absence of psychological maladjustment,“ and a „lack of neuroses.“ These claims, as we shall see, are without foundation. As I have already described, those who grow up and live within the highly authoritarian Sa-moan society are frequently subjected to emotional and mental stress, and this experience sometimes results in psychopatho-logical states, suicides, and other violent acts.7

Samoan character, as I have suggested in Chapter 14, is very much the product of the way in which discipline is imposed upon young children. As Robert Louis Stevenson has noted, if a child is sufficiently frightened „he takes refuge in duplicity“; it is into this response that Samoans are commonly forced by the anxiety-provoking demands of their often stern and punitive society. The child learns early to comply overtly with parental and chiefly dictates while concealing its true feelings and intentions. As a result, Samoans, whatever may be their real feelings about a social situation, soon become adept at assuming an outward demeanor pleasing to those in authority. By the time they are adults, males in particular have acquired the ability to hide their true feelings behind, as Wendt puts it, „an impregnable mask of controlled aloofness.“8

In both men and women this aloofness is commonly joined, as is socially appropriate, with an elaborate politeness and engaging affability. For example, when in a fono a chief is being criticized by others, however severely, it is usual for him to respond, even when deeply angered, by intoning at regular intervals the words Malie! Malie! („How agreeable! How agreeable!), so maintaining his social mask. Indeed, the maintenance of this mask becomes a source of special pride; for example, at a fono in Sa'anapu in 1966, a high-ranking talking chief (who later confessed to me that he had at the time been furious), suavely assured his detractors that not a hair of his body was ruffled. As these examples indicate, it is usual, especially in demanding social situations, for Samoans to display an affable demeanor which is, in reality, a defensive cover for their true feelings—to be, as they themselves put it, „smooth on top but whirling beneath.“

The Samoans, then, as Wilkes noted as long ago as 1841, are „adepts“ in „giving a false impression relative to their feelings and designs,“ and „particularly when they think their personal interest may be promoted by their dissimulation.“ Thus, Cartwright reports that although the high chief Tufele „thoroughly hated“ Captain H. F. Bryan, who was governor of American Samoa from March 1925 to September 1927, he said in a speech on 9 September 1927, that the twelve apostles at the Last Supper were „happy men“ compared with himself and other Samoans as they bade Bryan a final farewell. Such dissimulation is also common in purely Samoan contexts, as in a revealing incident I observed in 1966 during a communion service in a village church. During this service, Masima, a talking chief and lay preacher, having taken his piece of bread from the circulating communion plate, at once, in conformity with local custom, swallowed it, only to hear the visiting pastor solemnly announce that all members of the congregation were to perform the act of communion together. Giving no outward sign of his embarrassment, the worthy Masima elaborately simulated the eating of a second piece of communal bread, lifting an empty hand to his mouth and moving his jaws in unison with the rest of the congregation.9

However (as in the case of a child who had been forced to suppress his emotions to escape further punishment), there are often, and particularly among adolescents and young adults, feelings of deep resentment and anger against those in authority. When these feelings pervade the mood of an individual he or she is said to be musu, a term which Williams recorded as early as 1832, and which, as Pratt notes, has no exact equivalent in English. According to Stevenson, the word musu means „literally cross, but always in the sense of stubbornness and resistance“; it is used by Samoans to refer to any unwillingness to comply with the wishes or dictates of others, and especially of those in authority. It is, moreover, common for a mood of stubborn unwillingness so to dominate an individual's behavior that, in Judge Marsack's words, „he becomes completely intractable; will do little or no work, will deliberately misunderstand instructions, will go about with a look of sulky tragedy on his face and will reply to no questions.“10

An individual who has become seriously musu (as do virtually all Samoans from time to time, and especially during childhood and adolescence), is thus in a disaffected and emotionally disturbed state, and this psychological condition is of key significance for the understanding of Samoan character. What did Mead make of this state of being musu, the widespread incidence of which among Samoans is manifestly at odds with her depiction of Samoan life as being essentially „characterized by ease“? The word musu, Mead tells us, „expresses unwillingness and intractability,“ but she offers no explanation at all of why it is that this disaffected state is so widely prevalent among Samoans. If Mead's analysis had penetrated to the heart of what being musu means, she could never have sustained her claims about the untroubled character of Samoan adolescence. All she tells us is that the state of being musu is „a mysterious and widespread psychological phenomenon“ which the Samoans themselves out of „an odd incuriousness about motives“ find „inexplicable.“ These assertions are unwarranted, for there are many Samoans who are by no means incurious about motives, and who well understand why it is that someone becomes musu.11

