Page:Margaret Mead - Coming of age in Samoa; a psychological study of primitive youth for western civilisation.pdf/169

 guage as the use of a nominative after the verb "to be" in English. They had also not acquired a mastery of the processes for manipulating the vocabulary by the use of very freely combining prefixes and suffixes. A child will use the term fa'a Samoa, "in Samoan fashion," or fa'atama, tomboy, but fail to use the convenient fa'a in making a new and less stereotyped comparison, using instead some less convenient linguistic circumlocution.

All of these children had seen birth and death. They had seen many dead bodies. They had watched miscarriage and peeked under the arms of the old women who were washing and commenting upon the undeveloped fœtus. There was no convention of sending children of the family away at such times, although the hordes of neighbouring children were scattered with a shower of stones if any of the older women could take time. from the more absorbing events to hurl them. But the feeling here was that children were noisy and troublesome; there was no desire to protect them from shock or to keep them in ignorance. About half of the children had seen a partly developed fœtus, which the Samoans fear will otherwise be born as an avenging ghost, cut from a woman's dead body in the open grave. If shock is the result of early experiences with birth, death, or sex activities, it should surely be manifest here in this postmortem Cæsarian where grief for the dead, fear of death, a sense of horror and a dread of