Page:Margaret Mead - Coming of age in Samoa; a psychological study of primitive youth for western civilisation.pdf/255

 The third element in the Samoan pattern of lack of personal relationships and lack of specialised affection, is the case of friendship. Here, most of all, individuals are placed in categories and the response is to the category, "relative," or "wife of my husband's talking chief," or "son of my father's talking chief," or "daughter of my father's talking chief." Consideration of congeniality, of like-mindedness, are all ironed out in favour of regimented associations. Such attitudes we would of course reject completely.

Drawing the threads of this particular discussion together, we may say that one striking difference between Samoan society and our own is the lack of the specialisation of feeling, and particularly of sex feeling, among the Samoans. To this difference is undoubtedly due a part of the lack of difficulty of marital adjustments in a marriage of convenience, and the lack of frigidity or psychic impotence. This lack of specialisation of feeling must be attributed to the large heterogeneous household, the segregation of the sexes before adolescence, and the regimentation of friendship—chiefly along relationship lines. And yet, although we deplore the prices in maladjusted and frustrated lives, which we must pay for the greater specialisation of sex feeling in our own society, we nevertheless vote the development of specialised response as a gain which we would not relinquish. But an examination of these three causal factors suggests that we might accomplish our desired end, the development of a consciousness of