As we have seen, individuals growing up in Samoan society are regularly subjected to the dictates of those in authority over them, with punishment being meted out to the disobedient and refractory. On occasion the demands of this stringent system generate such intefnal resentment and stress that an individual can take no more and becomes intractable, or musu, sullenly refusing all commands and admonitions. A person in this state is very near the breaking point, and if harried further may become violent or even commit suicide; therefore when an individual does become seriously musu he is usually left to his own devices until his dangerous mood has subsided. Becoming seriously musu is thus, as my investigation of numerous cases has revealed, a direct result of the stress caused by the excessive demands of punitive authority. This, furthermore, is the interpretation of the Samoans themselves. For example, in discussing a case of musu behavior in February 1966, the 44-year-old daughter of a titular chief attributed being musu to „resentment at being dominated by another.“ She added that a person in a musu state, while „angered in his heart“ at the dominance of those in authority, was unable because of his fear of them to vent this anger.

This accords closely with Otto Fenichal's definition of stubbornness as „a passive type of aggressiveness, developed where activity is impossible,“ and the widespread incidence of musu states (which Mead herself reports) is evidence of the latent aggression that has been remarked upon by many observers of the Samoans. Ronald Rose, who did field research on Manono in the late 1950s, found that „a very large percentage of the population had complusive mannerisms of various sorts.“ One of the most common of these mannerisms is the agitated moving of the fingers of the hand in states of frustration: for example, drumming them rapidly on a mat, a behavior known to the Samoans as fitifiti. This behavior, in ethological terms, is a form of redirected aggression, and its prevalence among Samoans is evidence of the tension generated within individuals by the mode of discipline imposed upon them from childhood onward.12

This tension also occasionally finds expression in outbursts of uncontrollable anger. Turner, for example, writing in the mid nineteenth century, has described how a man or woman in a passion of anger not only would pull off an upper garment and tear it to shreds, but then, rushing up and down like a demon, would smash coconut water bottles and the like, before sitting down to weep over „the folly, wreck, and ruin of the whole affair.“ Again, when the 29-year-old Samala was heavily disciplined by the chiefs of Sa'anapu (see Chapter 13), he flung himself to the ground and tore to shreds the shirt he was wearing.13 Such fits of destructive rage closely resemble the temper tantrums of infants who are subjected to severe parental discipline, and Samoans prone to uncontrollable rage have told me of being overwhelmed as if by a kind of madness. This anger may also be released in redirected assaults upon others, as in the case of Tunu (see Chapter 14), who after being painfully punished by his uncle launched an unprovoked attack on one of his cousins. Thus, the high rates of aggression in Samoan society are certainly due, in part, to the tense and easily provoked characters of those who have been subjected to its severe regime of discipline and punishment.

In yet other instances, the aggressive impulses that individuals who have been heavily disciplined feel toward those in authority are redirected onto themselves in acts of suicide. In her paper of 1928, „The Role of the Individual in Samoan Culture,“ Mead asserts that the „emotional tone“ of Samoan society „never exerts sufficient repression to call forth a significant rebellion from the individual,“ and that „the suicides of humiliation so common in parts of Polynesia do not exist in Samoa.“ These statements are seriously in error.14

During my researches in Western Samoa in 1966-1967,1 collected from various sources detailed information on twenty-two cases of suicide (sixteen males and six females) that had occurred from 1925 onward15

Fourteen of these twenty-two persons (64 percent) had committed suicide in a state of anger at having been scolded or punished by a parent or some other elder. This accords with the opinion of Pratt, who lived in Samoa from 1839 to 1879, that among Samoans suicide is „mostly caused by anger with family“16 Most of these fourteen individuals, had, moreover, also been musu toward a parent during the emotional crisis that immediately preceded their suicides, as the following cases illustrate.

