Mid culture world of childhood briefly. Typological model of Margaret Mead culture. Family education among the peoples of the world Questions for discussion: National-ethnic and cultural features of the Western education system
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MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND SCIENCE OF THE RF
FEDERAL STATE BUDGET EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTION
HIGHER PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION
"NOVOSIBIRSK STATE PEDAGOGICAL UNIVERSITY"
PSYCHOLOGY FACULTY
DEPARTMENT OF GENERAL PSYCHOLOGY AND HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY
Abstract
M. Mead “Culture and the world of childhood. Growing up in Samoa"
NOVOSIBIRSK, 2011
Introduction
Over the past hundred years, parents and teachers have ceased to consider childhood and adolescence as something very simple and self-evident. Two factors forced them to re-formulate pedagogical tasks - the growth of scientific psychology, as well as the difficulties and conflicts of adolescence. Psychology has taught that much can be achieved by understanding the nature of children's development, its main stages, and understanding what adults should expect from a two-month-old baby and a two-year-old child. Angry sermons from pulpits, loud complaints from conservatives in social philosophy, reports from juvenile courts and other organizations testified that something must be done with that period of a person’s life that science calls youth. In America, psychologists are doing everything to explain the ferment of youth. As a result, we have works such as “Youth” by Stanley Hall, which see in the puberty period itself the causes of conflicts and dissatisfaction in adolescents. Youth is seen here as the age of the heyday of idealism, as a time of rebellion against authority, as a period of life in which difficulties of adaptation and conflicts are absolutely inevitable.
Mothers are warned that daughters between the ages of thirteen and nineteen are especially difficult. This, theorists say, is a transitional age. The physical changes taking place in the bodies of your boys and girls are accompanied by certain mental changes. They are as impossible to avoid as it is impossible to prevent physiological changes. Just as your daughter's body changes from the body of a child to the body of a woman, spiritual changes inevitably occur, and they happen rapidly. Theorists look around them at the teenagers in our civilization and repeat with conviction: “Yes, vigorously.” Such views, although not supported by the findings of experimental science, became widespread, influenced our pedagogical theory, and paralyzed our parental efforts. When a baby is teething, the mother must put up with his crying. In the same way, she must arm herself with maximum composure and patiently endure the unpleasant and stormy manifestations of “adolescence.” But gradually another path of science about human development was established - the path of the ethnographer, the researcher of people in a wide variety of social environments. Neither race nor general human nature can determine what form even such fundamental human emotions as love, fear, anger will take in different social environments.
We wanted to explore the influence of civilization on human development during puberty. In order to study it in the most rigorous way, we would have to construct different types of different civilizations and expose large groups of adolescents to different environments. We would vary one factor while leaving others completely unchanged. But we are denied such ideal experimental conditions. The selective method is also unlawful - selecting from our own civilization groups of children who satisfy one or another requirement.
The only possible method for us is the ethnographer's method, turning to another civilization and studying people living in another culture in some other part of the world. The subject of our study is primitive groups that have behind them thousands of years of historical development along paths completely different from ours. That is why, while exploring the problem of youth, M. Mead decided not to go to either Germany or Russia, but went to Samoa, one of the islands in the Pacific Ocean, located 13 degrees from the equator and inhabited by dark-skinned Polynesian people. M. Mead delved into the study of girls in this society. She carefully studied the home environment in which these teenage girls lived. Describing the life of Samoan girls, M. Mead always asked herself the question: are the problems that trouble our teenagers a product of adolescence as such, or are they a product of civilization? Would the teenager behave differently in other settings?
This description purports to do more than just highlight one specific issue. It should also give the reader some idea of a different civilization, a different way of life. Each primitive people chose for itself one set of human abilities, one set of human values and reshaped them in art, social organization, and religion. This is the uniqueness of his contribution to the history of the human spirit.
1. Day in Samoa
Life here begins at dawn. After a disturbing night full of ghosts, boys and girls cheerfully call to each other. The whole village, sleepy, unkempt, begins to stir, rub their eyes and, stumbling, wander towards the shore. The girls stop to giggle about a certain young slacker who ran away from his angry father last night, and confidently declare that this father's daughter knows something about where he is hiding now. The young man grapples with the rival who has driven him out of his beloved’s heart, and their feet get stuck in the wet sand. Children beg for food, older girls go fishing. Everyone is preparing for the meal. If today is a cooking day, and young people in the midday heat are quickly preparing lunch for their elders.
Noon. The village is sleepy and dead. Any sound seems strangely loud and out of place. Words have great difficulty breaking through the heat. But the sun gradually sets into the sea.
The sleepers wake up, perhaps awakened by the cry of “Boat!” that echoes through the village. Fishermen return from fishing with their catch. The echo carries throughout the village soft clapping of hands and the loud voice of the chief offering kava (evening drink). Evening. Everyone is doing their own thing to their heart's content, families are gathering in their houses, getting ready for dinner. First the head of the house, then the women and children, and finally the patient older boys eat their supper. If there is a guest, he is served dinner first.
After dinner, the elderly and young children are escorted to bed. If young people have guests, then the front part of the house is given to them. “Night is reserved for more frivolous matters.” If the moon shines brightly, young couples may stay up past midnight. The village sleeps until dawn.
2. Raising a Samoan child
Birthdays are not important in Samoa. But the birth of a child in a high-ranking family requires a big celebration and significant expenses. A woman must give birth to her first child in her home village. They bring food to the expectant mother, relatives on the maternal side are busy with the dowry for the newborn - they make white bast cloth for his clothes, weave several hefty small mats from pandanus leaves for the dowry. The expectant mother goes to her native village heavily laden with food as a gift to her relatives. When she is about to leave for her husband’s village, her relatives give her an equal number of mats and cloth as a gift to her husband’s relatives. During childbirth, any number of people can be present; the woman should not object to this, but squirm or scream. The midwife cuts the umbilical cord with a new bamboo knife, and then everyone waits impatiently for the placenta to come out, the signal for the celebration to begin. A girl's umbilical cord is buried under a mulberry tree, a boy's umbilical cord is buried under a taro or thrown into the sea. Then the guests disperse and everyone proceeds to their usual affairs. Immediately after birth, the child loses its ceremonial significance and regains it only after the end of puberty. Relative age is of great importance, but actual age can be completely forgotten.
Babies are always breastfed, except in rare cases when the mother loses milk (in this case, a relative). The child is also fed papaya, coconut milk, sugar cane juice: the mother chews the food and gives it to the child on her finger, or, if the food is liquid, moistens a piece of bast cloth with it and lets the child suck on it. Children are given food whenever they start crying. Once they are weaned, they are usually placed in the care of some little girl in the family. They are often washed with wild orange juice and rubbed with coconut oil until their skin shines.
The main nanny is usually a girl of six or seven years old. Little nannies do not encourage him to walk, since a walking child requires more trouble. Children begin to walk earlier than they talk. Children under three or four years old prefer to crawl rather than walk, since all housekeeping in Samoan villages is done on the floor.
A child under 4-5 years old must:
be absolutely obedient;
be able to sit or crawl around the house, but he is supposed to get up on his feet only in case of emergency;
do not address adults while standing;
do not go out in the sun;
do not confuse fibers prepared for weaving;
do not scatter coconuts folded to dry on the floor;
to ensure that his skimpy dress would at least nominally fit him;
handle knives and fire with due care;
Do not touch the kava bowl under any circumstances.
All these, of course, are simply prohibitions, reinforced from time to time by spanking, loud, irritated screams and ineffective suggestions.
The responsibility to punish disobedient people usually falls on children who are not much older in age. By the age of sixteen or seventeen, all these admonitions and warnings leave an indelible mark on the language of Samoan boys and girls. Every two minutes they insert into their speech remarks like “Be quiet!”, “Sit!”, “Shut up!”, “Stop making noise!” No mother will bother herself with the upbringing of her youngest child if there is some older child who can be entrusted with this responsibility. In Samoa, as soon as a child grows to an age where his willfulness becomes intolerable, the care of the younger one is entrusted to his shoulders. By the age of six or seven, a girl has mastered the main prohibitions well, and therefore she can be entrusted with caring for the youngest. By this time, everyone has developed a number of simple housekeeping skills. But for a little girl, all these services are just an addition to her main job, her duties as a nanny. Very young boys are also expected to care for younger children, but by the age of eight or nine they are usually relieved of this.
The upbringing of girls is less comprehensive than the upbringing of boys: boys not only go through the disciplined school of babysitting, but also quickly receive ample opportunities to learn to cooperate effectively under the guidance of their older comrades. Girls have a highly developed sense of individual responsibility, but their environment teaches them little about effective cooperation. This is especially noticeable when young people hold some kind of joint event: boys organize quickly, and girls, not accustomed to any quick and effective methods of cooperation, spend hours squabbling.
As soon as the girl gains sufficient physical strength to carry heavy loads, it is in the interests of the family to shift the care of small children to the shoulders of her younger sister, and the teenage girl is relieved of the duties of a nanny. The irritating, petty routine of housekeeping, which in our civilization is blamed for destroying the souls and embittering grown women, in Samoa falls on the shoulders of children of fourteen years of age.
Before her release from nanny duties, the little girl had virtually no opportunity to acquire complex work skills. Now they have to learn a lot:
weave all kinds of baskets for ourselves
choose taro leaves suitable for boiling
dig up only mature tubers of this plant
in the kitchen they learn to cook with palus
wrap large fish in palm leaves or wrap a bunch of small fish in a wide breadfruit leaf, etc.
As soon as they begin to look at a girl as a creature capable of some kind of long-term and purposeful activity, she, along with adults, is sent to the ocean for fish.
Until now, her knowledge of the plant world had mostly been related to games. Now she must get to know all these trees and plants, with more serious goals in mind. For example, she must know when pandanus leaves are ready to be harvested and how those long leaves can be cut with one swift, sure stroke of the knife. She must be able to distinguish between the three types of pandanus, since the quality of her mats will depend on this. At home, the girl’s main task is to learn to weave. Usually an elderly relative teaches a girl how to weave, making sure that she knows how to make all types of wickerwork. When a girl turns thirteen or fourteen years old, she begins to weave her first ceremonial mat. The ceremonial mat is the highest achievement of Samoan virtuosity in weaving. During all this time of more or less systematic training, the girl very subtly maneuvers between the reputation of a student who has successfully mastered the necessary minimum skill, and the fame of a virtuoso, which would bring her too much trouble. Her chances of marriage would be greatly harmed if a rumor spread through the village that she was lazy and incompetent at housework.
At the age of seventeen or eighteen, the young man is sent to the aumanga, a society of young and old untitled men, which, not figuratively, but simply in honor of it, is called “the strength of the village.” Here competition, teaching and example spur his activity. The old leaders who direct the activities of the aumanga look with equal disapproval at any lag and at any excessive precocity. The young man hopes that the future will bring him the title of matai, a title given to a member of the Fono - the assembly of heads of families. This title gives him the right to drink kava with the leaders, to work with them and not with the youth, the right to sit in the community house in the presence of the elders, although it is “intermediate” in nature and does not carry with it the fullness of character. But only in very rare cases can he be absolutely sure of receiving this title. But all this is constantly accompanied by the requirement: do not be too skillful, too outstanding, too precocious. You should only be slightly superior to your comrades. There is no need to arouse either their hatred or the disapproval of their elders, who would rather encourage the dismissal than reconcile with the upstart. And at the same time, the young man understands well the reluctance of his sisters to take on the burden of responsibility. If he hurries slowly, without being too conspicuous, then he has a good chance of becoming a leader. If he is talented enough, the Fono itself may think of him, finding him and granting him a vacant title so that he can sit among the old men and learn wisdom. The boy therefore faces a more difficult choice than the girl. He does not like responsibility, and at the same time he wants to stand out in his group; skill in some matter will hasten the day when he becomes a leader; and yet he is punished and scolded if he slackens in his efforts; but he is also severely condemned if he moves forward very quickly; and he must be respected among his companions if he is to win the heart of his sweetheart. On the other hand, his social prestige is increased by his amorous exploits.
That is why a girl calms down after receiving a “mediocre” grade, while a young man is spurred on to greater efforts. A young man shuns a girl who has not received evidence of her usefulness and is considered stupid and inept. But the girl is seventeen and doesn’t want to get married, not yet. After all, it is better to live as a girl, to live without bearing any responsibility, to live experiencing all the richness and diversity of feelings. This is the best period of her life.
3. Samoan family
A Samoan village numbers thirty or forty families. Each of them is headed by an elder called matai. At official village meetings, each matai has the right to a seat that belongs only to him and represents all members of his family. He is responsible for them. These families consist of all individuals who have lived for a certain time under the protection of a common matai. Their composition varies from a small family, which includes only parents and children, to families consisting of fifteen to twenty members, that is, to large families related to the matai or his wife by blood, marriage or adoption, often without any close family ties together. Adopted family members are usually, although not necessarily, close relatives.
Widows and widowers, especially those without children, usually return to their blood relatives, but a married couple may live with both the in-laws and the in-laws. But a person permanently residing in another village cannot be considered a member of the family, since the latter is a strictly local unit of Samoan society.
Within a family, age rather than kinship gives disciplinary power. The matai has formal and often real power over every member of the family under his leadership, even over his own father and mother. The extent of this power, of course, depends on his personal characteristics, but everyone is strictly careful that some ceremonial forms of recognition of his dominant position are observed. The youngest child in a family of this kind is subordinate to all the other members, and his position does not improve one iota with age until the next youngest child is born. This process has the force of strict law. A girl's marriage gives her almost nothing in this regard. Only one thing will change: the number of sweet and obedient subordinates will be increased in the most pleasant way for her by her own children. Any older relative has the right to demand personal services from his younger relatives from other families, the right to criticize their behavior and interfere in their affairs. This loosely defined but nonetheless demanding kin group is not without its merits. Within its boundaries, any three-year-old child can wander in complete safety, confident that everywhere he will be given food and drink, put to sleep, that everywhere there will be a kind hand to wipe his tears or bandage a wound.
The distribution of ranks according to age is violated only in very rare cases. In every village one or two high chiefs have the hereditary right to elevate some girl of their family to the rank of taupou, the ceremonial princess of the house. Older women respectfully call her the title when addressing her. There are only two or three taupou for the whole village. This extraordinary increase in importance is accompanied by a fear of inadvertently hurting family ties, which is expressed in additional respect for the girl’s personality. Very few children live in the same house all the time. Most of them are constantly trying other possible places of residence. And all this can be done under the pretext of visiting, without causing any reproaches for avoiding family responsibilities. No Samoan child, except taupou and hardened juvenile delinquents, ever feels cornered. He always has relatives to run away to.
