Page:Margaret Mead - Coming of age in Samoa; a psychological study of primitive youth for western civilisation.pdf/259

 know about the real nature of the calculations involved in room-papering is doubtful. In one or two experiences, the child is given no perspective, no chance to relegate the grotesque and unfamiliar physical details of the life process to their proper place. False impressions, part impressions, repulsion, nausea, horror, grow up about some fact experienced only once under intense emotional stress and in an atmosphere unfavourable to the child's attaining any real understanding.

A standard of reticence which forbids the child any sort of comment upon its experiences makes for the continuance of such false impressions, such hampering emotional attitudes, questions such as, "Why were grandma's lips so blue?" are promptly hushed. In Samoa, where decomposition sets in almost at once, a frank, naïve repugnance to the odours of corruption on the part of all the participants at a funeral robs the physical aspect of death of any special significance. So, in our arrangements, the child is not allowed to repeat his experiences, and he is not permitted to discuss those which he has had and correct his mistakes.

With the Samoan child it is profoundly different. Intercourse, pregnancy, child birth, death, are all familiar occurrences. And the Samoan child experiences them in no such ordered fashion as we, were we to decide for widening the child's experimental field, would regard as essential. In a civilisation which suspects privacy, children of neighbours will be accidental and unemotional spectators in a house where the head