It's a Samoan Thing. You Wouldn't Understand.

January 23, 2013 11:03 AM

Ilana Gershon is a professor currently researching how people use the Internet to break up with their romantic partners, but before that she wrote an anthropological study about "strategic ignorance" in Samoan immigrant communities, all of which is just a complicated way of showing that she's the most unusually qualified person on the Internet to comment on the Manti Te'o hoax. (previously)
posted by jonp72 (51 comments total)

Is this where we tweet the the link to ask vs. guess culture to Manti Te'o?
posted by NoRelationToLea at 11:28 AM on January 23 [2 favorites]

That was facinating and it certainly explains a lot about this whole thing.
posted by Ruthless Bunny at 11:37 AM on January 23 [1 favorite]

Back in my day, if you wanted to break up with your boyfriend you had to give him a sealed letter when you dropped him off at the train station at the end of your weekend together and ask him not to read it until he got on the train.
posted by The Card Cheat at 11:46 AM on January 23 [24 favorites]

She does a marvelous job of illuminating Te'o's side of the whole debacle, and how he could have let himself get roped in. Given that the primary perpetrator Ronaiah Tuiasosopo was also Samoan, I would have liked to have heard her take on him as well, though. I guess she was limiting her reactions to Te'o's side because they fell more directly in her areas of expertise.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 11:55 AM on January 23 [5 favorites]

This was really interesting, but it felt like Ilana knows so much more about the topic but wrote something brief for a quick web article. It sounds like she has been involved with a lot of really intriguing social, cultural interactions:

Leukemia was even a theme, I guess Samoan pranksters keep turning to the same diseases over and over again. But I did this fieldwork before Facebook or cell phones, and even before email became all that widespread outside of college circles. All the stories I heard involved husky voices on telephones, and maybe a letter or two.

I feel like she wrote to illuminate some of the realities of the Christian/Mormon Samoan society, but didn't want to draw the families into this too much.
posted by filthy light thief at 12:04 PM on January 23 [2 favorites]

So I guess Samoan culture trumped sports culture, which has a few basic principles:
1. Your wife or girlfriend will become a topic of conversation, and may even eclipse you in fame. See: Lauren Tannehill, Jan Vesely's girlfriend, the cast of Basketball Wives... and Katharine Webb, who as Alabama quarterback A.J. McCarron's girlfriend gained 175,000 Twitter followers during the BCS title game (in which Te'o also played).
2. People will try to get close to you because you'll be making millions this time next year.
3. Women offer you sex, all the time. Your girlfriend will not like that, and will definitely insist on visiting.
posted by acidic at 12:13 PM on January 23

I cannot read the word "Samoan" without hearing the Antwan Rockamora discussion in my head.
posted by DigDoug at 12:14 PM on January 23 [8 favorites]

That part doesn't surprise me, acidic. After all, another basic principle of sports culture is that no matter how common the first three are, a substantial proportion of newly-famous athletes will never see it coming.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 12:16 PM on January 23

I found this too vague to be persuasive. I'd like to hear specifically what these other hoaxes involved, with names changed as necessary. And could the subjects of those hoaxes not also have been complicit?

An alternate theory would be: people in strongly religious or traditional communities sometimes invent girlfriends to keep up appearances.
posted by East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 at 12:17 PM on January 23

i'm not samoan, but i was raised mormon. i had a number of letters/emails/chatting only relationships with only a couple of pictures exchanged and some phone calls, especially when i was leaving the church. it seemed easier to figure out my own feelings on chastity when i could keep everything out of the physical realm. i still have a book on my shelf that explains that hand holding is the first step on the slippery slope to "losing your most precious gift."

i don't know what he knew and if he was in on it, but i do know quite a few other mormons who have purposefully sought out emotionally intimate relationships with no chance of physical intimacy messing it up.
posted by nadawi at 12:24 PM on January 23 [13 favorites]

This article changed my view of the situation. I didn't realize that he was Samoan. I have Samoan and Tongan friends and my experience of their cultures (I'm by no means an expert) makes the idea of him being hoaxed ring more true. Thanks for posting this.
posted by kamikazegopher at 12:24 PM on January 23 [1 favorite]

Most Samoans aren't immigrants, at last not in the US.
posted by ethnomethodologist at 12:30 PM on January 23

The Card Cheat: "Back in my day, if you wanted to break up with your boyfriend you had to give him a sealed letter when you dropped him off at the train station at the end of your weekend together and ask him not to read it until he got on the train."