The most important kinship relationships in the Samoan family, the ones that most influence the lives of young people, are those between boys and girls who call each other “brother” or “sister” and the relationships between younger and older relatives. Relatives of the opposite sex in their communication with each other are guided by the rules of the strictest etiquette. After they reach the age at which decency must be observed, in this case nine or ten years old, they do not dare touch each other, sit next to each other, eat together, address each other casually, or mention anything in each other’s presence. there were no obscenities. They cannot be together in any other house except their own.
Tei, a word for a younger relative, emphasizes another human connection. The first manifestations of a girl's maternal instincts are never poured out on her own children, but on one of her younger relatives. The word ainga generally covers all relationships of kinship - blood, marriage, kinship by adoption, but its emotional meaning remains the same in all cases.
Any relative is considered as a person against whom many demands can be made. At the same time, this is a person in relation to whom there are just as many obligations. Refusal to help will brand the person refusing as a stingy, unkind person, and kindness is a virtue valued above all else by Samoans. At the moment when services of this kind are provided, no return is required, unless we are talking about sharing the products of family labor. But careful accounting of the value of the property given away or the service rendered is kept, and donations are demanded at the first suitable occasion.
Obligations to come to the rescue in general or to provide a service required by custom, as in the case of a wedding or the birth of a child, are determined by broad family relationships, and not by the narrow boundaries of the family hearth. Only in families of high rank, where the female line has priority in making certain decisions and in choosing the taupou - princess of the house, and the male line in the transmission of titles, does actual consanguinity continue to be of great practical importance.
A matai of any family is, in principle, exempt from performing minor household chores. But in practice this almost never happens, except for a high-ranking leader. However, he is assigned the role of leader in any type of work. All work is carefully distributed according to age - according to the ability of a person at a given age to complete them. Except among people of very high rank, an adult may reject a particular job simply because it can be done by younger people, and not because it is beneath him.
If the girl’s father is a matai, the matai of her family, then his position does not affect her in any way. But if another family member is a matai, then he can protect the girl from the excessive demands of her own father. In the first case, her disagreements with her father lead to her leaving her own home and going to live with relatives; in the second, minor family tensions arise.
And yet, rank, not by birth, but by title, is very important in Samoa. The status of an entire village depends on the rank of its main chief, the prestige of a family on the title of its matai. These titles have two gradations - leader and speaker; each of them carries with him many responsibilities and rights in addition to the responsibility of the head of the family.
In many families, the shadow of noble birth is cast over the lives of children - sometimes easily, sometimes painfully; imposed long before they are old enough to understand the meaning of these values.
4. Girl and her age group
Until the age of six or seven, a girl communicates very little with her peers. But around the age of seven, large groups begin to form, a kind of voluntary partnerships, which subsequently disintegrate. These groups include children of relatives and neighborhood children. They are strictly divided along gender lines, and hostility between little girls and boys is one of the most noticeable features of the life of these groups. These children's groups usually consist of children from eight or ten neighboring houses. These are all fluid, random communities, clearly hostile to their peers in other villages or even to similar groups in their own. Strong friendships never form at this age. The structure of the group is clearly dominated by kinship or neighborly relationships, with the individual in the background. The strongest attachments always arise between close relatives, and a couple of little sisters take the place of our bosom girlfriends in Samoa. The emotional tone towards the residents of another village leads to the fact that even two cousins from different villages glance at each other sideways. Children of this age, gathering in groups, only play; they have no other activities. And in this respect, being in a group is diametrically opposed to the home life of a Samoan girl, where she only works: babysits children, performs countless simple household chores. The girls gather in groups early in the evening, before the late Samoan dinner, and sometimes during the general afternoon siesta.
On moonlit nights they run around the village, either attacking or fleeing from gangs of boys, spying on what is happening in the houses behind the curtain-mats, catching shore crabs, ambushing unwary lovers, or sneaking up to some distant house to look at childbirth, and maybe a miscarriage. Obsessed with fear of the village elders, of little boys, of their own relatives, of night ghosts, they will not risk going on their nocturnal adventures unless there are four or five of them. But these whimsically emerging communities of girls were only possible between the ages of eight and twelve. As puberty approaches, and as the girl gains physical strength and acquires new skills, she is again consumed by household chores. Her days are filled with long work and new responsibilities. After 17 years, girls no longer gather in groups of friends. Now similar sexual interests and family relationships come first. If someone dear to her heart has a bosom friend who is not indifferent to her cousin, then a passionate, albeit transient, friendship arises between these relatives. Sometimes friendships of this kind extend beyond the purely kinship group. Although girls at this time may only confide in one or two of their young female relatives, their changed sexual status is felt by other women in the village.
Little boys follow the same pattern as little girls, forming gangs based on the double ties of neighborhood and kinship. The feeling of age superiority is always stronger here. Between boys there are two institutionalized forms of relationship, designated by the same word, which, perhaps, at one time defined the same relationship (coa). Boys are circumcised in pairs, and they themselves organize this ritual, finding an old man famous for his skill in this matter.
The choice of a comrade by a boy who has already reached puberty two or three years ago is also determined by custom: a young man very rarely speaks about his love and never asks a girl to marry him. He needs a friend of about his own age whom he can trust to sing his madrigals and carry the matter forward with the required ardor and care. Friendship is often, but not necessarily, based on mutual favors. The love expert, when the time comes, frees himself from the services of an intermediary, wanting to fully enjoy the sweet fruits of all stages of courtship.
Aualuma is an organization of young girls and untitled wives - an extremely loose partnership, gathering for very rare community work and for even more rare celebrations. At the same time, the aumanga - an organization of young people - occupies too large a place in the village economy to be eliminated with the same ease. Indeed, the aumaiga is the most stable social formation of the village. Matai meetings are a more formal organization, as they spend most of their time with their families.
It can be said that as an organizing principle, friendships based on age end for girls before the onset of puberty, their household responsibilities are very individual and they need to hide their love affairs. For boys the opposite is true: their greater freedom, the more obligatory nature of the organization of their groups, their constant participation in social labor give rise to age groups that persist throughout life. Kinship has a certain, but not decisive, influence on the organization of such groups. The solidarity of these groups is negatively affected by differences in the ranks of their members, different claims of young people for a future position in society, and different ages of people of equal rank.
6. Accepted forms of sexual relations
The first thing a little girl learns in her relationships with boys is a desire to avoid them and a sense of antagonism. After she is eight or nine years old, she will never go near a group of older boys. Children aged 13-14 outgrow the framework of same-sex age groups and age-related sexual antagonism. However, they do not yet have an active sexual consciousness. When teenagers get together, they have a fun romp, without experiencing the slightest embarrassment, good-naturedly teasing each other.
In two or three years, all this will change. The first independent love experiments of adolescents, as well as the Don Juan adventures of adult men among the girls of the village, are options that are on the very edge of permitted types of sexual behavior. This also includes the first experiences of a young man with a woman of a more mature age. More recently, this is extremely common, so the success of these experiments is rarely hampered by the mutual inexperience of the partners. Yet these forms of behavior lie outside the boundaries of recognized sexual norms. The worst deviations from the recognized forms of sexual relations, however, are the love of a man for some young woman who is dependent on him from his own family, a child he has adopted, or the younger sisters of his wife. Everyone starts screaming about incest, and feelings sometimes become so heated that the perpetrator is forced to leave his own home.
Apart from official marriage, there are only two other types of sexual relations that are fully approved by Samoan society: love affairs between unmarried young people (including widowed people) and adultery.
Among young people, before marriage, there are three forms of love relationships: secret dates “under the palm trees,” open flight with the beloved—avanga—and ceremonial courtship, when “the boy sits in front of the girl.” Beyond all this is a curious form of stealth violence called moetotolo: a young man who does not enjoy the favor of any girl creeps up on the sleeping people at night.
In all three accepted forms of love affairs, the young man needs a confidant and messenger, whom he calls soa. Soa behaves in the same way as the speaker: he demands certain material benefits from his master in exchange for intangible services rendered to him. If his mediation leads to marriage, the groom is obliged to give him a particularly beautiful gift. One overly cautious and disappointed lover said: “I had five soas, and only one of them turned out to be true.”
Among possible candidates for the position of coa, preference is most often given to two figures - a brother and some girl. A brother by his very nature must be faithful. The girl is more dexterous in these matters. But the best suited for the position of soa is a female envoy - “soafafine”. However, it is difficult to get any woman to fill this position. The young man cannot choose her from among his relatives. The strongest enmity is between a young man and a soa who betrayed him, or between a lover and his beloved friend, who somehow interfered with his courtship.
In such a love affair, the lover never shows himself in the house of his beloved. Only his companion can go there, either with some group, or under a fictitious pretext. His task is to get her to agree to a date. Love affairs of this kind are usually very short-lived, and both a boy and a girl can have several of them at the same time. According to the native theory, sterility is a punishment for promiscuity; conversely, it is a common belief that only stable monogamy is rewarded with conception.
Often a girl is afraid to leave the house at night, because the night is full of ghosts and devils. Then the lover bravely sneaks into the house. Taking off his lavalayu, he rubs coconut oil all over his body. The date takes place in absolute silence, and he must leave until the morning so that no one can see or hear him.
Moetotolo is the only sexual activity that represents a clear deviation from the usual pattern of sexual relations. Violence in the form of brutal assault on a woman has occurred from time to time in Samoa since the islanders' first contact with white civilization. If the girl suspects deception or becomes indignant, she will raise a terrible cry, and the whole family will rush in pursuit. Moetotolo fishing is considered an exciting sport.
There are most often two motives behind the behavior of a moetotolo - anger and love failure. A Samoan girl flirting with boys does not do so without risk. Some young men cannot achieve their beloved by any legal means, and there is no prostitution, excluding guest prostitution, in Samoa. But some of the young men who brought mototolo into disrepute were the most charming and handsome youths of the village. Moetotolo becomes the laughing stock of the entire village and must achieve the title in order to be able to choose again. Homosexuality is, to some extent, a way out of this “loveless” situation.
Between these adventures in the most literal sense of the word and the formal marriage proposal, there is also some middle form of courtship, in which the boy encourages the girl to express her feelings. Since this form is considered a preliminary step towards marriage, both kinship groups must more or less approve of this union. Soa, meanwhile, noisily and skillfully courtes the girl, whispering to her at the same time odes of praise in honor of his friend.
He who declares his love risks taking a thorny path. The girl doesn’t want to get married or break off her love affairs in the name of an official engagement. Now that the whole village knows that he is seeking her hand, the girl indulges her vanity, neglecting him, and becomes capricious. The official marriage ceremony is postponed until the boy's family has raised and collected enough food, and the girl's family has prepared a sufficient amount of dowry - tapas and mats.
This is how the love affairs of ordinary young people from the same village or young people of plebeian origin from neighboring villages are handled. These free and easy love experiments are not allowed by taupou. Custom demands that she be a virgin. Although the virginity test ceremony should always be observed at weddings of people of all ranks, it is simply bypassed.
The attitude towards virginity in Samoa is quite funny. Christianity brought with it, of course, the moral encouragement of chastity. Samoans treat it with respect, although with complete skepticism, and the concept of celibacy is absolutely meaningless for them. Virginity certainly adds something to a girl's attractiveness.
The prestige of the groom and his relatives, the bride and her relatives increases in the case of her virginity, so that a girl of high rank, hastening to part with her virginity before the wedding and thereby avoid a painful public ceremony, would encounter not only the watchful supervision of her older relatives, but also to the groom's ambition. If secret and casual “love under the palm trees” as an expression of disordered sexual intercourse is characteristic of people of modest social origin, then bride kidnapping finds its prototype in the love stories of taupou and the daughters of other leaders. These girls of noble birth are carefully guarded. Secret meetings at night or secret meetings during the day are not for them. The leader instructs some old woman from his family to be his daughter’s constant companion, a duenna. Taupou should not visit and should not be left alone at night. Some older woman always sleeps next to her. She is strictly forbidden to go to another village unaccompanied. Tradition requires the taupou to find a groom outside her own village - to marry a high chief or manaia of another village. No one pays any attention to the opinions and feelings of the girl herself.
During all this time, the wooing leader leaves his speaker in his place in the bride's house - the equivalent of a more modest soa. This commissioner has one of the best opportunities of his life to get rich. He remains here as an emissary of his leader to observe the behavior of the bride. He works for her family, and every week the matai at home must reward him with a nice gift. A young man from another village, having escaped from the taupou of a rival community, gains the loudest fame. After her flight, the marriage contract is certainly dissolved, although the angry relatives of the taupou may not approve of her new marriage plans and, as punishment, marry her off to the old man.
So great is the honor that accrues to a village where one of its young inhabitants has succeeded in stealing a taupou that the efforts of a whole malanga are often concentrated on making such an escape.
It is very rare that a girl from an ordinary family is supervised with such strictness as to make kidnapping the only possible way to end a love affair. But the kidnapping itself is spectacular; the young man is not averse to raising his prestige as a successful Don Juan, and the girl wants everyone to know about her victory, and often hopes that the kidnapping will lead to marriage. The runaway couple rushes to the boy’s parents or to some other relative of his and waits for the girl’s relatives to demand her back. Kidnappings are much less common than secret love affairs because the girl is at greater risk.
Kidnapping becomes practical when one of the families opposes the marriage that the young people have decided on. The couple finds refuge in a family that is favorable to their union. If their marriage is legalized, this stigma will remain on them forever. The community does not approve of a couple of young upstarts breaking the rules.
Romantic love in the form in which it is found in our civilization is inextricably linked with the ideals of monogamy, monogamy, jealousy, and unbreakable fidelity. This kind of love is unknown to Samoans. Marriage, on the other hand, is seen as a social and economic transaction in which the wealth, social status and skills of the future husband and wife must be taken into account in their relationship to each other. There are many marriages in Samoa in which both partners, especially if they are over thirty, are completely faithful to each other. This fidelity cannot be explained by passionate attachment to a spouse. The decisive factor here is the suitability of the partners for each other and expediency.
Adultery in Samoa does not necessarily mean the end of a marriage. The chief's wife, who commits adultery, is condemned for dishonoring her high position and is banished. The leader will be extremely indignant if she marries a man of lower rank for the second time. If her lover is considered more guilty, then the village will take upon itself the right of public retribution. In less noticeable cases of adultery, the degree of public outrage depends on the difference in the social status of the offender and the offended, or on individual feelings of jealousy, which arise only in rare cases. If the offended husband or offended wife is too deeply offended and threatens the offender with physical violence, then the culprit must resort to public ifonga - ceremonial repentance to the one from whom he asks for forgiveness.
