Page:Margaret Mead - Coming of age in Samoa; a psychological study of primitive youth for western civilisation.pdf/306



The scene of this study was the little island of Taū. Along one coast of the island, which rises precipitately to a mountain peak in the centre, cluster three little villages, Lumā and Siufaga, side by side, and Faleasao, half a mile away. On the other end of the island is the isolated village of Fitiuta, separated from the other three villages by a long and arduous trail. Many of the people from the other villages have never been to Fitiuta, eight miles away. Twelve miles across the open sea are the two islands of Ofu and Olesega, which with Taū, make up the Manu'a Archipelago, the most primitive part of Samoa. Journeys in slender outrigger canoes from one of these three little islands to another are frequent, and the inhabitants of Manu'a think of themselves as a unit as over against the inhabitants of Tutuila, the large island where the Naval Station is situated. The three islands have a population of a little over two thousand people, with constant visiting, inter-marrying, adoption going on between the seven villages of the Archipelago.

The natives still live in their beehive-shaped houses with floors of coral rubble, no walls except perishable woven blinds which are lowered in bad weather, and a roof of sugar-cane thatch over which it is necessary to bind palm branches in every storm. They have substituted cotton cloth for their laboriously manufactured bark cloth for use as everyday clothing, native costume being reserved for ceremonial occasions. But the men content themselves with a wide cotton loin cloth, the lavalava, fastened at the waist with a dexterous