Coming of age in Samoa

Modern descriptions of primitive people give us a picture of their culture classified according to the varied aspects of human life. We learn about inventions, household economy...

In the Samoan classification of relatives two principles, sex and age, are of the most primary importance. Relationship terms are never used as terms of address, a name or nickn...

For the sake of convenience the households were numbered in sequence from one end of each village to the other. The houses did not stretch in a straight line along the beach, bu...

The former of these expressions has a very different meaning from the latter although linguistically they represent optional syntactic forms, the second being literally, “I do n...

The children of this age already show a very curious example of a phonetic self-consciousness in which they are almost as acute and discriminating as their elders. When the miss...

During six months I saw six girls leave the pastor’s establishment for several reasons: Tasi, because her mother was ill and she, that rare phenomenon, the eldest in a biologica...