"Welcome To Dumpsville Baby, Population: You."
posted by mannequito at 12:32 PM on January 23 [7 favorites]

the most unusually qualified person on the Internet to comment on the Manti Te'o hoax

So 'unusually qualified', I was tempted to make sure she existed a week ago.
posted by MCMikeNamara at 12:32 PM on January 23 [6 favorites]

i'm not samoan, but i was raised mormon. i had a number of letters/emails/chatting only relationships with only a couple of pictures exchanged and some phone calls, especially when i was leaving the church. it seemed easier to figure out my own feelings on chastity when i could keep everything out of the physical realm. i still have a book on my shelf that explains that hand holding is the first step on the slippery slope to "losing your most precious gift."

That is really fascinating. I was raised Mormon and all of that sounds completely foreign to me - as in this is the first time I've ever even heard of any of that. The variety and variations of subcultures within Mormonism are pretty amazing.
posted by The World Famous at 12:37 PM on January 23 [2 favorites]

ethnomethodologist: Most Samoans aren't immigrants, at last not in the US.

So... they're tourists? Or migrant workers?
posted by IAmBroom at 12:44 PM on January 23

Citizens.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 12:45 PM on January 23 [13 favorites]

My money is on complicit in the hoax. As to why he was doing this in the first place....
posted by Old'n'Busted at 12:47 PM on January 23

Samoa generally in this way referring to American Samoa, which has roughly 55,000 of the roughly 250,000 residents of the Samoan Island chain.
posted by Navelgazer at 12:48 PM on January 23

Hawaii is a US state. An ethnic Samoan born and raised in Hawaii is an American citizen.

Maybe it's confusing because there's a country called "Samoa" and a country called "American Samoa." Not all people who identify as Samoan are from Samoa.
posted by muddgirl at 12:48 PM on January 23 [1 favorite]

Citizens are still immigrants, if they were born in another country. Unless you're using "Samoan" as a shorthand for Samoan-American, which is odd.
posted by IAmBroom at 12:50 PM on January 23

Most Samoans aren't immigrants, at last not in the US.

So... they're tourists? Or migrant workers?

Citizens.

Persons from American Samoa are U.S. nationals, more precisely. It's easy for them to become citizens, and they have unrestricted entry to and travel within the (rest of the) U.S. and can work freely, but American Samoans are only U.S. citizens by birth if one of their parents was already a U.S. citizen.
posted by Etrigan at 12:51 PM on January 23 [7 favorites]

Navelgazer: Samoa generally in this way referring to American Samoa, which has roughly 55,000 of the roughly 250,000 residents of the Samoan Island chain.

Ah! I didn't realize there's an American Samoa.
posted by IAmBroom at 12:51 PM on January 23

I cannot read the word "Samoan" without hearing the Antwan Rockamora discussion in my head.

I cannot read the word "Samoan" without craving the Girl Scouts' 'Samoas' cookies.
posted by ericb at 12:53 PM on January 23 [11 favorites]

Mmm. Having had a lot of experience with sockpuppets, attention vampires, and psueicides, I'm not tremendously convinced that much of this is specifically Samoan. The leukemia thing? Cancer of one sort or another comes up again and again, as the course of the disease is perfect for this sort of thing; you can have a 'relapse' whenever people's attention seems to be drifting, you can excuse yourself from face to face meetings because 'your immune system is weak', you can even beg off skyping in favor of photos (of other people) because 'I look so bad, I don't want people remembering me that way', etc.
posted by tavella at 12:53 PM on January 23 [2 favorites]

Citizens are still immigrants, if they were born in another country. Unless you're using "Samoan" as a shorthand for Samoan-American, which is odd.

"Samoan" generally means "of Samoan ancestry." This includes people who trace their Hawaiian ancestry to before American settlers.

