Page:Margaret Mead - Coming of age in Samoa; a psychological study of primitive youth for western civilisation.pdf/176

 group activities through which the normal group standards assert themselves. This was universally true for the boys for whom the many years' apprenticeship in the Aumaga formed an excellent school for disciplining individual peculiarities. In the case of the girls this function was formerly performed in part by the Aualuma, but, as I pointed out in the chapter on the girl and her age group, the little girl is much more dependent upon her neighbourhood than is the boy. As an adult she is also more dependent upon her relationship group.

Tuna, who lived next door to Pele, was in a different plight, the unwilling little victim of the great Samoan sin of tautala laititi. Her sister Lila had eloped at fifteen with a seventeen-year-old boy. A pair of hot-headed children, they had never thoroughly re-established themselves with the community, although their families had relented and solemnised the marriage with an appropriate exchange of property. Lila still smarted under the public disapproval of her precocity and lavished a disproportionate amount of affection upon her obstreperous baby whose incessant crying was the bane of the neighbourhood. After spoiling him beyond endurance, she would hand him over to Tuna. Tuna, a stocky little creature with a large head and enormous melting eyes, looked at life from a slightly oblique angle. She was a little more calculating than the other children, a little more watchful for returns, less given to gratuitous outlays of personal service.