Introduction
This 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.
This article was prepared in 2009, when Samoa introduced its now famous “road switch” when drivers had to change from driving on the right hand side of the road to driving on the left. As I imagined that the “traditional” buses might soon pass into history, I thought it timely to describe in English, and thus in a language accessible to young Samoans, how these buses were and are a social microcosm, creating a space within which all social relations are enacted. From my notes, I was able to draw on observations I had made during the 1980s and 1990s, and the “ethnographic present” in the following pages refers to this period.
