Coming of Age in Samoa
contamination from contact with the dead, the open, unconcealed operation and the sight of the distorted, repulsive foetus all combine to render the experience indelible. An only slightly less emotionally charged experience was the often witnessed operation of cutting open any dead body to search out the cause of death. These operations performed in the shallow open grave, beneath a glaring noon-day sun, with a frighted, excited crowd watching in horrified fascination, are hardly orderly or unemotional initiations into the details of biology and death, and yet they seem to leave no bad effects on the children's emotional makeup. Possibly the adult attitude that these are horrible but perfectly natural, non-unique occurrences, forming a legitimate part of the child's experience, may sufficiently account for the lack of bad results. Children take an intense interest in life and death, and are more proportionately obsessed by it than are their adults who divide their horror between the death of a young neighbour in child-bed and the fact that the high chief has been insulted by some breach of etiquette in the neighbouring village. The intricacies of the social life are a closed book to the child and a correspondingly fascinating field of exploration in later life, while the facts of life and death are shorn of all mystery at an early age.
In matters of sex the ten-year-olds are equally sophisticated, although they witness sex activities only surreptitiously, since all expressions of affection are rigorously barred in public. A couple whose wedding
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