Chapter 4
Summary
The focus of this chapter was on the samoan family hierarchy. Hierarchy is mostly determined by age as opposed to sex, although the matai, who is head of the household, is typically male. Additionally, the matai is sort of outside the age-based hierarchy.
Discussion
Probably the most interesting aspect of samoan hierarchy is that status is largely independent of sex. This is not completely true, as the majority of matai's are men, and women, even as children, are typically expected to raise children and so forth. However, in contrast to most of the other well known cultures, samoa is remarkably close to equality between the sexes.
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