The real Samoa.(Letter to the editor)

SIR: Re John Whitworth's poem about Samoa (May 2008). This nonsense about Samoan women is all Herman Melville's fault! In his novel Oomoo, he created the myth of the Polynesian maiden as a fantastic sexual being, an image that somehow resonated with the puritanical culture of the United States in the late nineteenth century. A generation later, Margaret Mead reinforced the myth, by giving it anthropological respectability. Her research in Manu'a, undertaken in the context of the then fashionable debate about "nature versus nurture", gave her a cachet that survives. But, like Melville's maiden, it is as fake. I'd like, on behalf of all Samoans, to put it to rest.

Mead was the victim of a taufa'alili, a concept that doesn't translate well into English, but is not dissimilar to the ironic seam that runs through Australia's sense of humour. Samoans are greatly amused by the gullibility of strangers, and relish the innocent fun that can be had teasing someone into believing their interpretation of Samoan behaviour or customs is actually true. Taufa'alili is why, when Mead asked young girls if they engaged in masturbation, or promiscuous behaviour, they answered "yes" with a straight face. Out of her earshot they must have been rolling about with laughter. And earnestly extending her research across a wider sample, Mead got more of the same answers, and the samples got more laughs.

"Napo", the little boy Mead befriended and wrote about, was Napoleone Tuitelelepaga. When I met him he was an old man, a Matai from the village of Sogi in the western part of Tutuila, American Samoa. He was inflated with a jolly sense of importance ascribed him by Western "civilisation". This was reinforced by his local reputation for so successfully pulling the palm fronds over the eyes of gullible Westerners for so many years. Taufa'alili indeed!

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