If, on the other hand, the wife really gets tired of her husband or the husband gets tired of his wife, then divorce in Samoa is very simple and informal: one of the spouses living in the other’s family simply returns to his parental home, and the relationship is considered “past.” " Monogamy in Samoa is very fragile, it is often violated and even more often abandoned completely.
In theory, a woman in a family submits to her husband and serves him, although, of course, there are often husbands who are under the thumb of their wives. The social rank of a wife never exceeds the rank of her husband, because it always directly depends on the rank of the husband. Her family may be richer and more famous than his. Her actual influence on village affairs, through her blood relations, may be much greater than his, but in the circle of her present family and in the village she is always tausi, the speaker's wife, or faletua, the chief's wife. This sometimes leads to conflict. It depends on where she lives.
7. The role of dance
Dancing is the only activity in which almost all ages and both sexes take part.
There are no professional dance teachers here, there are virtuosos. Dancing is a very individual activity, carried out as part of an event in the community (from 12 to 20 people). The main reasons for the holiday:
the arrival of two or three young people from another village;
It's at small, casual dance parties that children learn to dance. The number of songs performed is small; young people in the village rarely know more than a dozen melodies and twice as many song lyrics, which are sung now to one tune, now to another. The verse here is based on the equality of the number of syllables; It is allowed to change the stress in the word, rhyme is not required. The content of the song can be extremely personal and include many jokes about individuals and their villages. The form of audience participation in the dance depends on the age of the dancers. At these dance festivals, young children are dragged onto the stage with almost no prior preparation. Even as babies, sitting in the arms of their mothers, they get used to clapping their hands at such evenings. The rhythm is indelibly imprinted on their minds. Two and three year olds stand on mats in the house and clap their hands when the adults sing. Then they are required to dance in front of the audience themselves. While children dance, boys and girls decorate their clothes with flowers, necklaces made of shells, and bracelets made of leaves. One or two girls may sneak out of the house and return dressed in pretty skirts made of bast. A bottle of coconut oil comes from the family closet and the adult dancers lubricate their bodies with it. The form of the dance itself is very individual. The dance comes in three styles:
buffoonish.
A little girl who learns to dance has these three styles to choose from, twenty-five to thirty figures from which she must be able to compose her dance, and, finally, and most importantly, she has role models - individual dancers. The style of any more or less virtuoso dancer is known throughout the village, and when copied, the imitation immediately catches the eye. Imitations are not considered something vicious, but they also do not bring glory to the author.
Dance Meaning:
Dance effectively compensates for the child’s system of strict subordination in which he constantly finds himself. Here the adults’ command: “Sit and be silent!” is replaced by the command: “Get up and dance!” In their dance there is not even the slightest semblance of coordination of partners, subordination of the wings of the group of dancers to its center.
Participation in dancing lowers the threshold of shyness. A child in Samoa, suffering and tormented, still dances. A girl's grace and composure in dancing do not extend into everyday life as easily as it does in boys.
These informal dance evenings are closer to our pedagogical methods than all other aspects of Samoan pedagogy: it is in dancing that the precocious child is constantly encouraged, creating more and more opportunities for him to show his skills. The inferiority complex is based on two sources: awkwardness in sexual relations and awkwardness in dancing.
The highest sign of politeness of a chief towards his guest is to make the taupou dance for him. Boys dance after getting tattooed, manaia dances before going to the wedding, and the bride dances at her wedding. At midnight gatherings in Malanga, dancing often takes on an openly obscene and exciting character.
8. Attitude to the individual
A simple change of residence excludes the Samoans from the very possibility of very strong oppression of one person by another. Their assessments of human personality are a curious mixture of precautionary behavior and fatalism. They have a word - musu, which means a person’s reluctance and intransigence. Manifestations of musu in humans are treated with almost superstitious reverence. Samoans are not deaf to differences between people. But the completeness of their assessment of these differences is hampered by the theory of a certain general stubborn reluctance, the tendency to mistake resentment, irritation, intractability, and some particular partialities as simply multiple forms of manifestation of the same attitude—musa. The lack of interest in the motives of behavior is also facilitated by the fact that it is customary to answer any personal question completely vaguely (“Ta But” - “Who knows”). Sometimes this answer is supplemented by a clarifying answer: “I don’t know.” This answer is considered quite sufficient and acceptable in any conversation, although its harshness precludes its use on solemn ceremonial occasions. If a person falls ill, then an explanation for his illness is sought in the attitude of his relatives towards him. Anger against him in the heart of one of them, especially a sister, is the strongest cause of evil.
How this attitude protects the individual is easy to understand if we remember how little here everyone is left to himself. There is virtually no inviolability of personal property. But in general, the whole village knows well what each of its residents is doing. The Samoan language does not have special grammatical comparative forms. Relative quality, relative beauty, relative wisdom - all this is unfamiliar to them. They have less difficulty distinguishing between the degrees of bad than good. When describing another person, the sequence of characteristics mentioned always fit into the same objective system: gender, age, rank, family ties, defects, occupation. If your interlocutor is a very smart adult, then he can give an assessment to the person, which you need to specifically ask for. In accordance with the local classification, the psychological characteristics of a person are divided into four characteristics that form pairs: “good - bad” and “easy - difficult”.
Expressions of emotion are classified as “caused by something” or “uncaused.” A well-adapted individual who has sufficiently internalized the opinions, emotions and attitudes of his age and sex group will never be accused of laughing, crying or getting angry without reason. If a person deviates from the norm in temperament: his behavior will be subject to the most careful analysis and will cause contempt.
One of the most disliked traits in a peer is expressed by the word “fiasili” - literally “wants to be above everyone else”, or, more briefly, “arrogant”. They are interested in a person primarily in his actions, without in any way trying to penetrate the depths of the motives of his behavior.
An assessment of a person is always given in terms of age group - both the age group of the speaker and the age of the person being assessed. And the speaker’s assessments are influenced by his age, so assessments of a person’s strengths and weaknesses change with the age of the assessors. In adult assessments, norms of behavior are correlated with age as follows: young children should be quiet, get up early, obey, work hard and joyfully, play with children of the same sex; young people should be hardworking and skillful in their work, not be upstarts, show prudence in marriage, loyalty to their relatives, not gossip, not hooligans; adults must be wise, peace-loving, serene, generous, caring for the good name of their village, they must lead their lives in compliance with all the rules of decency.
9. Our pedagogical problems in the light of Samoan antitheses
In we met girls going through the same process of physiological development as ours. That is why here one could say: “These are the most suitable conditions for our experiment.” The developing girl is a constant factor in both America and Samoa; The civilizations of America and Samoa are different from each other. With the exception of physiological changes, we did not find any other significant differences that would distinguish the group of girls going through puberty from the group that will mature after two years, or from the group that went through this period two years ago.
The recipe for educators recommending special pedagogical tactics for dealing with teenage girls, applied to Samoan conditions, would be: tall girls are different from short girls of the same age, and we must use different methods in their education.
What, then, does Samoa have that America doesn't, and what does America have that Samoa doesn't, on what basis could one explain the difference in behavioral expression of adolescence? Two main components of the reason for this
specifically Samoan conditions;
living conditions of primitive society in general.
The Samoan background, which makes the growth of children so easy and such a simple matter, is the general spontaneous character of the whole society. Here no one suffers for their beliefs or fights to the death in the name of certain goals. The conflict between parents and child here is resolved by the child moving to live on the other side of the street, between the village and the adult by the fact that the adult leaves for the neighboring village, between the husband and the seducer of his wife by several pairs of finely made mats. Neither poverty nor major misfortunes threaten these people, and therefore they do not struggle so frantically for life and do not tremble with fear of the future. No merciless gods, quick in anger and harsh in vengeance, disturb the smooth flow of their lives. Wars and cannibalism are a thing of the past a long time ago, and now the biggest reason for tears, if not death itself, is a trip to visit relatives on another island. Here no one is in a hurry in life and no one is punished for falling behind. On the contrary, here the gifted, developed beyond their age, are held back so that the slowest can catch up with them. And in the personal relationships of Samoans, we do not see strong attachments. Love and hate, jealousy and revenge, sadness and bereavement - all this is only for weeks. From the first month of his life, a child, passed from one random female hand to another, learns a lesson: do not become very attached to one person, do not have very high expectations with any of your relatives. This is where the main reason for the painless transformation of a Samoan girl into a woman lies. Where no one experiences deep feelings, the teenager will not be tormented by tragic situations.
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IPART. INTRODUCTION
Margaret Mead (1901–1978) is an outstanding American ethnographer of the 20th century, a talented researcher who stood at the origins of a new science, cultural anthropology. Influenced by the famous American anthropologists of her time, Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict, she began active field work in 1925 and visited a number of little-studied but extremely interesting countries from an ethnographic point of view, including Polynesia and Samoa. In the process of studying the cultural heritage of these countries, Mead paid great attention to the peculiarities of personality development in a traditional society, to the close relationship between the laws of a particular culture and the psychology of different age groups included in it. She reflected the progress and results of her many years of research in a number of scientific monographs, united under the general title “Culture and the World of Childhood.”
First of all, starting her acquaintance with the life of primitive peoples, Margaret Mead seeks to delve into the relationships between the younger and older generations of the islanders and find the place of these relationships in the process of growing up for both boys and girls. Her observations touch on the very acute problem of “fathers and sons” at all times, which the researcher manages to find in the unique psychology of the islanders.
However, the significance of the work done by Margaret Mead was not immediately appreciated. Perhaps this was due to the fact that the purpose of her work could not be limited only to an ethnographic framework: it reflected the most pressing problems of the 20th century, many of which are still thriving today. Like any real scientist, Margaret Mead could not help but think about the future of the small and large nations of the world. And perhaps it is her works that open the door to this future for us.
IIPART. KEY THOUGHTS OF THE MONOGRAPH IN THE UNDERSTANDING OF THE MODERN READER
Each book by Margaret Mead, which touches on the issues of a person growing up in a primitive society, contains not only the scientist’s strict observations of the life and relationships of the participants in this society, but also broader, global thoughts. These are thoughts about the connection between generations, about the similarities and differences between cultures that are distant from each other, about the importance of science in identifying these similarities and differences, about the role of the scientist’s activities in replenishing and preserving knowledge about the life of peoples isolated from the rest of the world. The need for such preservation was firmly recognized by the researcher. This is exactly what Mead talks about on the first page of the book “Rime on the Blackberry Blossoms”: “In remote parts of the earth, under the onslaught of modern civilization, ways of life of which we know nothing are breaking down. We need to describe them now, now, otherwise they will be lost to us forever" ( I. Frost on blooming blackberries, part 2, ch. eleven). And the validity of her position is still confirmed by the works of thousands of talented and enterprising anthropologists in different parts of the world.
Having chosen Samoan society as the starting point of her field research, Margaret Mead sets out to understand how the childhood of representatives of such societies differs from the same period in the lives of Europeans. Starting from the observations of Sigmund Freud, Mead raises the question that once worried the psychologist (“What are the children of primitive peoples like if their adults resemble our children in their thinking?”) and in his reasoning comes to an important conclusion: “... Samoan culture is not only more gentle treats the child, but also better prepares him for the upcoming encounters with life’s difficulties.” ( II. Growing Up in Samoa, Ch.XIII) Developing this idea, the author proves that living conditions in such primitive societies as Samoa not only do not interfere with the full development of the child, but also expand the boundaries of many of his capabilities, often placing children on an equal basis with adults. Therefore, according to the researcher, it is fair to consider the younger generation, born far from modern civilizations, to be often more adapted to real life than European boys and girls.
In her second book, How to Grow Up in New Guinea, Margaret Mead dives into the life and culture of the tiny Manus tribe to explore in more detail the process of growing up. To do this, the researcher, as an ethnographer, anthropologist and psychologist, observes the features of the family hierarchy adopted by the Manus, identifies the personal roles of each family member and the degree of influence of each of them on the formation of the child’s personality. In the course of his reflections on all these issues, Mead comes to a very important conclusion: “... the resolution of family problems lies, perhaps, not in the refusal of the father and mother of their roles, as some enthusiasts believe, but in their complementing each other " ( III. How they grow in New Guinea, ch.I) There is no doubt that the idea reflected in this short statement worries today's sociologists and psychologists just as much as it worried many of Mead's contemporaries.
Referring to the example of the customs of the Samoan and Manus peoples, in which children, initially left to themselves, at the same time depend on the example of their older fellow tribesmen, the researcher points to the need for education through everyday life. “Standards of adult behavior, crystallized by years of conscious, intense life, can be transmitted from father to son, from teacher to student, but they can hardly be sold wholesale, through cinema, radio, newspapers,” Margaret Mead responds to the modern problem of adaptation child to his cultural environment ( III. How they grow in New Guinea, ch.XIV). That is, regardless of the level of development of society, a person from the first days must learn to adapt to it, adopting vital skills in direct contact with their adult and experienced carriers: parents, older peers, teachers. This is the shortest and most correct way of socialization of the individual, not only introducing the child to work, but also bringing him closer to the culture of his native people.
Continuing the chain of thoughts about the influence of the traditions of a particular people on the formation of a child’s personality, Margaret Mead in her monograph “Culture and Continuity” raises the issue of the role of language, which little representatives of society have adopted from those around them for many years. The researcher emphasizes: “The way children learn a language from their elders determines the extent to which they will be able to learn new languages as adults” ( IV). And today’s pedagogical practice can confirm that the very process of a person mastering his native language in childhood can subsequently affect not only his interest in the languages of other peoples, but also his ability to master them.
To sum up this part of her thoughts, Margaret Mead cites the idea that for many centuries, raising children around the world was based on methods created by developing cultures ( IV. Culture and continuity, ch. 1). This idea is indisputable, because, as is known, raising a child in his interaction with culture is a prerequisite for his full development. It is as indisputable as Mead’s assertion that these methods cannot be applied to all children without exception equally, without taking into account their individual characteristics ( there). In this, in my opinion, the researcher sees one of the greatest difficulties in the issue of culture and continuity of generations.
Describing the course of her own research, Margaret Mead often turns to the statements of her contemporaries, eminent anthropologists and ethnographers of the 20th century, illustrating her personal thoughts and conclusions with their words. So, in chapter 11 of the book "Frost on a Blooming Blackberry" The American linguist and ethnographer Edward Sapir says that learning a foreign language has no moral aspect. In this regard, Sapir believed that one can only be honest in one’s native language. In my opinion, learning any language is impossible without studying the moral rules inherent in the native people, since they stem from the culture of the people themselves and from the general laws of humanity. It is difficult to understand an unfamiliar culture without delving into the moral aspects of relationships within it. And you can remain honest even if you speak all the languages of the world.