I don't really know why we're talking about American Samoa. Te'o is from Hawaii. It looks like Tuiasosopo has lived in Southern California for most of his childhood, although I can't find a definitive history.
posted by muddgirl at 12:58 PM on January 23 [1 favorite]

OK, I stated that wrong. Samoans aren't the same as native Hawaiians - they migrated to Hawaii at various points before and after American settlement.
posted by muddgirl at 1:01 PM on January 23

I also grew up Mormon, and talking to people who came out, and left the church in the last few years, most of them had girlfriends of the abstracted email/letter/photo type--as a way of covering their queerness. I also had the same book as nadwai and my out queer friends talked about the ironic quality of old fashioned courting with its abstractness made the hiding easier. I am not saying he is queer, but the pressure to be in a rship, and that presurre disappearing when one comes, is understandable in conservative religious cultures.
posted by PinkMoose at 1:07 PM on January 23 [3 favorites]

That was facinating and it certainly explains a lot about this whole thing.

Really? Does it explain why the Notre Dame athletic director broke down and cried when addressing reporters about this story? (Because he was so upset by how a young man's trust was broken! The humanity!)

An account of this story that ignores that it's fundamentally a sports story -- about a religious young man who was supposedly inspired to play great football by the death of a tragically sick young woman -- seems woefully incomplete. I mean, it's not just that the kid was tricked (supposedly); he was also on the cover of Sports Illustrated, etc. feeding reporters the bullshit that they were so hungry for.
posted by leopard at 1:11 PM on January 23

I got a letter from my girl while in the army, overseas. I was addressed Dear John and had nothing else inside (the letter had correct address with my name aka under John. I was to figure out the rest. I did.
posted by Postroad at 1:14 PM on January 23 [5 favorites]

Does it explain why the Notre Dame athletic director broke down and cried when addressing reporters about this story?

Perhaps he's just a big boob.
posted by The World Famous at 1:16 PM on January 23

"Notre Dame sports official proves self to be gigantic asshole, hypocrite" wouldn't even make it to the top of page 17C, though.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 1:18 PM on January 23 [2 favorites]

No, but the "lie" about the existence of the girlfriend is just one of many lies that form the foundation of the college football. That people were willing to believe in this story -- that it was "meaningful" for Te'o to skip the funeral so that he could focus on delivering glory for his college football team -- is the driver here. The Notre Dame athletic director cried because Notre Dame football is in the business of selling bullshit and the revelation that an inspirational sob story was a complete fraud is potentially very threatening to the business.
posted by leopard at 1:23 PM on January 23 [4 favorites]

Really? Does it explain why the Notre Dame athletic director broke down and cried when addressing reporters about this story? (Because he was so upset by how a young man's trust was broken! The humanity!)

An account of this story that ignores that it's fundamentally a sports story -- about a religious young man who was supposedly inspired to play great football by the death of a tragically sick young woman -- seems woefully incomplete. I mean, it's not just that the kid was tricked (supposedly); he was also on the cover of Sports Illustrated, etc. feeding reporters the bullshit that they were so hungry for.

No, it only explained the context for why a naive, young man could be taken in with such a thing.

The rest of that is all on Notre Dame, Sports Reporting and the gaping maw that is the American Public's Insatiable Appetite for Scandalous News!
posted by Ruthless Bunny at 1:41 PM on January 23

Well I'm glad this makes sense to somebody, because I can't wrap my head around it from any angle.

When this was originally up on MeFi, there was a lot of discussion around the idea that he had to be complicit in it - because really, how could he not be - and that the most likely reason was that he was trying to keep people from realizing he was gay which, both as a Mormon and a guy about to go into the NFL, would be a huge problem.

That at least made some kind of sense, but if he just wanted to brush aside questions about his sexuality, why would he have had to go to such absurd lengths? He's a good looking man - a football hero, for God's sake! Getting a girlfriend should not be a problem for this guy. It's not as though he would have to sleep with anybody. He's clearly established his strong faith and values, so of course he's not going to sleep with someone until he's married. There must be a thousand girls at Notre Dame who would have gone out with him in a hot minute. All he had to do was go to dinner with one every once in a while, and problem solved. There was no need to invent a whole fictional person with a ridiculously sentimental backstory.

