Devereux] MOHAVE ETHNOPSYCHIATRY AND SUICIDE 17 



has been systematized by a tribe, while some other field of knowledge 

 or interest has not, is, from the point of view of the historian of 

 science, as well as from that of the anthropological functionalist, of 

 great significance, since it reveals not only the hierarchization of in- 

 terests and preoccupations in a given tribe, but also serves as a re- 

 minder that culture, like any other living thing, is never a fully com- 

 pleted system at any moment of its history. In addition, the presence 

 of relatively unsystematized but factually rich areas of knowledge 

 may, perhaps, also indicate the channels into which, and the objec- 

 tives toward which, future cultural efi'orts may be directed.® 



NOSOLOGY 



In principle, the study of native nosological categories can be ap- 

 proached in two ways : 



(1) By asking the names of various mental derangements. 



(2) By describing the various clinical entities known to Western psychiatry 

 and asking to vphat native illnesses they correspond. 



Anthropologically, the first type of inquiry is certainly more rele- 

 vant than is the second. Its sole drawback is that the native list of 

 names of diseases which one obtains may not be complete. 



The second approach also has certain drawbacks: 



(1) The risk of putting ideas into the informants' heads by asking leading 

 questions. 



(2) The risk of seducing them into identifying what was described to them 

 with some native disease category. This risk is not wholly obviated by asking 

 afterward the native names of the salient symptoms, since an intelligent in- 

 formant can always make up in good faith a suitable descriptive term. 



The one real merit of the second approach is that it jogs the mem- 

 ory of one's informants, enabling one to obtain a compendious set 

 of data on mental disorders in the society under study. 



On the other hand, the technique of asking leading questions also 

 has definite advantages. Thus, it was found that, by describing cer- 

 tain classical clinical entities and/or by mimicking abnormal behavior 

 and/or by narrating a concrete case history, one could obtain data 

 that might not have been forthcoming otherwise. This is best shown 

 by the fact that after I briefly described to Tcatc and to the inter- 

 preter E. S. an attack of hysterical laughter (but, intentionally, not 

 of crying)^ E, S. promptly recalled having seen a Pueblo school girl 

 laugh and cry hysterically (Case 62). This, in turn, reminded Tcatc 

 of a Mohave case that she had witnessed and that involved a child- 

 hood friend of hers (Case 61) . Both E. S.'s and Tcatc's accounts were 



*Thus, the availability of large amounts of disconnected data about animals and plants 

 represented a challenge to occidental students of natural history and eventually led to 

 Linnaeus' partially still valid systematization of that knowledge. 



