130 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETEDSTOLOGY [Bull. 175 



participation in a raid — exposes the Mohave to the dangers of the 

 ahwe: ilhiess. 



On an altogether different level, the Mohave stressed that all of 

 Kroeber's informants died shortly after working with him,^* ap- 

 parently because, by imparting to him tribal secrets, or knowledge ob- 

 tained in dream, they exposed themselves to the ahwe: illness, (and, 

 perhaps, also to witchcraft). 



Summing up, the three most intensive forms of physiological inter- 

 actions — eating, cohabitation, and killing — and the most significant 

 form of psychological interaction — discussing the knowledge one ac- 

 quired in dream ^^ — expose the Mohave to the dangers of foreign 

 contamination. Less intensive contacts are, by contrast, not especially 

 dangerous. 



Tlie second, and more general, factor is the streak of insularity 

 in Mohave personality, which, paradoxically, is complemented by a 

 tendency to explore distant countries, — e. g., for "name traveling" 

 (McNichols, 1944) — secure in the knowledge that no one would dare 

 attack even a single Mohave traveler, lest the dreaded Mohave club- 

 bers should, later on, retaliate. Like many other Mohave paradoxes, 

 this, too, becomes less paradoxical on closer scrutiny. Thus, Dr. 

 A. M. Halpern (1938) informed me that men sometimes deliberately 

 strayed into enemy territory, because they wished to be killed (pt. 

 7, pp. 426-431 ) . Getting oneself killed by enemies is, needless to say, 

 a way of expiating warlike aggression, guilt feelings of this type being 

 quite common in many warrior societies. In another sense, the fear 

 of aliens — and the deliberate incurring of risks by coming into con- 

 tact with aliens — is but another facet of the type of reaction to con- 

 quest which, in other tribes, led to waves of suicide in early reserva- 

 tion days. 



A third factor, related especially to impregnation by alien males, 

 is tribal concern over the transmission of gentile affiliation. Among 

 the Mohave, gentile affiliation is transmitted by the male, though the 

 gentile name is used exclusively by females (Kroeber, 1925 a). Thus, 

 both a man's sisters and his daughters may be called, e.g., O :otc, while 

 he himself will have a strictly personal made-up name, although this 

 name sometimes (though not often) is an allusion to his gentile 

 emblem, which may, or may not, have been formerly a totem. Now, 

 whereas the Mohave accept certain gentes of the related Yuman tribes 

 as equivalent to their own, so that, e.g., a Yuma father of the Hipa : 



"Needless to say, this was due to the fact that, like all nnthropologrlsts Investigating 

 a rapidly docaylnj; culture, Kroeber worked chiefly with older persons. 



i" Compare In this context the fact that shamans are reluctant to speak of their own 

 power dreams, medical theories, and therapeutic practices In the presence of another 

 shaman, because they fear that the latter — -offended by views partly differing from his 

 own — may bewitch them (Devereux, 1957 b). 