So the "she's a beard" theory doesn't seem to hold water now that I've thought about it. And that leaves me with no idea why he would participate in something like this. And that leaves the "he was fooled too" theories, which seem ridiculous to me because they demand what seems such an unlikely combination of Munchausen by Internet on one side and truly astonishing naivety on the other. But that's at least possible, I guess, and nothing else makes any damn sense at all.
posted by Naberius at 1:52 PM on January 23 [2 favorites]

My theory remains that he was fooled INITIALLY, told everyone about her, but then once she "got cancer" he realized he was fooled and decided to exploit it by making her "die" right during the Heisman trophy consideration. This is a great article nonetheless, I look forward to hearing more of her conclusions (and if I was a book publisher I'd be calling her phone non-stop right now).
posted by Potomac Avenue at 1:57 PM on January 23 [1 favorite]

At various instances with my friends and in my usual online haunts, I've referred to Manti Te'o's self-admitted scam artist, Ronaiah Tuiasosopo as an abuser. And the reason I use that word is because that's exactly what happened -- abuse. Ronaiah Tuiasosopo deliberately and repeatedly chose to engage in predatory and sytematic ongoing emotional manipulation and deception that, near the end, also involved sleep deprivation and false claims of hospitalization and medical procedures.

What -should- that be called? "Teasing"?

And as for the recent images of Te'o that have been appearing, it's entirely possible that Manti Te'o looks so furtive and wary because what he's going through is akin to post traumatic stress disorder. He's probably decompressing in the same way as a person who has managed to break free from a cult. Lots of people who disengage from psychologically abusive relationships have felt this way.

If one person did this to him, with no help from anybody else (and I believe that's the case, as there haven't been ANY tabloids breaking ANY news about 'cousins'), then -- Samoan cultural identity notwithstanding -- that one person is a lying, mentally ill sociopath who needs a whole lot of help for a very, very long time.
posted by Bindyree at 2:12 PM on January 23 [3 favorites]

The World Famous - yeah, we've spoken before about how our experiences differed. i come from a very conservative area, not even including the mormon up bringing, so i think the lds churches in the area went even more conservative to set themselves apart. growing up the other (devoutly conservative christian) kids thought i was pentecostal or amish. from what i could see restrictions on my activities were far tighter than my non-mormon peers, and their restrictions were already pretty tight.

PinkMoose - i should have mentioned that, yeah, queer/bi and trying to work it all out was totally part of my story. so i could have a "boyfriend" who lived in michigan and then also have a female "best friend" who lived in arizona, and figure out where emotional intimacy grew in the absence of physical stimulus.
posted by nadawi at 2:44 PM on January 23 [2 favorites]

I hadn't been paying much attention to this story (after all, who cares about a college football player's fake girlfriend), but after learning he's Samoan, it all started to click a bit for me. My family lived in American Samoa for a few of my formative years and I have first-hand experience with their unusual culture. We're all familiar with Margaret Mead's groundbreaking work describing the sexual behavior of Samoans and South Pacific islanders. So you have a culture that for hundreds of years practiced sexual mores very different from orthadox Christianity, and then about 150 years ago the missionaries show up. Catholics, Lutherans, Baptists, and most recently Mormans, all with their own particular takes on sexuality, relationships, and mores. The end result is a very strange melding of cultures and morals, which Manti Te'O was born into.

For example, in Samoan culture, if a family had too many sons, one son was often encouraged (forced?) into the role of a fafafini, a cross-dressing (sometimes transgender) member of the family so that there would be a female. The opposite was also true. Fafafinis would be treated as members of the opposite gender. Now, imagine how that particular Samoan tradition might be viewed by the missionaries. I actually laughing as I type this as I imagine how the recent Mormon missionaries in Samoa must be wrestling with the idea of a fafafini.

