Page:Margaret Mead - Coming of age in Samoa; a psychological study of primitive youth for western civilisation.pdf/92

 more socially enterprising than other children of the same age and in general reflected the socialising effects. of group life. Outside this group, the children of this age had to rely much more upon their immediate relationship group reinforced perhaps by the addition of one or two neighbours. Where the personality of a child stood out it was more because of exceptional home environment than a result of social give-and-take with children of her own age.

Children of this age had no group activities except play, in direct antithesis to the home life where the child's only function was work—baby-tending and the performance of numerous trivial tasks and innumerable errands. They foregathered in the early evening, before the late Samoan supper, and occasionally during the general siesta hour in the afternoon. On moonlight nights they scoured the villages alternately attacking or fleeing from the gangs of small boys, peeking through drawn shutters, catching land crabs, ambushing wandering lovers, or sneaking up to watch a birth or a miscarriage in some distant house. Possessed by a fear of the chiefs, a fear of small boys, a fear of their relatives and by a fear of ghosts, no gang of less than four or five dared to venture forth on these nocturnal excursions. They were veritable groups of little outlaws escaping from the exactions of routine tasks. Because of the strong feeling for relationship and locality, the part played by stolen time, the need for immediately executed group plans, and the punish-