A bus ride in Samoa during the 1980s: hierarchy, stratification and individualism in the Fa’aSāmoa

International audienceThis article is a further attempt to examine social relationships in Samoa from a holistic methodological perspective. The ethnographic context may seem anecdotal: public transport. But it seemed to me that the social interactions taking place on a Samoan bus, at least for lengthy trips, provide a snapshot of the social relationships characteristic of that society in the years under consideration. As I did in earlier studies of Samoan social relations, I am calling upon three theoretical proposals put forward long ago by Louis Dumont in his classic study of India (1966): the notion of “hierarchy”, the opposition between hierarchy and stratification, and the ability of hierarchy to accommodate individualism