Studying the picture of life in primitive societies, Mead finds many traditions and examples of behavior that, in her opinion, it would be nice for people in civilization to borrow. For example, examining in detail the process of a child growing up in Samoan society, the researcher sees a lot of positive things in the fact that children’s feelings are not directed so completely towards their home and parents. She believes that a strong attachment between a child and his parents only interferes with his growing up ( II. Growing Up in Samoa, Ch.XIII). Perhaps Margaret Mead wanted to point out the lack of independence of our children, but I am convinced that strong feelings for family and friends cannot have a detrimental effect on the emerging personality. Moreover, today we are acutely faced with the opposite problem, associated with the reluctance of children to take care of their parents, with their inattention, bitterness and even contempt for the most important thing in life - their family. A number of terrible consequences follow from this problem, including overcrowded nursing homes, hundreds of homeless people thrown onto the streets, and the degradation of the family as one of the irreplaceable institutions of society. Therefore, it is so important to instill in modern children the warmest feelings for their family. As well as learning to be independent, it will be better and more reliable for them to follow the example of their loved ones.
As you know, at the origins of the culture of childhood there are two most important social institutions: the institution of motherhood on the one hand and the institution of fatherhood on the other. In her book “How to Grow Up in New Guinea,” Margaret Mead rightly notes that the fact of motherhood cannot be doubted, since it is the mother who gives the child his very first, inalienable right – the right to life. But does this mean that fatherhood isn't just as important? The researcher considers paternity to be a “less reliable basis for determining a person’s origins”, which “can always be called into question” ( III. How they grow in New Guinea, IV. Family life). In my opinion, in matters of the origin and development of a person, both the father and mother of the child should be given equal roles, and the advantage of one over the other cannot be asserted here. Both the natural and cultural development of the child depends on the participation of both parties, and all his heredity flows from their union.
In the same chapter of her second book, Mead draws a consequence from the incorrect, overly careful, in her opinion, upbringing in European families, which consists in the ignorance of children about birth and death. According to the researcher, if the child was given the opportunity to learn about this as early as possible, as is done among the Samoan people, then encountering these two phenomena of human nature would not cause him such great emotional turmoil. I partly agree with this idea: the sooner a child is initiated into the mysteries of life and death, the easier it may be for him to relate to their manifestations in later life. However, the same knowledge can seriously traumatize an unprepared child’s consciousness, shake the world of childhood and leave dark memories associated with this time in the soul of a little person.
One of the most important reasons for comparing the childhood of American children and the world of Samoan children for Margaret Mead was introduction to work. If in our country a child’s working abilities begin to develop only during his school years, then for a small member of a primitive society “adult life” begins already at the age of four or five. And the practice of the Samoans, according to the researcher, turns out to be more productive, since children learn the skills their parents possess earlier. In my opinion, introducing the same practice among our peoples would deprive children of the opportunity for self-determination and, as a result, would not allow them to develop many hidden talents. After all, simple pranks are not always behind our children’s games: while playing, they learn about everything that surrounds them, get acquainted with the objects and people around them, so that soon the fun can turn into purposeful activity.
IIIPART. CONCLUSION
Margaret Mead's monographs are a colossal work, one of the most valuable studies in the field of cultural studies, anthropology and ethnography. Plunging into the world of these small natural communities, so different from our megacities, she draws many parallels between it and the world of civilization, proving that the structure of any society, even the most primitive in our opinion, is based on universal human laws and principles that transform a child into an adult and establish an invisible connection between distant generations.
Considering the dependence of the small world of childhood on the rich and established heritage of folk culture, Mead elevates this dependence to the rank of universal, making the role of the cultural in the process of development and formation of personality absolute. She seems to be trying to tell her readers that different skin colors, different religions, and even the distance of continents do not make much difference between peoples. The same Manus society is in many ways similar to our own society, and many of its features can be found in the structure of modern civilizations. Just like those features that were lost by many of these civilizations in the process of their development, one could try to adopt them again.
Margaret Mead's book "Culture and the World of Childhood" will be of interest to all those interested in ethnography and the little-studied cultures of island peoples. It is also interesting for its memoir episodes, in which the researcher talks about the beginning of her journey both as a scientist and as just a woman. Her book enriches one's horizons and helps to take a fresh look at modernity in many of its both light and dark manifestations, indicating that the future of the world can be made better only by relying on its past. Namely, on the cultural past of one large people called humanity.
It was translated into 17 languages and became a bestseller. A number of new scientific ideas are associated with the name M. - about the nature of parental feelings, the relationship between maternal and paternal roles, the origin of male and female initiations. No ethnographer in the world before her had enjoyed such popularity in the world. In human history, she distinguished three types of cultures in terms of the nature of the transmission of experience between generations. Post-figurative cultures - children learn from their ancestors. Thus, in a patriarchal society based on tradition and its living carriers, the elderly, relations between age groups are strictly regulated, innovations are not approved, everyone knows their place, and feelings of continuity and fidelity to traditions prevail. Cofigurative cultures - children and adults learn from peers, i.e. from their peers. The influence of elders decreases, while that of peers increases. The extended family is being replaced by the nuclear family, and the integrity of traditions is being shaken. The importance of youth groups is increasing, and a special youth subculture is emerging. The term “cofigurative” (the prefix “ko” means together, together) reflects the fact of co-creation between the teacher and students. Prefigurative cultures - adults learn from their children. Such cultures have emerged since the mid-20th century and are united by an electronic communication network. They define a new type of social connection between generations, when the lifestyle of the older generation does not weigh heavily on the younger one. The rate at which knowledge is updated is so high that young people are more knowledgeable than old people. Intergenerational conflicts are intensifying, youth culture is developing into a counterculture. Post-figurative cultures are oriented toward the past and are characterized by very slow, snail-like progress. Cofigurative cultures are focused on the present and a moderate pace of progress, while Prefigurative cultures are focused on the future and accelerated movement. M. was called a “lifetime classic” who made an outstanding contribution to the understanding of human culture and problems of socialization.
Trip to Samoa.
See also the article from Khoruzhenko’s encyclopedic dictionary.
MFA MARGARET (1901-1978) - American. ethnographer, founder of childhood ethnography as an independent scientific field. disciplines, follower of Amer. cultural anthropologist F. Boas; researcher of relations between different age groups in traditional (Papuans, Samoans, etc.) and modern ones. societies, as well as children's psychology. from the position of the so-called ethnopsychological school. The results of field research were published in the late 20s - early. 30s in a number of interesting works. In them, M. showed a wide variety of cultures of different peoples, as well as the decisive role of culture in the formation of social life. attitudes and behavior of people. M. was the first anthropologist to study the practice of raising children among different peoples. Considering the relationship between culture and the world of childhood, M. distinguished between three types of culture: postfigurative (children primarily learn from their predecessors), configurative (children and adults learn from their peers) and prefigurative (adults also learn from their children). In 1944, M. founded the Institute of Comparisons. cultural studies, which represented a non-profit organization where behavior, customs, psychology were studied. and social organization in all cultures of the world. Basic cultural studies ideas were reflected in the following works: “Coming of Age in Samoa” (1928); "Growing Up in New Guinea: A Comparative Study of Primitive Education" (1930); "The Changing Culture of an Indian Tribe" (1932); Mind Self and Society: From the Standpoint of Social Behaviorist (C. W. Morris, Ed., 1934); "Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies" (1935); "The School in American Culture" (1951); "Anthropology: A Human Science" (1964); Culture and Commitment: A Study of the Generation Gap (1970); “Culture and the world of childhood” (collection of translations in Russian, 1988), etc.
Excerpt from Margaret Mead’s book “The Culture and World of Childhood”:
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CULTURE AND WORLD OF CHILDHOOD
Selected works
From the editorial board
I. Frost on
blooming blackberries
Chapter 11. Samoa: Teenage Girl
Chapter 12. Return from the expedition
Chapter 13. Manus: the thinking of children among primitive peoples
Chapter 14. Years between expeditions
Chapter 15. Arapesh and Mundugumor: Sex Roles in Culture
Chapter 16. Chambuli: gender and temperament Chapter 17. Bali and Iatmuls: a qualitative leap II. Growing Up in Samoa I. Introduction II. Day in Samoa III. Raising a Samoan Child IV. Samoan family V. Girl and her age group VII. Accepted forms of sexual relations VIII. The role of dance IX. Attitude towards personality XIII. Our pedagogical problems in the light of Samoan antitheses III. How they grow in New Guinea I. Introduction III. Early Childhood Education IV. Family life VII. The world of a child XIV. Education and personality Appendix I. Ethnological approach to social psychology IV. Mountain Arapesh (chapters from the book “Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies”) 1. Life in the mountains 2. Working together in society 3. The birth of a child among the Arapesh 4. Influences shaping the Arapesh personality in early childhood 6. Growing up and betrothal of a girl among the Arapesh aranesh 8. The arapesh ideal and those who deviate from it V. Human fatherhood is a social invention VI. Culture and continuity. A Study of Intergenerational Conflict Chapter 1. The Past: Postfigurative Cultures, and Well-Known Ancestors Chapter 2. The Present: Cofigurative Cultures and Familiar Peers VII. Spiritual Atmosphere and the Science of Evolution Commentary Appendix. I. S. Kon. Margaret Mead and the ethnography of childhood Bibliography of the most important works by M. Mead FROM THE EDITORIAL BOARD Institute of Ethnography. N. N. Miklukho-Maclay of the USSR Academy of Sciences and the Main Editorial Board of Oriental Literature of the Nauka Publishing House have been publishing the book series “Ethnographic Library” since 1983.
The series publishes the best works of domestic and foreign ethnographers, which had a great influence on the development of ethnographic science and retain their important theoretical and methodological significance to this day. The series includes works in which, using ethnographic materials, the patterns of life of human societies at a particular historical stage are illuminated, and major problems of general ethnography are considered. Since the integral task of the science of peoples is the constant replenishment of factual data and the depth of theoretical generalizations depends on the reliability and detail of the factual material, works of a descriptive nature will also find their place in the “Ethnographic Library”, which are still of outstanding interest due to the uniqueness of the information they contain and the importance of the methodological principles underlying field research.
The series is intended for a wide range of specialists in the field of social sciences, as well as teachers and students of higher educational institutions.
The series opened with the publication of two books: “The League of the Chodenosaunee, or Iroquois” by L. G. Morgan and “Structural Anthropology” by C. Lévi-Strauss. Both were published in 1983 (in 1985
Lévi-Strauss's book was published in an additional edition). Suggested book by Margaret Mead “The Culture and World of Childhood. Selected Works" introduces the Soviet reader for the first time to the works of the famous American scientist, the founder of the ethnography of childhood.
The work of the Russian scientist - Turkologist, linguist and ethnographer - Academician V.V. Radlov (1837-1918) “From Siberia. Diary pages" (translation from German). In the long-term plan of the series there are also works by D.I.
Zelenin, M. Moss, L. Ya. Sternborg, V. G. Bogoraz, I. F. Sumtsov and others.
FROST ON A BLACKBERRY FLOWER PART Chapter 11: Samoa: Teenage Girl When I went to Samoa, my understanding of the obligations imposed on a researcher by working in the field and writing reports about it was vague. My decision to become an anthropologist was based in part on the conviction that a simple scientist, even one without the special gifts required of a great artist, can contribute to the advancement of knowledge. This decision was also connected with the acute feeling of anxiety conveyed to me by Professor Boas1 and Ruth Benedict2. In remote parts of the earth, under the onslaught of modern civilization, ways of life about which we know nothing are breaking down. We need to describe them now, now, otherwise they will be lost to us forever. Everything else can wait, but this has become the most pressing task. Such thoughts came over me at meetings in Toronto in 1924, where I, the youngest participant in the convention, listened to others constantly talk about “their people.” I had no people to talk about. From that time on, I had a firm determination to go out into the field, and not sometime in the future, after reflection at my leisure, but immediately, as soon as I had completed the necessary preparation.
Then I had very little idea of what field work was. The course of lectures on her methods, given to us by Professor Boas, was not devoted to field work, as such. These were lectures on theory - how, for example, to organize material to justify or challenge a certain theoretical point of view.
Ruth Benedict spent one summer on an expedition with a group of completely domesticated Indians in California, where she took her mother with her on vacation. She also worked with Zuni3. I read her descriptions of the landscape, the appearance of the Zuni, the bloodthirstiness of the bugs, and the difficulty of cooking. But I gleaned very little from them about how it worked. Professor Boas, speaking of the Kwakiutl,4 called them his “dear friends,” but this was followed by nothing that would help me understand what it was like to live among them.
When I decided to take a teenage girl as my research subject, and Professor Boas allowed me to go into the field in Samoa, I listened to his half-hour pep talk. He warned me that on an expedition I should be prepared for the apparent loss of time, to simply sit and listen, and that I should not waste time doing ethnography in general, the study of culture in its entirety. Fortunately, many people - missionaries, lawyers, government officials and old-school ethnographers - had already been to Samoa, so the temptation to “waste time” on ethnography, he added, would be less strong for me. In the summer, he wrote me a letter in which he once again advised me to take care of my health and again touched on the tasks facing me:
I am sure you have thought carefully about this issue, but there are some aspects of it that particularly interest me that I would like to draw your attention to, even if you have already thought about them.
I am very interested in how young girls react to the restrictions on their freedom of behavior imposed on them by custom. Very often, in our teenage years, we are faced with a rebellious spirit, which manifests itself either in gloominess or in outbursts of rage. Among us we meet people who are characterized by humility accompanied by suppressed rebellion. This manifests itself either in the desire for loneliness, or in obsessive participation in all social events, behind which lies the desire to drown out internal anxiety. It is not entirely clear whether we can encounter similar phenomena in a primitive society and whether our desire for independence is not a simple consequence of the conditions of modern life and more developed individualism. I am also interested in the extreme shyness of girls in primitive society. I don't know if you will find it in Samoa. It is typical for girls of most Indian tribes and manifests itself not only in their relationships with outsiders, but also within the family circle. They are often afraid to talk to older people and are very shy in their presence.
Another interesting problem is the outburst of feelings among girls. You should pay special attention to cases of romantic love among older girls. According to my observations, it can in no way be considered excluded, and it naturally appears in its most striking forms where parents or society force marriages on girls against their will.
