Page:Margaret Mead - Coming of age in Samoa; a psychological study of primitive youth for western civilisation.pdf/208

 still spent the greater proportion of their waking time at home amid conventional surroundings. Unless a girl was given some additional stimulus, such as unusual home conditions, or possessed peculiarities of temperament, she was likely to pass through the school essentially unchanged in her fundamental view of life. She would acquire a greater respect for the church, a preference for slightly more fastidious living, greater confidence in other girls. At the same time the pastor's school offered a sufficient contrast to traditional Samoan life to furnish the background against which deviation could flourish. Girls who left the village and spent several years in the boarding school under the tutelage of white teachers were enormously influenced. Many of them became nurses; the majority married pastors, usually a deviation in attitude, involving as it did, acceptance of a different style of living.

So, while religion itself offered little field for conflict; the institutions promoted by religion might act as stimuli to new choices and when sufficiently reinforced by other conditions might produce a type of girl who deviated markedly from her companions. That the majority of Samoan girls are still unaffected by these influences and pursue uncritically the traditional mode of life is simply a testimony to the resistance of the native culture, which in its present slightly Europeanised state, is replete with easy solutions for all conflicts; and to the apparent fact that adolescent girls in