Chapter 3 SJICIDE IN WESTERN SAl-DA: A SOCIOLOOICAL PERSPECTIVE

SUicide is not a new phenomenon in Samam society • missionary and lexicographer who lived in Samoa between 1839 George Pratt, a and 1879, recorded a tenn for suicide, toa ' i, in the first edition of his dictionary of the Samoan language {Pratt 1862).1 In a letter to another missionary, George Brown, he explained that suicide is nmostly caused by anger within the family " (Freeman 1983: 220, 346). Margaret Mead reported the phenomenon after her 1926 studies but was inclined to the q>inion that the incidence was low and that suicide was neither the result of humiliation, nor popular among adolescents for whom life was largely free of the stresses which might give rise to suicide. Lowell Holmes, in a re-study of Manu ' a, reported cases of suicide in that area in 1957 (Holmes 1957). Derek Freeman contends that the myth which developed as a result of the dissemination of Margaret Mead's account of Samoa diverted attention from such contradictory evidence as suicide. This in turn led to a