Samoans

Samoan life is organised by fa'a Samoa, the Samoan way, and its institutions are the aiga, the extended family, and the matai, the titled head who holds a name belonging to that family and represents it in the village council. Titles are conferred rather than inherited automatically, and they carry authority over land, over the distribution of goods and over conduct. Bradd Shore's ethnography describes a social order in which a person acts as the occupant of a position rather than as a private individual, and in which the resolution of a serious offence is a matter for the councils rather than for the parties.

The formal apology, ifoga, is the clearest expression of that. The offender's family goes to the offended family and sits covered outside the house until they are received, and the wrong is settled between the groups rather than between the persons.

Samoan religion before Christianity recognised Tagaloa as a creator working from a height, alongside aitu, spirits attached to families and to places, and restrictions regulating what could be done and by whom. Much of this material was recorded after conversion and by missionaries, so the atlas is cautious about its outlines, and notes that the aitu have not disappeared from Samoan conversation even where the theology has changed.

Christianity arrived in 1830 with John Williams of the London Missionary Society and was adopted with unusual speed, in part because it was received through Samoan channels and taken up by matai. Within a generation the village pastor, the faifeau, had become an office standing alongside the matai, supported by the village and holding real authority in it, and church buildings became the largest structures in most villages.

Samoa today is among the most churchgoing societies in the world. The Congregational Christian Church, the Methodists, the Catholics and the Latter-day Saints all have substantial memberships, Sunday observance is enforced by village rule in many places, and the constitution was amended in 2017 to declare Samoa a Christian nation. Church obligation, family obligation and the matai system are in practice inseparable, and the remittance economy that sustains many villages funds all three.

Colonial rule was divided between Germany and the United States in 1899, and then between New Zealand and the United States, and the two Samoas remain politically separate. The Mau movement of the 1920s, which sought independence from New Zealand by non violent means, was met with shooting in Apia in 1929. Independence came in 1962, the first in the Pacific islands. Large Samoan communities now live in New Zealand, Australia and the United States, and the churches are the institutions holding them together.