Page:Margaret Mead - Coming of age in Samoa; a psychological study of primitive youth for western civilisation.pdf/219

 Only one other girl in the three villages calls for consideration under this conception of delinquency and she received far less general condemnation than either of the others. This was Sala, who lived in the third village. She lived in a household of seven, consisting of her widowed mother, her younger brother of ten, her grandmother, her uncle and his wife, and their two-year-old son. This presented a fairly well-balanced family group and there were in addition many other relatives close by. Sala had been sent to live in the pastor's house but had speedily got involved in sex offences and been expelled. Her attitude towards this pastor was still one of unveiled hostility. She was stupid, underhanded, deceitful and she possessed no aptitude for the simplest mechanical tasks. Her ineptness was the laughing stock of the village and her lovers. were many and casual, the fathers of illegitimate children, men whose wives were temporarily absent, witless boys bent on a frolic. It was a saying among the girls of the village that Sala was apt at only one art, sex, and that she, who couldn't even sew thatch or weave blinds, would never get a husband. The social attitude towards her was one of contempt, rather than of antagonism, and she had experienced it keenly enough to have sunk very low in her own eyes. She had a sullen furtive manner, lied extravagantly in her assertions of skill and knowledge, and was ever on the alert for slights and possible innuendoes. She came into no serious conflict with her community. Her father