Where We Once Belonged by Sia Figiel6/6/2023 ![]() This paper analyses Sia Figiel’s explication of Samoa in Where We Once Belonged as a response to these Western anthropological studies and assertions on Samoan sexuality, coming-of-age, and the unification of Samoan Islands and overgeneralisations of Samoans’ dispositions. However, some Samoan (and non-Samoan) academics, writers and researchers debunk such Oriental representations. Derek Freeman questions Mead’s findings, gives contrary views and unified the whole Samoan Islands as one and same. Margaret Mead concludes that in Samoa, the transition from childhood, through adolescence, and into adulthood was one of relative ease and that sexuality is so free that women usually defer marriage to enjoy casual sex. Samoa has, specifically, been a subject of anthropological discourse for many decades, following the Mead-Freeman controversy. ![]() ![]() ![]() Like all Orients, the Pacific has been much represented and made subjects of theoretical discourses, characterised as bare-breasted and sexually available women, murderous and lecherous men, idly tropical islands inhabited by primitive people with little or no culture. ![]() The result of the first (and the subsequent) contact between the West and the East is an Oriental documentation, colonial establishment and notional subject-making of the East by the supposedly civilised and advanced West. ![]()
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