Theorizing Self in Samoa: Emotions, Genders, and Sexualities (review)

Theorizing Self in Samoa: Emotions, Genders, and Sexualities, by Jeannette Marie Mageo. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998. ISBN cloth, 0-472-10920-0; paper, 0-472-08518-2; xv + 292 pages, photographs, notes, glossary, references, index. Cloth, US$57.50; paper, US$22.95.

Jeannette Mageo has written a book filled with ideas about Samoan culture, constructs of self, socialization, and historical changes. She had the rare perspective of being an insider-outsider by virtue of her marriage to a Samoan and her employment as a college teacher in Samoa. This volume appears to be three different books. The first postulates cultural elements of a Samoan self, the second a construction of elements of childhood socialization, and the third a historical reconstruction of the influences of foreign missionaries and US military on the "reconfiguring" of Samoan ideas or "discourses" of male and primarily female selves and sexuality.

There are competing perspectives in the book, suggesting a postmodern schema for theoretical debunking. Mageo begins by stating that she is working with a Foucauldian discourse theory about the elements of self, which she labels "the premise-discourse series" whereby "sociocentric or egocentric premises are coded in cultural lexicons of personhood....These lexicons are efforts to capture the self in language, which condemn an alternative aspect to obscurity" (7). These alternative aspects are denied or repressed into a sort of id-like "shadow self." In outlining aspects of the Samoan self, Mageo appears to use a Levi-Straussian concentric dualism with psychoanalytic id-ego elements. She posits that certain key elements of the idealized Samoan self are expressed by two opposing emotions, so that the "idealized premise" is undermined by "contradictory tendencies" of repressed elements or "vices." For example, the ideal self expression of dignity (mamalu) is undermined by abandoned emotionalism (lotovaivai), but countermanded by the expression and encouragement of personal restraint (lototele). Dignity is not the fulcrum between emotionalism and restraint but a transcendent tertiary ideal.

In her socialization section, she tackles a long-standing issue of Polynesian child rearing: what are the adult effects of early "rejection" of formerly indulged infants and young children. The Richies thought it brought a "cognitive rigidity," and even later Alan Howard postulated adult conformity and conflict avoidance. Mageo posits that this parental rejection results in insecure attachments and inhibitions of certain emotions that reappear in adults as "vices." So the restraint of dignity is "protested" and expressed in an adult with the "vice" of wanton displays of emotionalism at separation events such as departures and funerals--not unlike the childish tantrum that occurs when the mother withdraws from her infant or young child.

The third section interweaves missionary and anthropological accounts with Samoan folk tales and her own fieldwork to give a historical picture of changes in "Samoan discourses on self" and the role Samoans played in those changes. Here she focuses on changing roles and ideas about sexuality and gender, using the transvestite as the transformative element between males and females, particularly as performers in a Samoan theatrical form called Joking Nights. This section is the strongest and most promising of the three, in spite of using early missionary accounts to develop what she refers to as "pre-contact Samoa." In the references, Mageo notes a manuscript on Joking Nights, and certainly it is worth a book-length examination.

There are several problems with this book, three of which I will highlight. The first problem involves Mageo's lack of adequate discussion of self and person and how it is situated in Pacific research. She neglects to discuss the extensive literature on the distinctions between the two (for example, as summarized in Thomas Csordas's comprehensive review); the research on emotion, morality, and self, exemplified by Catherine Lutz's work; and how her constructs differ from Bradd Shore's multifaceted, relations-based model of Samoan self. A hallmark of Samoan research is the importance of status and rank...