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

Frontiers, 1996 by Mageo, Jeannette Marie

One might suppose that this positive attitude towards self-display indicated a permissive attitude toward sexuality. This conjecture is given credence by many early missionary descriptions of Samoan night dances ( poula), which were described by one of my informants as "a sexual party." Although nineteenth-century sources suggest that, in their original form, p oula involved a great range of entertainments, these occasions had a definite trajectory ending in a melee for which "sexual party" is an apt description. 43 In the earliest recorded poula, girls danced naked, often in front of a torch, and displayed their bodies in antics that were both lewd and humorous, as did the boys. 44 Poula songs were often sexually explicit, and the same informant cited above (who observed poula as a boy) said that "the words of the song" were "telling them what to do," as the following illustrates: 45

Loosen your kilt and throw it in the house,

Then do the slap dance in the nude.

When the papaya is yellow on one side

That is when it is sweet!

It is splendid, the white ass;

It is splendid, the white ass.

The girl's kilt is in tatters. 46

Remember, however, that the girl's head was partially shaved. If girls were sexually unrestrained in old Samoa, then perhaps Hallpike is right, and shaving female heads does not necessarily signify sexual restraint. If, on the other hand, Leach is right about the significance of shaving and binding hair, then Samoan girls' mostly shaved heads are something of an enigma as they should indicate sexual restraint, just as surely as their reddened locks suggest an absence of restraint.

Female "Castration" and Shaven Heads?

Clues to the purport of the shaved head in Samoa can be found in reports from Christian times when girls began growing their hair long. I return to the memoirs of Laulii Willis, who grew up in Samoa during the latter half of the nineteenth century. The tutagita style was still in evidence in Laulii's time, but rather than being the style affected by the pubescent girl, it was worn by girls prior to coming of age; in adolescence girls grew their hair long like Laulii. 47 When Laulii was believed to have committed a sexual indiscretion, however, an older sister shaved her head, leaving a lock or two. 48 In other words Laulii was forced to return to the tutagita style, not because she was thought a virgin, but rather because it signified a greater measure of control over her sexuality. Reasoning from this incident, it seems likely that the precontact girls' shaved pates also signified control of their sexuality. This symbol of control, however, became a means to assert control.

In 1928 Margaret Mead mentions "severe beatings and a stigmatizing shaving of the head" as a recently abandoned punishment for promiscuity. 49 So it appears that relatives who were distressed by a girl's indiscretions eventually ceased to leave a lock or two--as in the tutagita style--and shaved the head altogether. Heads are still being shaved when Samoan parents catch a daughter in a compromising situation. Should a girl behave too freely, a parent may literally drag her home by her hair, a punishment common enough to have a name, futi le ulu, meaning either "pull by" or "pluck out the hair." I married a Samoan, and as recently as the early 1980s my husband witnessed a mother who, catching her daughter at a discotheque in Pago Pago, American Samoa,