Look for the individual, but also think about the scheme, pose the problems as Ruth Bunzel5 posed them in her study of art among the Pueblos and Heberlins on the northwest coast. I assume you have already read Malinowski6's article in Psyche about family behavior in New Guinea7. I think he was heavily influenced by the Freudians, but the problem he posed is one that confronts me as well.
Here it is also necessary to mention G. Stanley Hall's voluminous book on adolescents, in which, identifying the stages of human growth with the stages of human culture, he argued that the development of each child reproduces the history of the human race.
The textbooks started from the premise, borrowed largely from German theory,9 that puberty was a period of rebellion and stress. At that time, puberty and adolescence were strongly identified by everyone. Only much later did researchers involved in child development begin to talk about a hypothetical “first adolescence” - around the age of six - and about a second crisis - during puberty, about the continuation of adolescence after twenty years, and even about some manifestations of it. in adults over forty.
My training in psychology gave me an understanding of samples, tests, and systematic behavioral questionnaires. I also had even a little practical experience with them. My Aunt Fanny worked for the Association for the Protection of Youth at Hull House in Chicago, and I devoted one summer to reading the reports of that Association. They gave me an idea of what the social context of individual behavior is, what the family should be considered and what its place in the structure of society is.
I understood that I would need to learn the language. But I did not know anyone, except the missionaries and their children who became ethnologists, who could speak the spoken language of the people they were studying. I read only one essay by Malinovsky and did not know to what extent he spoke the Trobriand language10. I myself didn’t know a single foreign language, I only “learned” Latin, French and German in high school. Our language training in college consisted of brief exposure to the most exotic languages. During classes, without any prior preparation, we were bombarded with the following sentences:
And it was kind of a great teaching method. He taught us, like our seminars on kinship patterns and religious beliefs, to expect to encounter anything on expeditions, no matter how strange, incomprehensible, or bizarre it may seem to us. And of course, the first commandment that a practicing ethnographer must learn is: it is very likely that you will encounter new, unheard of and unthinkable forms of human behavior.
This attitude towards the possibility of a collision at any moment with a new, not yet recorded form of human behavior is the reason for frequent clashes between anthropologists and psychologists who try to “think with natural scientific precision” and do not trust philosophical constructs. This attitude was the reason for our clashes with economists, political scientists and sociologists who use the model of the social organization of our society in their studies of other social structures.
The good school we received from Professor Boas destroyed our inertia and instilled in us a readiness to face the unexpected and, let it be said, the extremely difficult. But we were not taught how to work with an exotic foreign language, bringing knowledge of its grammar to such an extent that we could learn to speak. Sapir11 noted in passing that learning a foreign language is devoid of a moral aspect: one can be honest, he believed, only in one’s native language.
Thus, in our education there was no knowledge of how to. It only gave us the knowledge of what to look for. Many years later, Camilla Wedgwood, during her first expedition to Manam Island, would address this issue in her first letter home: “How do you know who is someone’s mother’s brother? Only God and Malinovsky know this.” In Lowy's question12, “How do we know who someone's mother's brother is unless someone tells us?” - the striking difference between his methods of field work and mine is clearly visible.
The education we received instilled in us a sense of respect for the people we studied. Every nation consists of full-fledged human beings leading a way of life comparable to our own, people possessing a culture comparable to the culture of any other people. No one among us ever spoke of the Kwakiutl, or the Zuni, or any other people as savages or barbarians. Yes, these were primitive peoples, that is, their culture was unwritten, it took shape and developed without the support of writing. But the concept “primitive” meant only that to us. In college we learned firmly that there is no correct progression from simple, “primitive” languages to complex, “civilized” languages. In fact, many primitive languages are much more complex than written ones. In college we also learned that while some art styles evolved from simple patterns, there were others that evolved from more complex forms to simpler ones.
Of course, we also had a course on the theory of evolution. We knew that it took millions of years for humanoid creatures to develop language, learn to use tools, and develop forms of social organization capable of transmitting the experience acquired by one generation to another. But we went into the field not to look for early forms of human life, but for forms that were different from ours, different because certain groups of primitive people lived in isolation from the main stream of great civilizations. We did not make the mistake of Freud, who assumed that primitive peoples living on distant atolls, deserts, jungles or the Arctic North were identical with our ancestors. Of course, we can learn from them how long it takes to fell a tree with a stone axe, or how little food a woman can bring into the house in societies where the main source of food is hunting by men. But these isolated peoples are not links in the family tree of our ancestors. It was clear to us that our ancestors were at the crossroads of trade routes, where representatives of different nations met and exchanged ideas and goods. They crossed the mountains, went overseas and returned home. They borrowed money and kept records. They were influenced greatly by the discoveries and inventions made by other peoples, which was impossible for peoples living in relative isolation.
We were prepared to encounter differences in our field work that far exceeded those we find in the interconnected cultures of the Western world or in the lives of people at different stages of our own history.
Reports on what was found and on the way of life of all the peoples studied will be the main contribution of anthropologists to the treasury of accurate knowledge about the world.
This was my intellectual background in the field of theoretical anthropology. I, of course, to some extent learned to use methods for a generalized description of such, for example, phenomena as the people’s use of their natural resources or the forms of social organization developed by them. I also had some experience analyzing observations made by other researchers.
But no one talked about what real skills and abilities a young anthropologist entering the field must have - whether he is able, for example, to observe and accurately record what he sees, whether he has the intellectual discipline necessary to work hard day after day when there is no one to guide him, to compare his observations, to whom he could complain or to whom he could boast of his success. Sapir's letters to Ruth Benedict and Malinowski's personal diaries are full of bitter complaints about idleness, and they were written at a time when, as we well know, they were doing magnificent work. No one was interested in our ability to endure loneliness. No one asked how we would establish cooperation with the colonial authorities, with the military or with officials of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, but we had to work with their help. No one here gave us any advice.
This style, which developed at the beginning of the century, when the researcher was given a good theoretical training and then sent to live among primitive people, assuming that he would figure out everything else on his own, has survived to this day.
In 1933, when I gave advice to a young explorer traveling to Africa on how to deal with the drunkenness of British officials, anthropologists in London grinned. And in 1952, when, with my help, Theodore Schwartz14 was sent to learn new skills - operating a generator, recording on magnetic tape, working with a camera - all the things that were expected to be encountered in the field, the professors at the University of Pennsylvania thought it was ridiculous. Those who teach students now teach them the way their professors taught them, and if young ethnographers do not fall into despair, do not undermine their health, or die, then they will become ethnographers of the traditional style.
But it's a wasteful system, a system I don't have time for. I combat this by giving my students the opportunity to re-enact my fieldwork preparation, to work on my notes, by encouraging them to practice photography, by creating situations for my class in which students are faced with real problems and real difficulties, situations where there is the unexpected and unexpected. Only in this way will we be able to evaluate the real merits of different ways of recording what they see and see how students react in cases where they lose the camera key or forget to remove the lens cap during an important photo.
However, in this struggle I constantly fail. A year of training in how to protect each item from moisture or falling into water does not prevent a young ethnographer from wrapping a single copy of a unique manuscript in plain wrapping paper, putting a passport and money in a dirty, torn bag, or forgetting to pack an expensive and necessary camera in an airtight container. This is unfortunate, because students studying other sciences acquire practical skills: chemists learn the rules of laboratory work, psychologists get used to using a stopwatch and writing experimental protocols.
The fact that anthropologists prefer to be self-taught in everything, even in mastering the theories taught to them in college, is, in my opinion, an occupational disease that is associated with extremely difficult conditions of field work. To do it well, the researcher must empty his mind of all preconceived ideas, even if they relate to other cultures in the same part of the world where he is now working. Ideally, even the appearance of a dwelling that appears before an ethnographer should be perceived by him as something completely new and unexpected. In a certain sense, he should be surprised that there are houses at all, that they can be square, round or oval, that they have or do not have steps, that they let in the sun and block winds and rains, that people cook or don’t cook there, eat there, Where live. In the field, nothing can be taken for granted. If we forget about this, we will not be able to freshly and clearly perceive what is before our eyes, and when something new appears to us as one of the options for something already known, we can make a very serious mistake.
Considering a certain dwelling seen as larger or smaller, luxurious or modest in comparison with dwellings already known, we risk losing sight of what exactly this dwelling is in the minds of its inhabitants. Later, when the researcher becomes thoroughly acquainted with the new culture, everything in it should be subsumed under what is already known about other peoples living in a given region, included in our theories about primitive cultures in general, in our knowledge about man as such - knowledge for today, of course. But the main goal of ethnographic expeditions is to expand our knowledge. That is why the focus on recognizing new variants of what is already known, rather than on searching for something fundamentally new, is unfruitful. It is very difficult to clear one’s own consciousness of preconceived ideas, and without spending years on this, it is almost impossible to free oneself from prejudices by studying only one’s own culture or another one close to it.
On his first expedition, the ethnographer does not know all this. He only knows that he faces the most difficult task of learning to clearly understand and speak a foreign language, to determine who is what, to understand thousands of actions, words, looks, pauses that are part of a still unknown system, and, finally, to “embrace ” the structure of the entire culture. Before my trip to Samoa, I was well aware that the categories used by other researchers to describe cultures were neither very original nor very pure. The grammars they created bore the imprint of the ideas of Indo-European grammars, and the descriptions of the native leaders bore European ideas about rank and status. I realized that I would have to make my way in this fog of half-truths and half-misconceptions. In addition, I was tasked with studying a new problem, a problem for which there was no research and therefore no guidance.
But, in essence, what has been said is true for any expedition that truly deserves this name. Nowadays, researchers go into the field to work on some small problem that can be solved by simply filling out a few questionnaires and running a few special tests. In cases where the questions are unsuccessful, and the tests are completely incomprehensible and alien to the subjects, this work can encounter considerable difficulties. However, if the culture is already fairly well understood, the success or failure of surveys of this kind does not matter much. The situation is quite different when it is necessary to accurately record the configuration of an entire culture.
At the same time, it must always be remembered that a certain holistic configuration perceived by a researcher in a culture is only one of the possible ones, and that other approaches to the same human situation can lead to different results. The grammar of the language you are working on is not a capital-G grammar, but only one of possible grammars. But since this may well be the only grammar you have to develop, it is extremely important that you listen to the language and record the facts with the utmost care and do not rely, as far as possible, on the grammar that is emerging in your mind.
All this is very important, but it does not clarify the tasks of daily work. There is no way to know in advance what kind of people you will encounter or even what they will look like. Although there are many photographs taken by others, the appearance of the tribe's people may have changed by the time you arrive at the site. One summer I worked among the Omaha Indians15. Just in time for my arrival, the girls got their hair permanent for the first time. I couldn't foresee this. We do not know which real colonial official, planter, policeman, missionary or merchant life will confront us with. We don’t know where we will live, what we will eat, whether we will need rubber boots, shoes to protect against mosquitoes, sandals to rest our feet, wool socks to absorb sweat. Usually, when preparing expeditions, they try to take as few things as possible (and when ethnographers were poorer, they took even less) and make as few plans as possible.
When I went to Samoa, I had half a dozen cotton dresses (two very fancy ones) because I was told that silk fabric decomposes in the tropics. But when I arrived in Samoa, I discovered that sailors' wives wore silk dresses. I had a small bag for money and papers, a small Kodak and a portable typewriter. Although I had been married for two years, I had never lived in a hotel alone, and my travel experience was limited to short train rides as far as the Midwest. Living in towns and cities and in the farming areas of Pennsylvania, I had met different types of Americans, but I had no idea about the men who served in the U.S. Navy in peacetime, nor did I know anything about the ethics of sea life on bases. I've never been to sea before.
At a reception in Berkeley, where I made a brief stop, Professor Kroeber16 came up to me and asked in a firm and sympathetic voice: “Do you have a good flashlight?” I didn't have any lamp at all. I carried with me six thick notebooks, typewriter paper, carbon paper and a flashlight. But I didn't have a flashlight.
When I arrived in Honolulu, I was met by May Dillingham Frier, my mother's Wellesley friend. She, her husband and daughters lived in their house in the mountains, where it was cooler. She put “Arcadia” at my disposal - their beautiful, large house in the city. The fact that my mother once became friends with May Dillingham and her husband's sister Constance Frier at Wellesley solved all my problems in Honolulu for many years. May Dillingham was the daughter of one of the first missionaries to Hawaii, and her husband Walter Freer was the governor of the Hawaiian Islands. She herself somehow strangely did not fit into the framework of her noble, large and wealthy family. She was filled with some very delicate feelings, and her attitude towards life was purely childish. But she knew how to give orders when she needed to, and with her influence, which extended all the way to Samoa, she was able to find hundreds of opportunities to make my path smooth. Everything was arranged under her supervision.
The Bishop Museum included me on its staff as an honorary member;
Montague Cook, representative of another old family in Hawaii, took me every day to the museum, and E. Craighill Handy17 sacrificed a week of his vacation to give me daily lessons in the Marquesan language, akin to Samoan. A friend of “Mama May,” as I affectionately called her, gave me a hundred pieces of old, torn muslin “to wipe the children’s noses,” and she herself gave me a silk pillow. This is how she reacted to practical advice given to me this time by a biologist:
“Always have a small pillow with you and you can sleep anywhere.” Someone introduced me to two Samoan children attending the school. It was assumed that their families would help me in Samoa.
All this was extremely pleasant. I, protected by the authority of the Friers and Dillinghams, could not have had a more successful start to the expedition. But I was only vaguely aware of this, since I could not separate what stemmed from their influence from the most ordinary courtesy. However, many researchers suffered a real fiasco already in the first weeks of their expeditions. Circumstances made them so pitiful, so unwanted, so disgraced (perhaps because another anthropologist had once turned everyone against him) that the whole expedition failed even before it began. There are many unforeseen dangers from which you can only try to protect your students. The role of chance is also great.
Mrs. Freer may simply not have been in Honolulu at the time I arrived there. That's all.
Two weeks later I hit the road, surrounded by garlands of flowers. At that time, garlands were thrown from the deck into the sea. Now Hawaiians* give garlands of shells because the import of flowers and fruits to other ports is prohibited. They bring plastic bags with them in which they take flowers and fruits home. But when I set sail, the wake of the ship sparkled and sparkled with floating colors.
* In the original - Samoans (probably erroneously). - Note. ed.
So, I arrived in Samoa. Remembering Stevenson's poems, I rose at dawn to see with my own eyes how the first South Sea island in my life would float over the horizon and stand before my eyes.
