Page:Margaret Mead - Coming of age in Samoa; a psychological study of primitive youth for western civilisation.pdf/316

 lence have worked like a yeast in giving greater personal freedom. As many of the crimes which were formerly punished in this fashion are not recognised as crimes by the new authorities, no new mechanism of punishment has been devised for the man who marries the divorced wife of a man of higher rank, the miscreant who gossips outside his village and so brings his village into disrepute, the insolent detractor who recites another's genealogy, or the naughty boy who removes the straws from the pierced cocoanuts and thus offers an unspeakable affront to visitors. And the Samoan is not in the habit of committing many of the crimes listed in our legal code. He steals and is fined by the government as he was formerly fined by the village. But he comes into very slight conflict with the central authorities. He is too accustomed to taboos to mind a quarantine prohibition which parades under the same guise; too accustomed to the exactions of his relations to fret under the small taxation demands of the government. Even the stern attitude formerly taken by the adults towards precocity has now been subdued, for what is a sin at home becomes a virtue at school.

The new influences have drawn the teeth of the old culture. Cannibalism, war, blood revenge, the life and death power of the matai, the punishment of a man who broke a village edict by burning his house, cutting down his trees, killing his pigs, and banishing his family, the cruel defloration ceremony, the custom of laying waste plantations on the way to a funeral, the enormous loss of life in making long voyages in small canoes, the discomfort due to widespread disease—all these have vanished. And as yet their counterparts in producing misery have not appeared.

Economic instability, poverty, the wage system, the separation of the worker from his land and from his tools, modern warfare, industrial disease, the abolition of leisure, the irksomeness of a bureaucratic government—these have not yet