Page:Margaret Mead - Coming of age in Samoa; a psychological study of primitive youth for western civilisation.pdf/155

 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 Tau 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.