So, yeah, this is the unusual culture into which Manti Te'O was born and raised. I can see how he might have been caught up in the scam, and why he might have been embarrassed by it to the point of continuing the deception. To me, having lived in the Samoan culture, it actually makes some kind of sense. What doesn't make much sense to me is why our media seems to have latched onto this story with such tenacity. But then, I didn't spend my entire childhood being raised in America, so many of the peccadillos of American culture don't make sense to me.
posted by mrbarrett.com at 4:09 PM on January 23 [2 favorites]

As your Samoan attorney, I advise you to plead ignorance.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 4:32 PM on January 23 [5 favorites]

The article was frustrating in its incompleteness. I get that she's saying that this sort of deception is (somewhat?) common in Samoan culture, but what purpose does it serve? Who are the perpetrators and the victims? How is it viewed by the community? I'll have to see if she has a book out and try to get my hands on that.

And if this was supposedly perpetrated by Ronaiah Tuiasosopo, what was his motivation for doing so? I've found it hard to believe the whole thing wasn't a hoax by Te'o, simply because I can see a few possible reasons why a college football player would do it.
posted by WorkingMyWayHome at 5:44 PM on January 23

The article is vague. mrbarret.com's comment is, too.
posted by Pruitt-Igoe at 5:49 PM on January 23 [1 favorite]

muddgirl: "Citizens are still immigrants, if they were born in another country. Unless you're using "Samoan" as a shorthand for Samoan-American, which is odd.

"Samoan" generally means "of Samoan ancestry." This includes people who trace their Hawaiian ancestry to before American settlers."

No, not really. Samoa was originally settled roughly 3000 years ago, and then there was a gap of nearly 2000 years before humans finally got to Hawaiʻi. Samoans and Hawaiʻans have a common ancestry, probably from the Lapita people who appear to have kicked off the whole colonization-of-Polynesia phase even longer ago, but "Samoan" doesn't also refer to native Hawaiʻians.

People of Samoan heritage may well have Hawaiʻian ancestry, too, but that's no big deal. However, there are thousands of years, thousands of miles, and a ton of linguistic and cultural differences between the two cultures that saying that "Samoan" is basically the same as "Hawaiʻian" is quite incorrect.

I'm not Polynesian, but I'm an archaeologist who has a strong research interest in Samoa and who lived in American Samoa for a while, so I can speak from a academic and a limited first-hand basis.
posted by barnacles at 6:22 PM on January 23 [5 favorites]

mrbarrett.com: "For example, in Samoan culture, if a family had too many sons, one son was often encouraged (forced?) into the role of a fafafini, a cross-dressing (sometimes transgender) member of the family so that there would be a female. The opposite was also true. Fafafinis would be treated as members of the opposite gender. Now, imagine how that particular Samoan tradition might be viewed by the missionaries. I actually laughing as I type this as I imagine how the recent Mormon missionaries in Samoa must be wrestling with the idea of a fafafini."

mrbarrett.com, you'll get more google hits with the spelling "faʻafafine". And I wouldn't necessarily say that boys were forced into the role. There's a few people doing some good research on the historical and cultural aspects of faʻafafine, and I think it's more about how the culture was accepting of and had a social convention for how men could move into a woman's role in society. This is a weak point in my knowledge, but you might find more with some of these links:
* Migrating Genders: Westernisation, Migration, and Samoan Faʻafafine (dissertation, PDF)
* Redefining Faʻafafine: Western Discourses and the Construction of Transgenderism in Samoa (and the book)

And, finally, when I was in Samoa last, it seemed to me like the Mormons missionaries kept well away from the faʻafafine ... or at least, I never saw them together!
posted by barnacles at 6:29 PM on January 23 [6 favorites]

WorkingMyWayHome: "The article was frustrating in its incompleteness. I get that she's saying that this sort of deception is (somewhat?) common in Samoan culture, but what purpose does it serve? Who are the perpetrators and the victims? How is it viewed by the community? I'll have to see if she has a book out and try to get my hands on that."

I think it's unfair to call it deception, which has some strongly negative connotations. Her term is much better: "strategic ignorance". I only have time to skim the article at the moment, but I think she has some interesting insights in there. In trying to keep up cultural practices that have sustained communities in diaspora, and which continue ties back to family, friends and community in Samoa, people are trying to satisfy multiple sets of demands, none of which can be satisfied at the same time. Usually, no harm done. But when practiced on the scale of Manti's case, strategic ignorance can really come back to bite you in the ass.