Tupe, a 16-year-old girl of Solosolo, left her parents' house on 29 September 1964 and spent the next two days staying and working at the house of the village catechist. On her return she was scolded and beaten by her father, who suspected her of having gone off with a boy. After this punishment Tupe became musu, flatly refusing her father's instruction to weed the family's cocoa plantation. After further scolding and punishment from her father, she went off and hanged herself, with a piece of bark, from the branch of a tree.

On 26 October 1958 Sio, a 16-year-old boy of Leulumoega, wanted to go to the town of Apia for the day. His adoptive father forbade him to go, on the ground that it was Sunday. Intensely angered at this domination, Sio became musu and, as he had threatened when arguing with his father, went off and hanged himself from a breadfruit tree.

In 1942, Malu, the beautiful 17-year-old daughter of a titular chief of a village on the north coast of Upolu, who had been installed as a ceremonial virgin, was seduced and became pregnant by a handsome 25-year-old bus driver of part-European descent. Malu's father, on discovering this, subjected his daughter to severe scolding and punishment. When Malu pleaded to be allowed to marry her lover, her father took down a shotgun and told her that if she tried to elope he would kill her. At this Malu became angered and musu. One Sunday, having refused to go to church, she hanged herself with a clothesline from a rafter in her father's house.17

Six of the twenty-two individuals who committed suicide did so out of shame at illicit sexual liaisons {the remaining two killed themselves after being jilted). The six who acted out of shame all either had been scolded by others or feared that they would be. One of them, for example, a youth of 19, wrote (in English) of not being able to carry his „big load of blame,“ and a man of 28, who had been severely scolded, left a note (in Samoan) saying that he was taking his life because he was „so weighed down with shame.“

A further point of significance is that nine of the twenty-two persons who committed suicide were adolescents, eight of these (36 percent of the total) being between the ages of 15 and 19. This proportion of adolescent suicides is high in comparative terms. In 1975, for example, only 4.6 percent of the 1,528 suicides in Australia were committed by individuals aged between 15 and 19. For New Zealand the percentage (for the years 19401964) is even lower: approximately 3 percent. Thus, the information I have been able to collect from police records and other sources indicates that the incidence of adolescent suicide relative to that of older age groups is, in fact, considerably higher in Samoa than in some other countries. This is scarcely a confirmation of Mead's claim that in Samoa adolescence is „the age of maximum ease“ (a point to which I shall return in Chapter 17). Further, it is plainly evident from my analysis of twenty-two cases that Mead's assertion that „suicides of humiliation … do not exist in Samoa,“ is in error. Indeed, these cases show that the majority of the suicides that occur in Samoa directly involve the humiliation of an individual by those in authority. Examples are the case of Tulei (see Chapter 13) who shot himself after being punitively fined by the chiefs of his village; and that of Amoga (aged 25), who was humiliated in front of his brothers by his father for having broken the handle of an axe, and who then stormed off to take his own life by swallowing the powdered root of a poisonous plant.18

As we have seen, the tensions that sometimes develop within Samoan families in response to excessive scolding and punishment not infrequently result in states of psychopathological stubbornness, or musu behavior, and even, from time to time, terminate in suicide. Yet another expression of these tensions is a form of hysterical dissociation known to the Samoans as ma'i aitu, or ghost sickness. Although Mead was aware of the presence of this psychological malady—she specifically refers to a sickness in which an individual becomes „possessed“ by „an angry ghostly relative“ and „speaks with a strange voice“—she did not relate this sickness to the structure of Samoan charac-ter.19

As described in Chapter 12, the principal institution of the pagan religion of Samoa was spirit mediumship, in which a medium was believed to become possessed by a spirit or god who then spoke through his lips. This state of possession in which „normal individuality is temporarily replaced by another“ with intense motor and emotional excitement is, as T. K. Oesterreich documents, a widespread phenomenon in human populations. As William Sargant's researches have shown, it is associated with the „hypnoid, paradoxical and ultraparadoxical states of brain activity“ first studied by Pavlov, which can result in a splitting of the stream of consciousness and so a state of hysterical dissociation. As I have already described, because of the mode of punishment in which children are forced to assume an outward demeanor totally at variance with their actual feelings, the psychology of Samoans is especially characterized by states of marked ambivalence, particularly toward those in authority. Thus, I have often had a Samoan tell me that while one part of his character is under the power of God, another part of it is under the power of Satan. Shore reports a pastor's characterizing Samoan existence as being „an ongoing war between Satan and God within each person,“ and it is common to hear a Samoan account for having violently attacked someone, or for some other antisocial act, by saying „Satan overcame me.“ This kind of character structure, in which the emotionally impulsive is split off from the socially acceptable, makes Samoans particularly prone to dissociated reactions, such as were once displayed by their spirit mediums, and which, as noted earlier in this chapter, are also sometimes evinced in Christian settings.20

