Ads by Google Ads by Google

The Samoan Roots of the Manti Te'o Hoax

By now we're all familiar with the story of Manti Te'o — how he captured football fans' hearts, how he led his team to the national championship game despite the fact that his grandmother and his girlfriend had both died on the same day last September.We're also asking ourselves how Te'o could be fooled into loving an imaginary girlfriend named Lennay Kekua, described as a Stanford undergraduate dying of leukemia whom he'd never met.Reporters are now wondering whether Te'o was truly hoaxed, or whether he was complicit. They ask why he never visited his girlfriend in person—they had been in touch for four years, after all, chatting by Facebook message, texting, calling each other on the phone. How could he not be a bit suspicious?But they never ask about the influence of his cultural background. What ideas about truth and verification did he learn growing up in a Samoan migrant community in Hawai'i, especially one that was so religious (in his case, Mormon)? And that is all I keep wondering about after spending two and a half years doing fieldwork among Samoan migrants.As an ethnographer, I heard a number of stories that sound almost exactly like Te'o's story—naïve Christian golden boys who had been fooled by other Samoans pretending to be dewy-eyed innocents. Leukemia was even a theme—I guess Samoan pranksters keep turning to the same diseases.I heard these stories as gossip—women in their late teens or early 20s would tell me about how a much sought-after man in their church had been fooled. I never talked directly to a victim or a hoaxer about this, so I didn't write about this in any of my academic work.I did this fieldwork before Facebook or cell phones, and even before email became widespread outside of college circles. All the stories I heard involved husky voices on telephones, and maybe a letter or two.What strikes me as particularly Samoan about Te'o's comments to ESPN is that he opens with a very familiar Samoan worry. It is not his own shame he is concerned about; he is worried about the shame this will bring to his whole family, all those who share his last name. Concern about family comes up time and time again in his tale.