134 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 175 



of ghosts. The psychological transformation of the beloved rela- 

 tive's or spouse's ghost into a dangerous being is due partly to un- 

 conscious resentment over the beloved person's "desertion," and partly 

 to the final eruption, triggered by the trauma of mourning, of the 

 hitherto repressed aggressive component of man's unconscious am- 

 bivalence toward those ■whom he overtly loves. A further triggering 

 factor is the feeling that neither ghosts nor aliens act as real, live 

 Mohave should. We will return to this point in a moment. 



Be that as it may, the Mohave themselves are quite conscious of 

 their xenophobia, though, when accused of being terribly prejudiced, 

 they at first strenuously denied it. However, in the end Hama : Utce : 

 remarked: "The Mexicans are really closest to us; yet we would do 

 more for an (American) Chinese or Japanese, than for a Mexican." 

 Sometimes the Mohave neutralize their xenophobia by pretending that 

 a likable alien is really a Mohave; a trait already mentioned by 

 Garces (1900). Thus, I, personally, was told time and again that I 

 was not really a white but a Mohave, since I felt and acted the way 

 a Mohave does.^^ Otherwise expressed, an alien who acts the way a 

 Mohave should act, is, both emotionally and by courtesy, no longer 

 a true alien. This, in turn, implies that a Mohave, such as Ha : wl, 

 who is selfish like an alien, is felt to be "more like a white than like 

 a Mohave." It is therefore reasonable to suggest that one reason 

 why ghosts are implicitly viewed as sufficiently alien to be capable 

 of causing the alien ghost illness is that their conduct is un-Mohave, 

 which, in essence, means: not predictable in terms of Moliave "systems 

 of classification" (Durkheim and Mauss, 1903) and of the expectations 

 which are rooted in such a system of classification.^^ 



It is of interest to note, at least in passing, that, even though the 

 Mohave say that the Yuma are like the Mohave, and even though 

 Hama: Utce: specified that the Mexicans were closer to the Mohave 

 than any other racially alien group, I know of no instance where 

 the expression "he is really a Mohave" was applied to anyone other 

 than a white, and this despite the fact that the whites are the most 

 foreign and most dangerous of aliens. Indeed, once in a while someone 

 will even refer to ahwe : hahnok as apen hahnok (= beaver contamina- 



" since, to the Mohave, "white" means primarily "American," the fact that I had first 

 come to them straight from France, also mitigated the odium of my heing white, especially 

 since those Mohave, who fought In World War I, admired French valor in general, and that 

 of French oflJcers in particular. "The oflicers were always the first to emerge from the 

 trenches wlien the French attacked." 



^2 From the psychological point of view it Is Important to note In this context that, for 

 the sm.Tll child, the bi^havior of adults^ — and especially that of parents — is essentially 

 arbitrary and unpredictable (Devereux, 1955 h). It is therefore suggested, at least 

 tentatively, that the relative unpredictability of ghosts and of foreigners is, psycho- 

 logically, a major determinant of the tendency to equate ghosts, aliens, and also magical 

 powers whicli, by definition, are unruly and unpredictable. In brief, the ghost becomes 

 as unpredictable as the parent (= witch) sometimes seemed to the child. (Cf., however, pt. 

 5, pp. 254-255.) 



