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

Frontiers, 1996 by Mageo, Jeannette Marie

In its narrative salience, the long hair of female spirits is analogous to the penises of chiefs. As chiefs have remarkable genitals, female spirits have remarkable hair. It seems probable that the primary visual characteristic of female spirits represents their primary spiritual characteristic: their long hair, like chiefly penises, is a symbol of their mana.

Summing up, in Samoa mana connotes an ensemble of ideas that might be termed "sexuality-fecundity"; mana is connoted by long hair. There is, then, a chain of association connecting long hair and sexuality. These associations are

confirmed by Samoan ideas of feminine beauty. Beauty queens everywhere are sex symbols. In the early 1970s beauty pageants began in Samoa. At one of the first pageants in American Samoa, the queen was determined exclusively by measuring each girl's hair with a yardstick. Like the silhouettes exhibited at American beauty contests, hair symbolically exhibited the Samoan girls' sexuality. Leach's argument seems confirmed in Samoa and provides a basis for decoding the cultural messages inscribed in the tutagita: as a lock of long hair, the tutagita displayed a girl's sexuality.

The exhibitionistic significance of hair in old Samoa was reiterated by bleaching the tutagita to a light reddish-brown. If mana can be said to have a color, that color is red. The archetypal Polynesian chiefs skin and hair were reputed to be ruddy.28 The same can be said of female spirits in Samoa. The skin of female spirits glows red "like that of the fisherman returning from the sea."29 Should a female spirit seduce a boy, the next morning his skin is "suffused with a strange rosy flush, as if he has been working in the sun," says Saeu Scanlan (former President of American Samoa Community College). 30

Recounting a tale of a boy seduced by Sauma'iafe, Augustin Kraemer says, "He looked all aflame the next morning." 31 One might surmise that the boy's skin had taken on the spirit's rubicund glow.

Often the boy seduced by a spirit becomes sick, even unto death. 32 Perhaps this is because, throughout Polynesia, mana is transferred by contact. 33 When a person without mana comes into contact with one who has mana-- even indirectly--some of the mana is transferred to the lesser individual, who is likely to become ill. In old Samoa the missionary Stair noted that chiefs

always partook of their meals separately, since whatever they touched was supposed to partake of their sacredness, so that all food left by them . . . was taken to the bush and thrown away, as it was believed that if a person not belonging to this sacred class ate of it, his stomach would immediately swell from disease, and death speedily ensue! 34

The boy who takes on a spirit girl's ruddy glow, like the food left behind by a chief, is contaminated with "sacredness," that is with the spirit's mana; however, the boy is also like the partaker who enjoys the food but does not belong to the chief's "sacred class," and who in consequence suffers disease and speedy death.