Hairdos and don'ts: Hair symbolism and sexual history in Samoa

Frontiers, 1996 by Mageo, Jeannette Marie

Hair is one of the classical foci of scholarly musing about the body, attaining this focal status through the seminal essay of Edmund Leach, "Magical Hair." 1 My intention is to draw the strands of this debate into a coherent conversation and to contribute to the colloquy by exploring transformations of feminine sex roles in Samoa from contact to the present. I do so by viewing changes in hair styles as indices of changes in these roles, arguing that the rules for hairdos that pertained to young women in precontact Samoa paralleled "dos and don'ts" for their sexual behavior and that changes in the former and the latter coincided. I use historical and ethnographic sources to document these changes, as well as data collected during my own eight-year residence in Samoa from 1981 to 1989.

As long as there have been chroniclers of Samoan culture, hair has been a symbol of import. When the British consul William Churchward resided in Samoa between 1881 to 1884, he observed a tropical profusion of hair styles and a ubiquitous preoccupation with the arrangement of hair:

One can rarely pass through a village without seeing some branch of hairdressing, either cutting, oiling, combing, liming, or shaving .... A flower is never more than a second or two in the hands . . . before it is transferred to the hair. When feasting or visiting, coronets and garlands, most elaborately woven with the greatest possible taste from all sorts of bright-hued flowers, berries and variegated leaves, invariably mixed with the high-scented leaf of the Musooe, are worn by both men and women, who never lose an opportunity of so adorning themselves.

Another . . . habit is, by the continued application of lime, to artificially produce a light-colored hair ... or ... to stain it a deep red .... The light color is .... produced by plastering the hair once or twice a week with a thick coating, well rubbed and combed in, of lime burnt from the coral-rock. This is allowed to remain during the day, but is washed out in the evening .... The

men present the appearance of... sunburnt barristers .... When these white heads are set off with bright-colored flowers and leaves, the effect, contrasting with the dark skin, is most striking ....

It would be impossible to describe the innumerable different methods of wearing the hair adopted in Samoa. One man will grow his hair for a year or two, keeping the sides and back closely clipped, whilst the hair on the crown is permitted to grow up . . . in the form of a great mushroom, about eighteen inches above the scalp, and which from being liberally treated with lime becomes quite blonde in color [above] . . . a parterre of quite dark and ordinary hair. In old times it was only certain chosen individuals who were allowed to wear their hair like that, and when it became long enough it was cut and made into the . . . fighting headdress worn by the chief warriors. 2

By the phrase "old times," Churchward refers to precontact times, when he presumes there were more rules for hairdos and less riotous variety of coiffure. In Samoa, significant contact with the outside world and missionization began together around 1830.3 Depictions of hair styles from this earlier period, especially those of young women's styles, do evince a greater regularity. Thus the Reverend John B. Stair, who resided in Samoa from 1838 to 1845, notes that while "Females had seven different styles of dressing their hair," the tutagita "was a style restricted to young females during their virginity." 4 Missionary John Williams, who was in Samoa during the early 1830s, describes the tutagita style as consisting of a shaved pate ornamented by a tuft hanging down over the left temple, from which a long tail was left to dangle down the cheek. 5 These curious tufts and tails were commonly bleached with lime to a light reddish-brown.6

As Samoa became Christian, long hair for girls came to be thought extraordinarily pretty. Laulii Willis, a Samoan girl born in 1865, married an English

man and moved to England where she wrote her memoirs, The Story of aul: A Daughter of Samoa. Laulii tells us that prior to her marriage, when another Englishman violently and persistently pursued her, a Samoan gossip attributed it to her long hair. Today in Samoa, when a girl cuts her heavy long hair, others will remark she is wasting her beauty.7 Yet girls' hair in Christian Samoa was, until recently, normally hidden in a bun.

In what follows I have two projects that are interwoven and interdependent: to investigate the significance of this rearrangement--from shaved pates and hanging locks to long hair neatly bound--and to further anthropological discourse on the convoluted topic of hair. Initially, the ideas that have arisen in the context of anthropological controversy will be used to decipher the historical reconfiguration of Samoan girls' hair. Finally, the Samoan data on hair,

allied with other ethnographic data on hair and body symbols generally, will be used to reflect on the anthropological debate.