My wife and I revisited the South Sea isles of American Samoa in 1988, observing and recording the changes that had taken place since our last anthropological field trip in 1976. I also was anxious to visit my research village on the island of Ta'u, which is part of the island cluster known as the Manu'a Group. Ta'u, a culturally conservative island sixty miles to the east of Tutuila, was made famous by the research of anthropologist Margaret Mead in 1925-26. My first trip took place in 1953 when Melville J. Herskovits, my mentor at Northwestern University, suggested the area as a site for my doctoral dissertation research.
Herskovits maintained that for some time scholars had been skeptical of Mead's findings in American Samoa and that it would be worthwhile to conduct a methodological restudy of her work as presented in Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) and Social Organization of Manua (1930). In other words, I was to find out if a thirty-year-old male anthropologist (accompanied by wife and child) would perceive and interpret the cultural scene in the same way that a single woman of twenty-three might. And it was important that this be an objective analysis. When Herskovits and Mead were classmates at Columbia in the 1920s, they apparently were not great admirers of each other. However, my charge was to investigate and not to refute--unless the facts warranted it.
In 1953, Samoa was one of those places about which travel agents jokingly said, "You can't get there from here." No airlines flew into American Samoa, and we made most of the journey by freighter. My wife, four-month-old daughter, and I took a train from Chicago to San Francisco, then a ship to Tahiti, where we were laid over a week before boarding a flying boat for Western Samoa. After another week's layover, we took an ancient motor sailer, the MV Samoa, to Pago Pago, American Samoa.
We still had another sixty-mile journey ahead of us, but that trip would have to wait a few weeks while I made arrangements for accommodations, met government officials and important island chiefs, and worked at learning the language.
The government anthropologist, John Cool, was interested in my project and did his best to introduce me to Manu's chiefs living in Tutuila and to orient me to my new cultural experience. He alerted me to taboos and to proper forms of behavior and introduced me to High Chief Tufele, the paramount chief of the Manu's Island group. Most helpful of all, he invited me to go on a ceremonial Malaga (visit) to the villages of Ta'u and Fitiuta on the Island of Ta'u.
This Malaga was a very special one, for we would be accompanying Crown Prince Tungi of the Tonga Islands. Tungi had never visited the Manu's area but was anxious to make the trip because all of his life he had been told the myths and legends about the struggles between the forces of the TuiTonga (king of Tonga) and of the TuiManu'a (king of Manu'a). Furthermore, one Tongan king was, according to Tongan tradition, buried near the village of Ta'u.
The passage to Manu'a was a rough one, and the prince and I, being among the very few on the ship who had not succumbed to seasickness, shared a settee in the wheelhouse for some ten hours. We talked about Samoan and Tongan traditions, the differences between the Samoan and Tongan languages, his college days, and his hobby--collecting and actually
...
Read Full Article
|