A further major expression of this susceptibility to dissociated reactions is a form of possession in which the sickness of an individual is attributed to his or her having been entered by the angry ghost of an ancestor. This condition, which existed in pagan times (it was witnessed by 1836 by Buzacott), has been reported from all parts of Samoa. Holmes, for example, in confirming the occurrence of ma'i aitu in Manu'a, describes it as involving, among other things, the symptoms of delirium and „sudden aimless running about“; while Goodman, writing of

Western Samoa, describes a case in which a boy shouted „bad words“ at the woman who was treating him and then tried to bite her.21

These disturbed behaviors are attributed by Samoans to the anger of the ghost that is possessing the individual. Their way of treating the condition is to hold a seance to discover the cause of this ghost's resentment, and then to placate and thus exorcize it. A person skilled in this task (who may be either male or female) is called a taulasea. The usual way of proceeding is to have the possessed individual drink an herbal potion, drops of which are also often placed in all the orifices of the body. This done, the taulasea addresses the ghost directly, asking why it has come. In a successful seance the ghost replies through the lips of the psychologically dissociated individual, voicing angry complaints at recent happenings within the family, until finally, after promises of rectification and reparation have been made, the placated ghost leaves and the sickness subsides. My own inquiries in both the 1940s and the 1960s indicated that this form of psychological sickness is always associated, as Buzacott noted in 1836, with „some quarrel or ill-natured words“ within , an extended family, and, further, that it tends to occur especially in adolescents who have been subjected to excessive emotional stress. For example, the two cases of ma'i aitu that I investigated in 1943 were of 18- and 19-year-old girls, and the case I studied in detail in 1966 was of an 11-year-old boy, Mu, whose hysterical illness well illustrates the psychodynamics of the ma'i aitu syndrome.22

Some eight months after his birth in 1944, Mu was given in adoption to Moana, the sister of his father, Sami. It was to Moana and her husband, then, that Mu became behaviorally attached. He lived contentedly with them until 1954, when after a searing quarrel between Moana and Sami, he was forcibly taken to his father's household. When he tried to return to his adopted mother, he was repeatedly and heavily punished. In this highly stressful situation Mu finally became hysterical, complaining of pains in his head and body, talking incoherently, and making to bite those who approached him. When a Samoan medical practitioner could find nothing physically wrong with him, he was declared to be stricken with a ma'i aitu. In the seance that followed he was revealed to be possessed by the ghost of his grandmother (whose voice he had often heard as a young child), who, speaking through Mu's lips, so berated Sami for taking his son away from Moana, that Sami broke down and wept, promising then and there to let Mu return to Moana's household, so temporarily resolving the crisis that had led to Mu's illness.23

As this case indicates, the sk^ maj aitu is one in which an individual, having been subjected to excessive stress within the family, develops an hysterical illness. A'fljfa 1 aitu is thus revealed as a pisychopathological consquence of/the stringent authority system in which the young grow up. Although the Samoans have developed their own techniques for Coping with hysterical illness, in seances which allow the source of the trouble to be identified and then rectified without undue threat to the authority system, such illness is nonetheless, for the individuals afflicted by it, a severe psychophysiological disturbance.24

The fact that such hysterical illnesses are endemic to Samoan society, occurring in adolescents as well as in adults, is a further indication that Mead's depiction of Samoa as a place in which there is „no psychological maladjustment“ is in error. Instead, as I have shown in this and earlier chapters, Samoans, as children, adolescents, and adults, live within an authority system the stresses of which regularly result in psychological disturbances ranging from compulsive behaviors and musu states to hysterical illnesses and suicide. ﻿