Deverenx] MOHAVE ETHNOPSYCHIATRY AND SUICIDE 133 



preparing for death (Kroeber, 1925 a), as well as in connection with 

 the possessiveness of the recently dead (Devereux, 1942 a), and the 

 acquisitiveness of twins, whom one set of Mohave beliefs defines as 

 reincarnated ghosts (Devereux, 1941), that the Mohave do, in fact, 

 ascribe to the dying and to the dead an acquisitive and selfish type 

 of misconduct which they consider characteristic only of livmg aliens, 

 and especially of whites. Hence, even though they formally deny 

 that the ghost of a Mohave Indian turns into a kind of alien, their 

 beliefs concerning the economic selfishness of supposedly Mohave 

 ghosts and their conviction that the ghosts of one's own relatives 

 may cause one to contract the foreign ghost illness, indicate tliat the 

 formal belief concerning the nationality of Mohave ghosts is not 

 echoed on a deeper attitudinal and affective level. (Cf. p. 139.) 

 Without falling into the more extreme errors of the old-fashioned 

 comparative method, it is not inappropriate to recall in this context 

 that primitives often equate truly strange groups with the ghosts of 

 their o\n\ ancestors. Thus, at least one Australian tribe argued that 

 the newly arrived whites had to be the ghosts of their ancestors, since 

 otherwise they would have been unable to find their way to that tribe's 

 territoiy. In Melanesian "cargo" cults, whites also tend to be viewed 

 at least as the emissaries of the tribe's ancestors. 



If we now combine the culturally implicit, and psychologically more 

 or less unconscious, tendency to equate aliens and Mohave ghosts 

 with the fact that magic substances cause harm primarily because they 

 do not truly belong to the Mohave, we must conclude, be it only ten- 

 tatively, that — at least in psychological-attitudinal terms — the Mohave 

 experience one and the same type of dread in connection with aliens, 

 magical powers, and the ghosts of the deceased,-" It is quite certain 

 that such an identity of psychological reactions cannot take place in 

 a cultural vacuum and cannot fail to have at least latent cultural 

 consequences. 



Thus, on the cultural level, the fear of magical substances and the 

 dread of ghosts appears to be brought into a relationship of artificial 

 compendence with the Mohave Indian's pervasive fear of all that is 

 alien, partly because of the obnoxious acquisitiveness manifested by 

 aliens, and partly because the alien's blood, soul, or "power" causes 

 the Mohave to contract the alien sickness. In brief, on the cultural 

 level, the Mohave Indian's xenophobia is the source of his dread of 

 ghosts and magical powers. 



By contrast, on the psychological level it is probable that the 

 source of the Mohave Indian's conviction that aliens, as well as magical 

 powers and substances, are dangerous, is, in the last resort, his fear 



"It should be recalled that one and the same person functions as scalper, purifier of 

 warriors, healer of the alien and the ghost sicknesses, and funeral orator. 



