Page:Margaret Mead - Coming of age in Samoa; a psychological study of primitive youth for western civilisation.pdf/90

 activity often contain both girls and boys, but here the association principle is simply age discrimination on the part of their elders, rather than voluntary association on the children's part.

These age gangs are usually confined to the children who live in eight or ten contiguous households. They are flexible chance associations, the members of which manifest a vivid hostility towards their contemporaries in neighbouring villages and sometimes towards other gangs within their own village. Blood ties cut across these neighbourhood alignments so that a child may be on good terms with members of two or three different groups. A strange child from another group, provided she came alone, could usually take refuge beside a relative. But the little girls of Siufaga looked askance at the little girls of Lumā, the nearest village and both looked with even greater suspicion at the little girls from Faleasao, who lived twenty minutes' walk away. However, heart burnings over these divisions were very temporary affairs. When Tua's brother was ill, her entire family moved from the far end of Siufaga into the heart of Lumā. For a few days Tua hung rather dolefully about the house, only to be taken in within a week by the central Lumā children with complete amiability. But when she returned some weeks later to Siufaga, she became again "a Siufaga girl," object elect of institutionalised scorn and gibes to her recent companions.