Word: manus
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...Easter Week fiasco. To Revolutionist Andrew Kilfoyle, who fought in it, the Rising was sickening, "a revolt of poets and schoolmasters," inept, ill-planned, melodramatic, futile. It convinced him that next time there should be no sentimentality, no proclamations, no self-deception and no pity. But to Manus Considine, who had intended to be a priest, the defeat of the Rising and the execution of its leaders were an incentive to join the rebels. Kilfoyle tried to keep him out, said sentimentalists were...
Youthful Anthropologist Margaret Mead (Mrs. Reo Fortune), no bookworm theorist, believes in getting her data at first hand. Two years ago she published an account of primitive adolescence (Coming of Age in Samoa). Now she reports how children grow up among the Manus of the Admiralty Islands...
...Manus are isolated, unreformed by missionaries, almost uncontaminated by white men. They live in thatched huts set on piles in a lagoon. Children learn to swim, to use a boat, almost before they can walk. For six months Margaret Mead and her husband lived among the Manus, learnt their language, their tabus, took photographs, asked questions, saw as much as they were allowed. Anthropologist Mead's conclusion is that among the Manus only the children have a really good time. Children do exactly as they please; parent's may plead, they never discipline. But with marriage a hard life begins...
...There is . . . a curious analogy between Manus society and America. Like America, Manus has not yet turned from the primary business of making a living to the less immediate interest of the conduct of life as an art. As in America, work is respected and industry and economic success is the measure...
Love, even of the unromantic, pagan kind Mrs. Mead found in Samoa, is non-existent among the Manus. Children, like their father, who spoils them, are apt to despise their mother. They are callous about death, birth, the facts of life. Women get no joy out of marriage. Maturity and middle age mean constant debt and hard work. "Above the 35-year-olds comes a divided group?the failures still weak and dependent, and the successes who dare again to indulge in the violence of childhood, who stamp and scream at their debtors, and give way to uncontrolled hysterical rage...