Page:Margaret Mead - Coming of age in Samoa; a psychological study of primitive youth for western civilisation.pdf/156



ease with which personality differences can be adjusted by a change of residence prevents the Samoans from pressing one another too hard. Their evaluations of personality are a curious mixture of caution and fatalism. There is one word musu which expresses unwillingness and intractability, whether in the mistress who refuses to welcome a hitherto welcome lover, the chief who refuses to lend his kava bowl, the baby who won't go to bed, or the talking chief who won't go on a malaga. The appearance of a musu attitude is treated with almost superstitious respect. Lovers will prescribe formulæ for the treatment of a mistress, "lest she become musu," and the behaviour of the suppliant is carefully orientated in respect to this mysterious undesirability. The feeling seems to be not that one is dealing with an individual in terms of his peculiar preoccupations in order to assure a successful outcome of a personal relationship, appealing now to vanity, now to fear, now to a desire for power, but rather that one is using one or another of a series of potent practices to prevent a mysterious and widespread psychological phenomenon from arising. Once this attitude has appeared, a Samoan habitually gives up the struggle without more