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Return to Ta'u
| Article
# : |
15973 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1989 |
5,476 Words |
| Author
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Lowell D. Holmes
Lowell D. Holmes is professor and chairman of the Department
of Anthropology at Wichita State University. |
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
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