Page:Margaret Mead - Coming of age in Samoa; a psychological study of primitive youth for western civilisation.pdf/49

 bamboo knife and then all wait eagerly for the cord to fall off, the signal for a feast. If the baby is a girl, the cord is buried under a paper mulberry tree (the tree from which bark cloth is made) to ensure her growing up to be industrious at household tasks; for a boy it is thrown into the sea that he may be a skilled fisherman, or planted under a taro plant to give him industry in farming. Then the visitors go home, the mother rises and goes about her daily tasks, and the new baby ceases to be of much interest to any one. The day, the month in which it was born, is forgotten. Its first steps or first word are remarked without exuberant comment, without ceremony. It has lost all ceremonial importance and will not regain it again until after puberty; in most Samoan villages a girl will be ceremonially ignored until she is married. And even the mother remembers only that Losa is older than Tupu, and that her sister’s little boy, Fale, is younger than her brother’s child, Vigo. Relative age is of great importance, for the elder may always command the younger—until the positions of adult life upset the arrangement—but actual age may well be forgotten.

Babies are always nursed, and in the few cases where the mother’s milk fails her, a wet nurse is sought among the kinsfolk. From the first week they are also given other food, papaya, cocoanut [sic] milk, sugar-cane juice; the food is either masticated by the mother and then put into the baby’s mouth on her finger, or if it is