No one met me in Pago Pago. I had a letter of recommendation from the Surgeon General of the Navy, a classmate of Father Luther's19 in medical college. But at that time everyone was too busy to pay any attention to me. I found a room in a run-down hotel and hurried to the square, where a dance was held in honor of those arriving on the ship. Black umbrellas were visible everywhere.
Most Samoans wore clothes made of cotton fabric: men wore suits of a standard cut, while women wore heavy, uncomfortable blouses. Only the dancers wore Samoan robes. The priest, mistaking me for a tourist with whom he could take a little liberties, turned over my Phi Beta Kappa badge to see my name. I said: “This is not mine.” This remark confused my affairs for many months to come.
Then came a time that was very difficult for any young researcher, no matter how difficult he was preparing for. I was in Samoa. I had a room in the hotel that was the setting for Somerset Maugham's story and play "The Rain," which I saw in New York. I had letters of recommendation. But I never managed to lay the foundations for my future work. I paid a visit to the governor, an elderly grumpy man who had not risen to the rank of admiral. When he told me that he had never learned the Samoan language and that I would not learn it either, I had the temerity to notice that after twenty-seven years it is difficult to learn languages. This certainly didn't help me at all.
I don't know if I would have been able to start work at all if it weren't for the letter from the chief surgeon. This letter opened the doors of the medical department to me. The eldest sister, Miss Hodgeson, obliged the young Samoan sister J. F. Pene, who lived in the United States and spoke excellent English, to tutor me for an hour a day.
After that, I had to plan my work for the remaining time. I was fully aware of both my independence and responsibility to the commission that financed my work, which did not agree to pay me money even three months in advance. Since there was no other way to measure my diligence, I decided to work eight hours a day. Pepo taught me for one hour. I spent seven hours memorizing the dictionary. So, purely by chance, I came across the best method of learning a language - to learn it in such large portions and as quickly as possible, so that each memorized part reinforces the other.
I sat in an old hotel and ate disgusting dishes prepared by Faalavelave - the name means "Misfortune" - dishes designed to prepare me for Samoan food. From time to time I was invited to the hospital or to the families of medical workers. The National Research Council insisted on sending me money by mail, and only the next ship delivered the mail. This meant that I would be broke for six weeks and unable to plan to leave until I paid off my hotel bill. Every day I wandered around the port city and tested my Samoan language on the children, but all this was a poor substitute for a place where I could do real field work.
Finally the ship arrived. And then, using the services of the mother of half-Samoan children whom I met in Honolulu, I managed to get out to the village.
This woman arranged for me to stay for ten days in Waitongi, where I was to stay with the family of a chief who loved to receive guests. It was in his house that I received my basic training in Samoan etiquette. My constant companion was his daughter Faamotu. She and I slept together on piles of mats in a separate bedroom. We were separated from the rest of the family by a curtain of fabric, but it goes without saying that the house was open to the eyes of the entire village. When I washed, I had to put on something like a Malay sarong, which could easily be thrown off in a village shower, but I put on dry clothes in front of a gawking crowd of children and adult passers-by. I learned to eat Samoan food and find flavor in it, and to feel at ease when I was at a party being the first to eat, while the whole family sat sedately around me, waiting for me to finish the meal so that they, in turn, could eat. I memorized complex politeness formulas and learned to circulate kava21. I have never made kava itself, because it should only be prepared by an unmarried woman. But in Waitongi I didn't say I was married. I had only a vague idea of what the implications of this might be for me in terms of role responsibilities. Day by day, I mastered the language better, sat more correctly, and experienced less and less pain in my legs. In the evenings there were dances, and I took my first dance lessons.
Waitongi is a beautiful village with a wide square and tall, round palm-roofed guest houses. The leaders sat at the pillars of these houses on special occasions. I learned to recognize leaves and plants used for weaving mats and making tapas. I learned to address others according to their rank and to respond to them according to the rank they assigned to me.
The only difficult moment I experienced was when a speaker22 from British Samoa23 who arrived in the village started a conversation with me, which was based on the experience of the freer sexual world of the port of Apia. Still unsure of my Samoan, I explained to him that marriage between us would be indecent due to the disparity of our ranks. He accepted this formula, but added regretfully: “White women have such beautiful thick legs.”
Having lived these ten days, which were as delightful and fulfilling for me as the previous six weeks had been difficult and useless, I returned to PagoPago to prepare for a trip to Tau, an island in the Manu'a archipelago. Everyone agreed that the traditions were more intact in the Manu'a Islands and that it would be best for me to go there. There was a medical station on Tau, and Ruth Holt, the wife of Mate's chief pharmacologist Edward R. Holt, who was in charge of that station, was in Pago Pago giving birth to a child. The chief physician in Pago Pago ordered that I be accommodated directly at the medical station. I arrived on the island with Mrs. Holt and the newborn on a minesweeper that temporarily replaced the station ship. During a dangerous unloading through the reef, a whaleboat with schoolchildren capsized, and Mrs. Holt breathed a huge sigh of relief, finding herself and her baby, named Moana, safe on land.
Housing was arranged for me on the back veranda of the outpatient clinic. A grate separated my bed from the entrance to the dispensary, and the village was visible across the small courtyard. There was a Samoan-style house nearby where I was supposed to work with teenagers.
A Samoan pastor from a neighboring village assigned a girl to me, who became my constant companion, since it was not appropriate for me to appear anywhere alone. I settled in a new place, regulated my economic relations with the Holts, who also had a boy, Arthur. He was not yet two years old, but he already spoke both Samoan and English.
The advantages of my settlement at the dispensary soon became clear to me. If I had stayed with a Samoan family, I would not have been able to communicate with the children. I was too big a person for that. People knew that when the warships arrived in Pago Pago, I dined on the flagship. This determined my rank. On the other hand, I insisted that the Samoans call Mrs. Holt faletua, so that there would be no questions about where and with whom I ate.
Living in the dispensary allowed me to do things that would otherwise be completely indecent. Teenage girls, and later younger girls, whom I was then convinced of the need to study, filled my lattice room day and night. Subsequently, I received the right to use the nekola premises for “exams”. Under this pretext, I interviewed them and offered several simple tests to each girl. I could walk freely around the village, participate in fishing with everyone else, and go into houses where women were weaving.
Gradually, I conducted a census of all the village residents and studied the family of each of my charges. Along the way, I certainly delved into many ethnological problems, but I never took part in the political life of the village.
My field work was extremely complicated by a fierce hurricane, which destroyed the front veranda of the dispensary - the room that I had converted into my office. This hurricane destroyed all the buildings in the village and destroyed the crops. All ceremonies were almost completely suspended while the village was being reconstructed, and I, having become accustomed to Samoan food with great difficulty, had to switch with all the villagers to rice and salmon supplied by the Red Cross. The naval chaplain, sent to monitor the distribution of food, increased the number of inhabitants of our small dwelling. Moreover, his presence in the house caused deep irritation to Mr. Holt, who, having not received a higher education at one time, was just a pharmacist's assistant. He experienced burning pain when faced with any manifestation of rank and distinction.
During all these months I had almost nothing to read, but this did not matter much, since work occupied all my waking hours. The only distraction was letters. The reports about my life addressed to my family were well balanced, they were reports of my joys and hardships. But in my letters to friends I focused too much attention on the difficulties, so Ruth decided that I was going through a difficult and unsuccessful period in my life. The point, first of all, was that I didn’t know whether I was working with the right methods. What should these correct methods be? I didn't have any examples to rely on.
Just before leaving Pago Pago, I wrote a letter to Professor Boas in which I shared my plans with him. His encouraging reply came just as I had finished my work at Tau and was getting ready to go home!
These letters nevertheless bring back to life scenes from those distant times. In one of them I wrote:
The most pleasant time of the day here is sunset. Accompanied by about fifteen girls and small children, I walk through the village to the end of the Siufang pier.
Here we stand on a platform fenced with iron bars and look at the waves.
The spray of the ocean hits us in the face, and the sun floats over the ocean, descending behind the hills covered with coconut palms. Most of the adults went ashore to swim. They are dressed in lavalavas, each with a bucket on a rocker. The heads of the families sit in the faletele (village guest house) and prepare kava. At one location, a group of women fill a small canoe with a solution of local arrowroot starch.
Sometimes, as soon as we approach the shore, the languid sounds of a wooden bell calling for evening prayer overtake us. Children should hurry to take cover.
If we are on the shore, they run to the barn steps and sit there, curled up, until the bell rings again, announcing that the prayer is over. Sometimes, at the sound of the bell, we are all already safe, in my room. Here the prayer must be said in English. The girls take flowers out of their hair, and a festive song fades on their lips. But as soon as the bell rings again, the not-so-serious reverence is thrown off: the flowers again take their place in the girls’ hair, and the festive song replaces the religious chant. The girls begin to dance, and their dancing is by no means puritanical. They have dinner around eight and sometimes I get a little respite. But usually dinner is so short that I don’t have time to take a break from them. The children dance a lot for me;
they love to do it, and the dance is an excellent indicator of their temperament, since the dance in Samoa is individual, and the audience considers it their duty to accompany it with continuous comments. Between dances they look at my pictures, and I always try to show Dr. Boas higher up on the wall. This slide fascinates them...
With the greatest pleasure I remember trips to other villages, to other islands of the Manua archipelago, to another village on Tau - Fitiuit, where I lived as a young village princess who came to visit. I was allowed to gather everyone who could tell me about something interesting to me, and as a return favor I had to dance every evening. All these trips fell at the end of my expedition, when I felt that the task was completed and I could “waste time” on ethnology in general, to analyze in what details the current way of life on the Manua archipelago differs from other islands.
In all my subsequent expeditions, where I had to work with completely unknown cultures, I was faced with a more rewarding task - first to get acquainted with the culture in general, and only then to work on its particular aspects.
There was no need to do this in Samoa. That's why I was able to complete a work about the life of a teenage girl in nine months.
While studying a prepubescent girl, I also discovered the method of age sections24, which can be used when it is impossible to spend many years on an expedition and at the same time it is necessary to reproduce the dynamic picture of the development of the human personality. I only took the first step in Samoa. Later I turned to young children and then to infants, clearly realizing that I needed all stages of human development. But in Samoa I was still influenced by the psychology I had learned in college. That's why I studied individual cases and invented the tests myself:
a test for naming objects in pictures I borrowed from Flaherty's magazine story “Moana of the South Seas,” and a color identification test for which I drew a hundred small squares.
When I wrote “Growing Up in Samoa,” I carefully camouflaged all the real names, sometimes even having to use double disguise to exclude any possibility of recognizing the real persons behind this or that name. In the introductions I wrote to subsequent editions, I did not address the girls I studied as the readers for whom I was writing. It was hard to imagine that any of them would ever learn to read English. Today, however, the children and grandchildren of girls like those I studied at Tau attend American colleges—half of Samoans today live in the United States25—and when their classmates read about Samoans fifty years ago, they ask themselves: what you read applies to them.
Chapter 12. Return from the Expedition In June 1926, I returned to Tutuila, and two weeks later I boarded a small ship in Pago Pago. The last few weeks in Samoa have left me deeply nostalgic. I visited Waitongi again, the village where I had learned to sleep on a pile of mats, and where Ufuti, the affable chief who loved to entertain American guests, personally took the lead in teaching me how to pass the bowl and how to pronounce the politeness formulas that are of utmost importance here. The family that received me then was as happy to see me as if they had not seen me for many years. I had the feeling of someone returning home after many years of travel. Visiting Waitongi again, I realized how homesick I was, how strong my need for love was, a need that I could only partially satisfy by nursing Samoan babies or playing with children. In conditions where there was almost no sense of contact to be experienced, only Samoan babies kept me alive. This was later expressed by Gregory Bateson28 when he said that in field conditions that last for months, the most painful thing is not the lack of sex, but the lack of tenderness. Some researchers become attached to cats or dogs;
I strongly prefer babies. In Waitongi I realized how sad I was, how I would like to be where someone wants me to be, precisely because I am me.
The family that took me in comforted me, and I realized that they would willingly look after me for the rest of my life. Faamotu, my “sister,” was about to get married, and since I had once said in one of my flowery speeches that Samoa excels in politeness, and France is the country of the most beautiful dress, Faamotu wanted to have a wedding dress from Paris. That year I bought it from the Galeries Lafayette, but by the time the dress arrived on Tau, Faamotu was forced to write to me: “Makelita, calm your heart, don’t be angry. An unpleasant thing happened: my fiancé took someone else as his wife.”
A week spent in Waitongi alleviated my homesickness somewhat. Here I was again at home, although just a year ago it was unknown to me. But it made me even more acutely aware of a much stronger need - the need for conversation, for communication with people of my own type, people who had read the same books, who understood my hints, people who understood my work, people with whom I could to discuss what I have done and which could help me evaluate whether I really did what I was sent to do. I myself had to develop all the examination methods, including tests, and I had no way to determine whether what I did was good or bad.
I set off from Pago Pago on a six-week ocean voyage to Europe. Soon I won't be alone anymore. Luther, who spent an interesting but somewhat lonely year traveling, trying to understand a new world for him, will be waiting for me. Ruth Benedict, who had accompanied her husband to a conference in Scandinavia, planned to meet me in Paris. Louise Rosenblatt, my college friend who spent a year at the university in Grenoble, will also be in Paris. And at this time I stopped receiving letters, which fell on me during the expedition in periodic showers, sometimes seventy or eighty at a time. There could be no letters now: they were traveling slower than me. So I felt extremely lonely.
On the passage from Pago Pago to Sydney we experienced the most severe storm that has ever occurred in these latitudes for many decades. Eleven ships were lost. On our ship, waves covered the upper deck, and passengers, deathly seasick, bowed like ninepins. There were several interesting people on board the ship, including a ship's officer who had served on the Titanic. He now lived as a man without a fatherland, far from home.
There was also a miserable, emaciated missionary couple from Western Samoa with a two-year-old child and a tiny baby. Like everyone else, the parents were below, suffering severely from seasickness. A woman of dubious reputation, with brightly colored hair, shared the care of the baby with her friends. I began looking after a two-year-old child who spoke no English, who had yet to go through the traumatic experience of facing a world of people who did not understand a word he said. I felt a little sorry for myself, somehow miraculously spared from seasickness, even ready for a little entertainment and at the same time tied up in caring for a small child. But talking to him helped me learn what it means for a small child to be cut off from those who can understand the words he has just learned, and surrounded by people who do not understand him, either because they do not know the language he speaks or because that his language contains too much family jargon. How desperate must be children who are orphaned by war and adopted on the other side of the world! It’s even difficult to imagine for people who have never experienced such complete alienation. Almost fifty years later I still hear that sad, anxious, weak voice: “Ua pau le famau, Makelita, ua pau le lamau”27 - a small pathetic chick falling out of the nest.
