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Return to the Samoan Isles
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16154 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1989 |
5,519 Words |
| Author
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Ellen R. and Lowell D. Holmes
Ellen R. Holmes, an anthropologist with a major interest in
the aging experience in other cultures, is assistant professor
of health, administration, and gerontology as well as academic
coordinator of the gerontology program at Wichita State
University. Lowell D. Holmes is professor of anthropology in
the Department of Anthropology at Wichita State University. |
Varying degrees of European-influenced social and cultural change have occurred in the Samoan Islands over the last 150 years, most dramatically in American Samoa since the early 1960s. American Samoans now depend heavily on imported food, and even native items like taro must be acquired from Western Samoa to ensure an adequate supply. The territory's traditional subsistence economy has been almost entirely replaced by wage labor. The major employers are the government, the tuna canneries, and an ever-increasing number of small businesses.
Efficient health care is provided by the government at minimal cost to Samoans, and recent years have brought reduced infant mortality rates, increased life expectancy, and the effective elimination of diseases such as filariasis (elephantiasis). The educational system, based on American patterns, provides modern but somewhat substandard (relative to the United States) education through grade twelve. There is also a system of village preschools, and postsecondary education is available at American Samoa Community College. Transportation and communication have been revolutionized compared with thirty years ago.
We returned to the islands of American Samoa, which have been central to most of our research, in late spring of 1988, after an absence of twelve years. It was Lowell's fifth visit, the first having been in 1954 when he conducted a restudy of Margaret Mead's work in Manu'a. He had returned in 1962, 1974, and 1976 to investigate such issues as politics and decision making, the impact of educational television, and the effect of modernization on the aged.
Ellen's familiarity with Samoan culture began in 1976, when she collected data for her doctoral dissertation on aging. At that time we studied in the isolated village of Ta'u in the Manu'a group (sixty miles east of Pago Pago), where Mead had worked fifty years earlier and where Lowell began in 1954, and in American Samoa's most urban center at Pago Pago Bay--the villages of Utulei, Fagatogo, and Pago Pago. We then went to Western Samoa and lived on the grounds of Mapuifagalele, western Polynesia's first home for the aged, in order to explore why such an institution had developed in a society where family care for the aged was a traditional priority. The modernization and aging project then concluded with several months' study in the Samoan migrant community in the San Francisco bay area.
Our most recent visit was undertaken for several reasons: first, to observe the political environment under the recently established system whereby
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