Culture
In 2001, 64% of ethnic Samoan New Zealanders were able to speak the Samoan language. Samoan is the third most-spoken language in New Zealand, behind English and Maori.
Samoan cultural values, the "Samoan way of life" (fa‘asamoa), are reportedly retained particularly by elderly members of the community, and include respect and mutual help within the extended family (‘aiga), as well as fa‘alavelave (ceremonial and family obligations), and attendance at a Christian church.
Traditional tattooing (tatau) is embraced by some Samoan New Zealanders, both men and women, as an expression of cultural identity.
Samoans have contributed significantly to New Zealand culture in the fields of art, music, literature and sport (see below).
Read more about this topic: Samoan New Zealander
Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“When a culture feels that its end has come, it sends for a priest.”
—Karl Kraus (1874–1936)
“In society, in the best institutions of men, it is easy to detect a certain precocity. When we should still be growing children, we are already little men. Give me a culture which imports much muck from the meadows, and deepens the soil,—not that which trusts to heating manures, and improved implements, and modes of culture only!”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Cynicism makes things worse than they are in that it makes permanent the current condition, leaving us with no hope of transcending it. Idealism refuses to confront reality as it is but overlays it with sentimentality. What cynicism and idealism share in common is an acceptance of reality as it is but with a bad conscience.”
—Richard Stivers, U.S. sociologist, educator. The Culture of Cynicism: American Morality in Decline, ch. 1, Blackwell (1994)