In Sydney, where I finally arrived, I was greeted by the relatives of one of Luther’s friends with huge bouquets of flowers picked from their own garden. Sydney was my first city after nine months in the wilderness. They took me to listen to the Don Cossacks and the Vatican choir. Two days later I boarded a luxury ocean liner, the P&O SS Chitral, on its maiden voyage to England.
I had no idea, of course, how the whole voyage, and indeed my whole life, would have changed if the Chitral had gone, as planned, to Tasmania to pick up a cargo of apples.
However, dockers went on strike in England, and apples turned out to be an unreliable cargo. Therefore, instead of going to Tasmania, and only then to England, “Chitral” stuck around in Sydney harbor. Most of the passengers were ashore all this time, and the company's cabins were almost empty. Only a few passengers, like me, with little money and no particular reason to be in the city, remained on board. Among them was a young New Zealand psychologist, Reo Fortune, who had just won a two-year fellowship at Cambridge University for his work on dreams. The head steward, noticing that we were enjoying each other's company, offered us a table for two. We talked to each other so enthusiastically that the large motley group at the table would only disturb us. The offer was happily accepted. Brought up in a world where the exchange of thoughts between a man and a woman did not automatically entail romance, I had no idea how our behavior would be viewed by Australian passengers.
Both Reo and I were in a state of deep excitement. He was going to England to meet people who would understand what he was talking about, and I, who had just completed the expedition, longed for communication. In many ways very inexperienced and unsophisticated, Reo was different from anyone I had known so far. He had never seen professional actors play, or an original painting painted by a great artist, or heard music performed by a symphony orchestra. But to make up for the isolation in which New Zealanders lived before the era of modern communications, he went deep into the depths of his life, read with pleasure all English literature and passionately devoured everything he could find on psychoanalysis.
Meeting him was like meeting an alien and at the same time a person with whom I had a lot in common.
Reo was imbued with the ideas of W. Rivers,28 a Cambridge professor whose works on physiology, psychoanalysis and ethnology excited the whole world. I've never met Rivers. Reo, needless to say, too. But we both saw in him a man from whom we would like to learn - a common and impossible dream, because he died in 1922. Rivers was interested in evolution and the unconscious, its early roots in human ancestors. He was fascinated by Freud, but was critical of his theories. With his characteristic insight, Reo pointed out in the essay that won him the prize that Rivers actually reverses Freud without changing the premises - making fear instead of libido the main driving force of man.
Reo studied sleep, studied it completely independently, conducting experiments on himself in a psychological laboratory: he woke himself up to check whether the first hours of sleep were more restful than the last. He was interested in this question raised by Freud, as well as in another - whether dreams that occurred on the same night were related in theme. At the beginning of our journey, I began to write down my dreams for Reo. In one night I recorded up to eight dreams with one main theme and two secondary ones. One of these dreams, in a slightly modified form, was published by him in his book “The Sleeping Brain.”
Our ship delayed sailing from Australia and was delayed for several days in each port. In Melbourne we went to the theater. When I was in Samoa, Ruth wrote to me about Bronislaw Malinowski's arrival in America, and I told Re about him. His remarks about Malinovsky were not particularly flattering. He loved to appear in public as a kind of Don Juan, and gossip added a lot to the set of his stories about his adventures. There was probably a lot of posturing in all this, but in the eyes of New Zealander Reo his behavior was scandalous debauchery.
Malinowski's first great book on the Trobrianders, The Argonauts of the Trobriand Islands,29 was published when I was in graduate school, but I did not read it then. A rather weak report on this book was given at a graduate seminar, where our attention focused on the Kula, the intra-island trading syndicate analyzed in the book, but not on Malinowski's theories and methods of work. They were not as innovative for Boas's students as they were for students in England. However, Ruth's letters aroused my curiosity, and in Adelaide Reo and I went ashore, found the university library and read the anthropology article that Malinowski had written for the latest supplementary volume of the Encyclopædia Britannica. I said that I intended to attend a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science this summer, before the Americanist Congress in Rome. Reo was already fascinated by Malinovsky, but out of jealousy he opposed my trip to the English Congress: he was convinced that Malinovsky would certainly seduce me.
Thus began the long history of his one-sided internal polemic with Malinowski, a polemic strongly colored by the Oedipus complex. Later, during his first expedition to Doba, an island adjacent to the Trobriand Islands and included in Malinovsky's analysis of the kula, Reo spent entire nights on the Argonauts, which became for him a model for the development of fieldwork techniques, a selection of theories for criticism and a way to make a life not boring. In 1963, in a new introduction to a cheap edition of Sorcerers with Dobu, Reo's enduringly important first book, he again launched into a polemic with Malinowski, a polemic that gained little from the emotional background on which it was based.
When Reo finished the manuscript of The Sorcerers of Dobu, I wrote to Malinowski and suggested that he consider whether it would be advantageous for him to write an introduction to this book, since otherwise reviewers would pay too much attention to some interpretations of the kula that differed from his own. Malinowski agreed, and his large, thorough introduction ensured both the book's acceptance by Routledge and great reader interest in the book immediately after its publication.
And yet I never met Malinovsky until 1939, although he came into my life again, but this time in a different way. In 1926, during his trip to America, he went out of his way to prove to everyone that nothing would come of my expedition to Samoa, that nine months was too short a time for any serious research, that I I won't even learn the language. Then in 1930, when my book How to Grow in New Guinea was published, he encouraged one of his students to write a review in which it was stated as a matter of course that I had not understood the kinship system of the Manus people, but had used the information school translator. I don’t know if I would have been so angry if the criticism had come from someone else, but in this case my rage was so great that I postponed the next expedition for three months and wrote a special monograph “Kinship Systems on the Admiralty Islands” only in order to demonstrate the completeness of my knowledge on this subject.
Thus Malinowski, who played the same role in England as Ruth and I did in the United States in making anthropology accessible to the general public and connecting it with other sciences, came into our lives through a purely chance meeting of two people on board a ship that was delayed in sailing Australian coast, a ship rocked by waves due to empty holds....
Weeks passed. We spent the day on the coast of Ceylon. Arrived in Aden. We saw the shores of Sicily. And finally the ship approached Marseille. Reo remained on it as he sailed to England. He was going to stay with his aunt and prepare to enter Cambridge. Luther arrived in Marseilles for me, and I left the ship. When the ship docked, we were so engrossed in conversation that we didn’t even notice it.
Finally, feeling that the ship was not moving, we walked along the deck and saw a worried Luther on the pier. This is one of the moments of my life that I would willingly return back and live completely differently. There are few such moments, but this is one of them.
This is how I arrived in Europe for the first time, arriving not across the stormy Atlantic, but by the most circuitous route, having previously lived for nine months in Samoa. Luther wanted to show me what he does. He took me to Provence - to Nimes, where Louise Rosenblatt joined us, to Les Baux and, finally, to Carcassonne. Both Luther and Louise were overwhelmed with impressions from their year in France. I was full of my Samoan expedition, but it turned out to be difficult to talk about it with the same fervor as on the ship to people whose minds were occupied with other things. And yet those days will always be remembered by me. It was only in Carcassonne that I returned to Luther again.
From Southern France we went to Paris, where Ruth arrived from Sweden. Many of our other friends spent their holidays here. However, Luther could not stay with us in Paris. He finally broke with his priestly career and received a teaching post at City College, where he had previously worked. Now he had to return home to prepare for lectures, and in the midst of all this turmoil - arguing, searching for each other in cafes, chasing news, attending theater premieres - Reo arrived from England, determined to change my plans.
Finally I arrived in Rome and met Ruth again. She had a bad summer. She spent part of it alone and was in a state of deep depression. But she cut her hair and appeared before us in a silver helmet of gray hair, in the splendor of her former beauty. I spent a week with her in Rome. Once dusk found us in the Protestant cemetery at Keats's grave, and we heard the ringing of a bell, specially rung for those who remain here after sunset. At the Congress of Americanists there was a fanfare in honor of Mussolini and quiet, muffled greetings to the scientists gathered here.
I was supposed to meet Reo in Paris, but the train tunnel was blocked, and when we woke up we found ourselves still in Italy. But he still came to the pier to see me off. Ten days later, a slow steamer took us to New York. All my colleagues came to the pier to meet me. I was overwhelmed by a stream of news: Leonia was very unhappy, Pelham had fallen in love, Luther had found us an apartment. I immediately threw myself into my new job as Assistant Curator of Ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History.
But everything has changed. My expedition was romantic and people wanted to hear about it, while Luther only visited Europe, where everyone was. “Don’t you think I look like Mrs. Browning’s husband?” - he asked me good-naturedly when we were returning home after a reception given in my honor by Mrs. Ogburn32. At this party she asked, “Do they have any table manners?” and I replied, “They have finger bowls.”
It's been a strange winter. Luther taught anthropology. This meant that I was a useful source of information for him at breakfast. But we got married in hopes of finding a common calling by working with people in the church. Now it's all gone, and with it the sense of common purpose. My new position left me time to write, and I was almost finished with Growing Up in Samoa. There were only two final chapters left to write, in which I applied what I had seen to American life. I also began to rebuild the museum's Maori collection with the help of the New Zealand specialist G. D. Skinner, who was in New York at that time.
Reo was formally listed as a psychology student at Cambridge. But his contacts with the leadership assigned to him, F. Bartlett and J. McCurdy34, turned out to be difficult.
At Cambridge, he also met professor of anthropology A. Haddon35 and began to think about moving into anthropology and working in New Guinea. He wrote to me: “...Haddon is very kind to me, but he gave his mosquito net to Gregory Bateson.” That was the first time I heard the name Gregory. Reo eventually received permission from the people administering his New Zealand scholarship to use the remaining money to publish his just-completed study of dreams, The Sleeping Brain. This book, subsidized as a commercial publication, never reached the specialist reader. He decided to leave Cambridge and hoped to obtain an anthropology fellowship with the help of Radcliffe-Brown,36 who had established a promising research center at the University of Sydney in Australia.
He wrote to me about this, and our correspondence was interspersed with poems that we wrote to each other..
The picture of my own future has also changed. Luther and I always dreamed of having many children - six, and no less, I thought. Our life plan was to lead the humble life of a country priest's family in a parish where everyone needed us, in a house full of our own children. I had confidence in Luther as a father. But that fall, the gynecologist told me that I would never have children. I had a narrowed uterus - a defect that cannot be corrected. I was told that if I became pregnant, I would definitely have miscarriages. This changed the picture of my entire future. I have always wanted to fit my professional life around my responsibilities as a wife and mother. But if motherhood was not given to me, then professional collaboration in field work with Reo, who was keenly interested in my problems, took on much more meaning than working with Luther, who taught sociology. (In fact, Luther later became a first-rate archaeologist, working in a science that required from him all his ability to handle things, as well as all his human sensitivity.
But that’s later.) One of the main reasons why I didn’t want to marry Reo was that I doubted him;
paternal qualities. But if I don't have children...
In the spring, Reo wrote to me that he had received money from the Australian Research Council to carry out field work and that he was going to Sydney. I agreed to meet him in Germany, where I was going to study Oceanic materials in German museums. Our summer meeting was stormy, but Reo was full of tempting ideas, and when we parted, I agreed to marry him.
I returned to New York to say goodbye to Luther. We spent a peaceful week together, unmarred by reproaches or guilt. At the end of that week he went to England to meet the girl whom he later married and who became the mother of his daughter.
I stayed with three college friends. We sang through an exciting and anxious winter, each of us suffering from our own heart wound. I maintained my interest in dreams, and Leonia told us her dreams, which she later turned into poetry. That winter she became a Guggeiheim Fellowship applicant, and I insisted that she list her 119 highest college grades on her application. And of course, when she went to interview Henry Allen Moe, who had headed the Guggenheim Foundation for so many years, he said, “I was delighted with...” in such a tone that she expected him to add, “...your beautiful poem “Returning Home”, because only she could justify such a tone, but he clarified:
“...your excellent college grades!” I felt like I was really starting to understand my American culture.
“Growing Up in Samoa” has been accepted for publication. I have added two chapters based on lectures I gave at a club for working girls. There I had a rare opportunity to test my ideas with a mixed audience. That same winter I wrote “Social Organization on Manua”37 - an ethnographic monograph aimed at specialists. The museum had new display cases made for the tower hall, where I moved the Maori collection, writing a small guide for it. This gave me the feeling that I was making my first, still modest, progress as a museum curator.
The most difficult task facing me was that of obtaining money for the expedition to New Guinea, where I was to go with Reo after our wedding.
Anthropological rendezvous of this kind is as difficult to arrange as the rendezvous in the legends of separated lovers. Each must obtain a separate subsidy from different sources and plan everything so that two people end up arriving at the same time and place with scientific programs that justify their working together here. This requires a fair amount of maneuvering skill. Reo secured his second year of research work with his reports on Dobu. The line was behind me.
Reading Freud, Lévy-Bruhl and Piaget, who were based on the assumption that the thinking of primitive peoples and children has a lot in common - Freud classified both of them as neurotics - I became interested in the problem: what are the children of primitive peoples like? if their adults resemble our children in their thinking? This kind of question is obvious, but no one has asked it. Dealing with the most complex problem of applying Freudian hypotheses to the analysis of the behavior of primitive peoples, I wrote two articles - “An ethnologist’s comments on Totem and Taboo” and “The absence of animism among one primitive people.”38 In the latter I analyzed the fact that a certain type of dilogical thinking , which Levy-Brud and Freud talked about, is not observed in the Samoans I examined. It was this problem that I wanted to study in the field. That is why I turned to the Social Science Research Foundation for a subsidy to study “the thinking of preschool children,” living on the Admiralty Islands. It was here, Radcliffe-Brown believed, that Reo and I should carry out our field work. The term "pre-school children" sounds a little strange when applied to the children of a primitive people who had no schools at all, but that was the custom characterize children under five years of age.
In order to marry Reo, I had to get a divorce, receive a subsidy for the expedition, and also permission from Goddard39 for a year's leave at the museum. When I confidentially told him that an affair was connected with all this, he joyfully contributed to the implementation of my plans. Besides, I had to prepare for the expedition. This preparation, among many other things, included the selection of a whole battery of tests and toys for my work with children. In a number of cases, I had to make it all up out of my head, since I had no precedents at my disposal to rely on.