In regard to the purpose it serves, I think it requires a bit more information about the fa'alavelave she mentions. Fa'alavelave is a tricky thing to translate or describe, but in general it's a set of mutual obligations surrounding large ceremonies such as weddings, funerals, births, graduations, etc.. These obligations take the form of transfers of cash, materials, time, effort, and there are many times that the people participating in a fa'alavelave have neither the money, time, or material to participate to the fullness that the culture is demanding of them. Thus the "perpetrators" and "victims" are really just family members and people in the same village who get caught up in these webs of obligations. And since people are always getting married, dying, graduating, being born, these obligations can be a serious drain on (especially) financial resources. To a great extent, the amount you have to fa'alavelave depends on your financial standing.

In fact, I just remembered that when reading the newspaper in American Samoa that some times funeral notices for notable community members (especially those that ran large businesses) would be accompanied by the text "Please no fa'a Samoa", which basically meant "We're not going to fa'alavelave you for this funeral, so please don't expect us to do anything in return for you at your next funeral."

In terms of how the community views it, she touches on that in the second paragraph on page 102 of her article. To outsiders, people will express some concerns with fa'alavelave and about how it can be a major imposition, but at the same time, they will emphasize that it's also part of Samoan culture. Within the community, people may grumble a bit, bit it's understood as something you have to do. After all, these obligations go around the entire community. You may have had to chip in a lot for your uncle's funeral a year ago, but you know that if a close family member dies soon that you will have money to bury them, help with the feast, and all the resources you need to handle it -- apart from the psychological and emotional support.

But, for the disclaimer, this is just my perspective as an interested outsider, and I am certainly missing many of the deeper subtleties are work here.
posted by barnacles at 6:50 PM on January 23 [6 favorites]

Well, I don't quite see the connection between what you're describing and what Te'o is claiming happened here. He's saying that for four years, he talked to someone on the phone, that person texted his family, he supposedly talked to her brother on the phone, etc., etc. I'm sure I don't know all the details, but I don't recall anything about gifts or money being exchanged or any ceremonies taking place at all. And he claims that he asked someone about her, and the guy he talked to said he'd talked to her on the phone also; that doesn't sound like strategic ignorance to me. If this whole thing was done to Te'o and he wasn't in on it, I don't quite understand how you wouldn't call that deception.
posted by WorkingMyWayHome at 7:46 PM on January 23

Hm,I had to do a find for this thread and it turns out that the name "manti" appears in the word "Romantic," so I just had to share that.

I have not been able to make head nor tail of this entire story, despite having met my own SO on the internet, and this added layer of discussion doesn't help. Every time I read about it just get confused and lose track. I'm sure there's a cultural element, but good god Jim, no one can even figure out what the fuck happened.
posted by Miko at 8:35 PM on January 23

WorkingMyWayHome: "Well, I don't quite see the connection between what you're describing and what Te'o is claiming happened here. He's saying that for four years, he talked to someone on the phone, that person texted his family, he supposedly talked to her brother on the phone, etc., etc. I'm sure I don't know all the details, but I don't recall anything about gifts or money being exchanged or any ceremonies taking place at all. And he claims that he asked someone about her, and the guy he talked to said he'd talked to her on the phone also; that doesn't sound like strategic ignorance to me. If this whole thing was done to Te'o and he wasn't in on it, I don't quite understand how you wouldn't call that deception"

Ah, clarification on my statement: I wasn't actually speaking to anything in the Manti situation, I was referring to questions I thought were about the Gershon paper and the strategic ignorance described therein.

Personally, with regard to Manti's situation, I'm not entirely convinced that it has as much to do with Samoan cultural mores as is being made out in this FPP. It seems to me like an unfortunate thing with a young guy in a confusing situation making bad decisions that compounded one after the other, and the end result came out to be far from what anyone wanted or expected. But time will tell.
posted by barnacles at 8:46 PM on January 23

Man, those Samoans are a surly bunch.
posted by asterix at 11:14 PM on January 23

I wonder why if it's so common in a small community, then why is anyone still fooled?
posted by Brian B. at 6:30 AM on January 24

Man, those Samoans are a surly bunch.
posted by asterix at 11:14 PM on January 23 [+] [!]

Angry, even.
posted by snottydick at 7:55 AM on January 24 [1 favorite]