Race, Gender, and ‘Foreign Exchange’ in Samoan Performing Arts

Abstract

Through an investigation of Samoan performing arts, I argue that artistic innovation is intentional, but not fully conscious in the linguistic sense. Performance artists grapple with disturbing shared experiences neither they, nor their cultural consociates, can get into words, but that artists render through a play of figures. By reframing figures and the cultural models they symbolise, artists think and feel through cultural memories in ways that germinate social, psychological, and artistic change. This capacity is particularly useful in historical periods of abrupt transition, as the colonial era was in the Pacific. The performances I review are wonderfully coordinated, collective endeavours in which players and audience together, within the quotation marks of play, consider interactions between foreign males and local females and their implications for models of race and gender.

Keywords:

• Performing Arts
• Race
• Gender
• Samoa
• History

Notes

[1] Acknowledgments: I thank Roger Lohmann, Joel Robbins, Nusi Mauala, Sanele Mageo, Margaret Jolly, the editors of Anthropological Forum and three anonymous reviewers for their contributions to this article.

[2] Mana is typically rendered in English as ‘power’ or ‘efficacy’, but any one English word is inadequate. See further, Shore (1989).

[3] The westerly islands used to be called ‘Western Samoa’, but are now simply called ‘Samoa’, while the easterly islands are called ‘American Samoa’.

[4] On Pacific traditions of female clowning, see Hereniko 1991.

[5] In many villages, the aualuma lost its traditional role owing to its incompatibility with Christian values (Keesing 1937). Women's church auxiliaries inherited many of their responsibilities. They sponsored a girls’ group (‘au a teine) and a boys’ group (‘au a tama), which took over singing at weddings and, moderately, the sexy dancing that accompanied it.

[6] The Samoan word for marine is actually ‘malini’.

[7] Translation by Loia Fiaui and Sanele Mageo.

[8] The personal attendants of chiefs, soga, also performed as jesters.