This winter has been difficult in other ways too. All my friends knew that I was going to marry Reo, but at the same time Luther didn’t tell anyone that he was also going to get married. I often saw him to talk about his plans. All this shocked my father, who held the opinion so common in previous generations, the opinion that meetings between spouses intending to divorce were something disgusting, something like incest. This shocked my friends too. They believed that I was exploiting Luther, playing with his feelings. It was very difficult for me to live in a situation that was so misunderstood.
There was only one thing that made it easier: I knew that eventually everyone would know the truth.
Nevertheless, I found it difficult to bear the criticism of my callousness from most of my friends, who condemned me when they had time from their own troubles. That is why it was a huge relief to me when our family unit, which at the end consisted of five members, broke up in June. Ruth, who taught the summer course, came to see me. At the end of the summer she went on an expedition, and I left for a long time on Manus Island. Before I left, I was shown only the layout of my first book, and many months passed before I learned that the book had become a bestseller.
Chapter 13. Manus: the thinking of children among primitive peoples We planned to get married in Sydney. But when I was already on the road, Reo, impressed by Radcliffe-Brown’s stubborn disbelief in our upcoming marriage, became worried and changed our plans. When my ship touched shore in Auckland, New Zealand, Reo appeared on board and announced that we were getting married today. The store did not have a small wedding ring, we had to have the ring altered, and this took almost the entire parking time. We got to the marriage registration office almost before closing and returned to the ship just as it was about to set sail. Then we arrived in Sydney and presented Radcliffe-Brown with a fait accompli.
It was decided that I would work on the Admiralty Islands among the Manus people, since no modern ethnographer had ever worked here. As for my personal interests, I simply wanted to work among some Melanesian people, thereby obtaining information useful for the museum, and solving for myself the problem of what is the thinking of adults among primitive peoples, the thinking that was discussed that it is similar to the thinking of the children of civilized peoples, different from the thinking of their own children. Reo spoke with a government official who served on Manus Island, and he advised him to select as his subject of study the inhabitants of pile buildings erected right in the lagoon on the southern coast of the island. The official believed that life there was much more pleasant than in other parts of the island. We found some old Manus texts collected by some German missionary and found a short description of this people by the German explorer Richard Parkinson,40 and that was all.
When we arrived at Rabaul, which was then the center of this mandate territory of New Guinea, we were met by the anthropologist E. P. W. Chikieri, who was in the government service;
he offered to place Bonyalo, a Manus schoolboy, at our disposal to help us begin learning the language. Bonyalo was by no means delighted at the prospect of returning to Manus, but he had no choice. From Rabaul we departed for Manus, with Bonyalo in our care. We spent ten days as a guest of a district government official, while at that time the village was preparing for our settlement. By chance we heard that Manuwai, another boy from Bonyalo village, had just completed his contract work. Reo went to talk to him and hired him. So we had two boys from the same village of Pere at our disposal, and we decided that we should go there to work. Forty years later, Manuwai still loved to tell how surprised he was when, in his youth, a strange young white man appeared before him and spoke to him in his native language.
It was arranged for the paramount chief of the south coast of the island to take us and our effects to Pera in his canoe. The sea voyage lasted from early morning until midnight, when, very hungry - Reo believed that the Manus would be embarrassed if we took food with us - we arrived at a moonlit village. Houses with cone-shaped roofs stood on high stilts in a shallow lagoon among tiny islands covered with palm trees. In the distance the dark mass of the great island of Manus could be seen.
I had to send my first quarterly report to New York, and the first day we arrived we began to work very hard, photographing the villagers - men with their hair tied in knots, arms and legs decorated with ribbons with walnut resin beads, women with shaved heads and elongated earlobes, necks and arms from which the hair and bones of the dead hung. The central lagoon was lively: boats were leaving everywhere with loads of fresh and smoked fish, which were supposed to be exchanged at the market for taro, betel nut41, bananas and pepper leaves. The Manus, as it turns out, are a trading people whose entire life is centered around exchange transactions: at the market, large things are exchanged with residents of remote islands - tree trunks, turtles, etc.;
exchanges are carried out among themselves related to marriage payments, in which strong values: dog teeth, shells, and, more recently, beads are given for consumer goods - food and clothing.
Thus began the best expedition we have ever had. The Dobuans of Reo were a harsh, corpse-sorcerer culture, where everyone was the enemy of his immediate neighbors, and every married man or married woman had to periodically live among hostile and dangerous in-laws. Therefore, Reo was fascinated by this new people, much more open and unsuspicious. However, a lot of time passed before he realized that they had no terrible secrets.
One day we were working at opposite ends of the same dwelling: I was with the women gathered around the deceased, and Reo was with the men. Periodically, canoes floated up to the house, from which more and more groups of mourners disembarked.
They ran through the house and threw themselves, sobbing, on the corpse. The floor of the pile structure swayed dangerously, and the women begged me to leave the house. They were afraid that the floor might collapse at any moment and we would all end up in the water. I sent a note to Reo about this.
He wrote back to me: “Stay here. They don't seem to want to show you anything.” I refused to leave. Then people who thought about my safety, and only about it, were forced to transfer the body of the deceased to another house, where I was safer.
Each of us had already studied one language of Oceania, and now we were working together on the Manus language. Our first teacher was Bonyalo, a schoolboy placed at our disposal by the authorities at Rabaul. He spoke a little, very little English. None of us knew pidgin English, the main intermediary language of the area42. Therefore, we had to learn not only manus, but also pidgin - an unpleasant side task. When Bonyalo, an incredibly stupid boy, could not explain what a mwellmwell was (that's the full expensive bridal outfit consisting of shell money and dog teeth), Reo ordered him to go and bring this mwellmwell, whatever it was. I can still hear the astonished Bonyalo’s question: “Take what with you?!” Any of us would respond in exactly the same way if he were ordered to bring a complete bedroom set in order to illustrate some grammatical rule. As much as I was struck by the unpleasant traits of the Manus as a people in comparison with the Samoans, Reo was also pleasantly surprised when he compared them with the Dobuans. And none of us identified ourselves with them. Manus are puritanical, sober, energetic people. The souls of their ancestors constantly encouraged them to activity, punished them for the slightest sexual offense, for example, for lightly touching the body of a representative of the opposite sex even when a hut was collapsing, or for gossip when two women were talking about their spouses. The spirits punished them for failing to fulfill countless economic obligations, and if they fulfilled them, then for not taking on new ones. Life for the Manus was very much like walking up an escalator running down. Men died early, without waiting for the children of their sons. They tolerated us as long as we had something they needed, and even at times showed concern for our well-being. But this did not stop them from refusing to sell us fish when the stock of our exchange tobacco was exhausted. In fact, the attitude towards us was very utilitarian. The children were adorable, but I always had before my eyes the image of the adults they would soon become.
On Manus, Reo and I were not bound by the kind of cooperation that develops on the basis of fortunate or unfortunate differences in temperament and which became so important in our subsequent field work. Here we simply competed with each other honestly and good-naturedly. Reo's main source of information was Pokanau, an intellectual and misanthrope who grumbled at me when I arrived on Manus twenty-five years later: “Why did you come here? Why did you appear and not Moeyap?” My informant was Lalinge, Pokanau's main rival. He was horrified by the insecurity of a woman in a village where she had no one to turn to for help except her husband. He volunteered to be my brother so that I would have a place to run to if Reo started beating me. When we bought some things: Reo for a museum in Sydney, me for the Natural History Museum in New York, the villagers openly enjoyed our rivalry over them. But the Manus are a simple people, and the widespread New Guinea style of pitting the master and mistress of the house against each other by the servants is alien to them. We had to encounter this style in subsequent expeditions. Perhaps this lack of intrigue was also explained by the fact that our attendants were children under fourteen years of age. I found it too difficult to hire to serve older children.
That is why we had a kind of kindergarten kitchen, which at times turned out to be the scene of violent fights, during which our lunch flew into the sea.
We led a hard working life, with almost no joy. Reo decided that baking bread was a waste of time, and we had no bread. Our main food was smoked fish and taro. One day someone brought us chicken, I fried it and... I put it in our pantry, but a dog climbed into it and stole the meat. And once again I opened our only jar of snacks, because the captain of a trading schooner promised to come to us for lunch, but the tide was low, and he sailed. We both had bouts of malaria. To avoid the annoying and indecent begging of children for cigarettes, I decided not to smoke. Reo was smoking a pipe. Only at night, when the village fell asleep, would I smoke a cigarette and feel like a guilty schoolgirl. When our camp beds broke, we had to replace them with “New Guinea” - rolls of heavy fabric through which stakes are threaded. At the bottom, the stakes are fastened with transverse plans. These beds are bound to sag and make you feel like you're sleeping in a sack.
But we enjoyed our work, and Reo began to perfect what I would later call the method of event analysis, a method of organizing observations around the main ones in the village. The friendly rivalry between us regarding the formulation of problems and the choice of methods brightened up what is usually called the monotonous routine of the working day. Lagoons attract modern tourists with their tropical beauty, but we treated them like locals. The reef poses a constant threat. The remote mountains on the big island look dark and hostile, both because they are inhabited by spirits and ghosts that are believed to exist, and because evil people live there. The village was not a place for dancing at night. and songs, as in Samoa, or a place where sorcerers prowl, as in Dobu.
It was a place where vengeful spirits, guardians of morality, punished sinners, and families settled scores with each other. The girls sat locked up in the evenings. Canoes filled with youths and young men, whose marriages were still unsettled due to difficult economic calculations, scurried aimlessly around the village, the youth banging gongs or making plans to run away to work for the white people.
Reo, who taught Pokanau to dictate the content of spiritualistic night sessions, focused on processing the texts of these recordings. He wrote everything down without using shorthand, and twenty-five years later, having become acquainted with my method of writing pidgin English directly onto a typewriter, Pokanau shouted with enthusiasm: “This is much better than Moeyan’s pen”;
The outstanding anthropologist and ethnographer Margaret Mead drew attention to the fact that with different ratios of cultural traditions and innovations, the interaction between generations of people living in society develops differently. This led to a distinction between three types of culture (Mid M. Culture and the World of Childhood. M., 1988):
- 1) post-figurative, based on the fact that the younger generation adopts the experience of their elders;
- 2) cofigurative, where both children and adults learn not only from their elders, but also from their peers;
- 3) prefigurative, in which not only children learn from their parents, but parents also have to learn from their children.
Traditional culture is post-figurative: it changes slowly and imperceptibly, grandchildren live in the same conditions as their grandfathers. “The past of adults turns out to be the future of each new generation; what they lived is a blueprint for the future for their children” (p. 356). Such a culture is preserved under the condition that three generations live together, in which old people act not only as leaders and mentors, but also as bearers of life models and role models. Relationships between generations are not necessarily conflict-free. In some post-figurative societies, each younger generation is expected to rebel against their elders. But having seized power, the new generation does not change the way of life of society and continues to follow the behavioral standards learned from childhood. The cycle of the same life processes and affairs repeated from generation to generation creates a feeling of timelessness. The entire system of postfigurative culture always exists “here and now.” Only a small part of the cultural norms is realized. Unconsciousness, automaticity, absence of doubts are the key conditions that ensure the long-term stable existence of post-figurative culture.
Although post-figurative cultures typically exist in societies that have lived for centuries on the same territory, they can be found among nomadic peoples, among diasporic groups (such as the Armenian or Jewish) or, for example, among Indian castes consisting of a small number of members, who are scattered across villages and live alongside people of many other castes. These cultures can be found in groups of aristocrats or social outcasts.
Cofigurative culture is a culture in which behavioral patterns set by contemporaries predominate. It exists where changes occur in society that make the experience of past generations unsuitable for organizing life in changed conditions. In such a situation, both seniors and juniors have to adapt to the new situation, developing from their own experience different lifestyles and ways of acting that differ from the previous ones. People learn to live from each other, adopting the paths to success found by their peers and avoiding the mistakes they made. Those whose experience turns out to be the most successful become models for other representatives of their generation. In a cofigurative situation, the forms of behavior of different generations become non-identical, which gives rise to conflicts between generations. These conflicts become especially aggravated when raising children in new conditions does not ensure the formation of the lifestyle in adulthood that, in the opinion of their fathers, they should adhere to.
In a cofigurative culture, although the older generation retains a leading role in the educational process, it is not an infallible ideal for the younger one. In its simplest form, cofigurative culture does not require a generation of grandfathers. It is characterized by a nuclear family, consisting only of parents and children, in contrast to the large patriarchal families characteristic of post-figurative culture. Non-family, school (and “street”) education and training play an important role. Young people know that their parents live differently from their grandfathers, and that their own lives will be different from the lives of their fathers and mothers. Often, children see the best and most authoritative mentors not in their parents, but in their peers or those who are slightly older than them. In a cofigurative society, conditions are created for the formation of a youth subculture, the culture of “teenagers” (teenagers).
The ground for configuration arises where the crisis of the postfigurative system occurs. Such a crisis may be a consequence of relocation to another country, where the elders turn out to be strangers who find it difficult to get used to the new environment; conquest or conversion, when elders cannot master other morals and ideals, or master a new language; a revolution bringing new styles of behavior for youth; development of new types of technology unknown to elders. In such circumstances, the behavior of subsequent generations begins to differ from the behavior of previous ones. In the modern world, for example, the culture of immigrant families who have to quickly adapt to life in another country takes on a cofigurative character: children, as a rule, adapt to a new cultural environment faster than their parents. Cofigurative culture is formed during socio-political, economic and technical transformations in economically backward countries. “In India, Pakistan or the new states of Africa, children also become experts in the new way of life, and parents lose their right to evaluate and guide their behavior” (p. 322). A similar thing is observed in our country during the transition from a socialist system to a modern market economy.
Cofigurative culture is dynamic, capable of quickly restructuring its norms and standards and meets the needs of a society living in conditions of social change and accelerated scientific and technological progress. In the 20th century it has taken a leading position in industrialized countries.
However, the pace of development of modern society, according to Mead, is becoming so high that past experience sometimes turns out to be not only insufficient, but also harmful, interfering with a creative approach to new, unprecedented circumstances. Given this, Mead foresees the possibility of a prefigurative culture.
Prefigurative culture is a culture of even more intense and rapid transformations than cofigurative culture. Innovations in it can occur at such a frantic pace that the adult population simply will not have time to assimilate them. “Children today face a future that is so unknown that it cannot be managed in the way we are trying to do today, effecting change in one generation through configuration within a stable, elder-controlled culture that carries many post-figurative elements” (with . 360 - 361) . If postfigurative culture is oriented towards the past, and cofigurative culture - towards the present, then prefigurative culture - towards the future. The spiritual potential of the younger generation, which will develop a community of experience that the elders have not had and will not have, will acquire decisive importance in it.
