Devereux] MOHAVE ETHNOPSYCHIATRY AND SUICIDE 187 



social position of the survivor is changed, expenses are incurred, and 

 material objects belonging to the dead, which were formerly available 

 for use, are withdrawn from circulation. In fact, funeral customs 

 may deeply affect a society's chances for accumulating the surplus 

 goods which form the basis for socio-economic progress. Thus, the 

 destruction of the dead person's house and property among the 

 Cocopa represented such a drain on their economy as to make the 

 accumulation of surplus impossible (Kelly, 1949). The same is true 

 of the Mohave, who not only destroy the defunct individual's prop- 

 erty, but even cast goods, expressly purchased for that purpose, upon 

 the funeral pyre of the deceased (Devereux, 1942 a, McNichols, 1944). 



Needless to say, the necessity of responding to the crisis represented 

 by death with extensive behavioral and attitudinal changes arouses 

 both anxiety and resentment. Thus, while the Mohave do not go so 

 far as the Hopi, who slap the face of the corpse, accusing the deceased 

 of having died solely in order to grieve the survivors (Kennard, 

 1937), they, too, are inclined to interpret death as a voluntary, if 

 inevitable, act. For example, in a Mohave myth (Kroeber, 1948) some 

 deer (consciously?) head for a fatal meeting with their maker, the 

 mountain lion, who is also their destroyer. 



The Mohave tendency to see suicide even in certain types of death 

 from natural causes (pt. 7), and the ease wherewith the wish to die is 

 said to be mobilized in witches (Devereux, 1937 c) and in persons 

 suffering from certain ghost ailments (pt. 4, pp. 128-186), also show 

 that, in one way or the other, the living define death as a desertion. 

 Hence, like many other groups, the Mohave, too, turn a previously 

 beloved relative into a dangerous ghost and taboo his name (Kroeber, 

 1925 a) . The fact that funeral and memorial rites are defined as acts 

 of piety toward the honored dead does not imply that they are truly 

 loved and defined as beneficial or at least harmless, since the danger- 

 ousness of certain supernaturals is often denied either by renaming the 

 "Erinyes" (furies) the "Eumenides" (gracious ones) or, like small 

 children, by splitting their image into a good and a bad part, as seems 

 to have been done w^lien the words "deus" and "diabolus" were evolved 

 from the common root "dev." 



Even the love that the deceased is supposed to harbor for the living 

 may harm the latter. Thus, the ghost of a spouse or relative may long 

 so much for the survivors that it will visit the latter in dream, so as to 

 lure them to the land of the dead, either by offerings of food, or else 

 by means of dream intercourse (p. 4, pp. 128-184). Similar seduc- 

 tive maneuvers on the part of his victims are held to motivate, at 

 least in part, the witch who seeks to be killed by the surviving rela- 

 tives of his victims (Kroeber, 1925 a, Devereux, 1937 c). In other 

 words, the mourner's own separation anxieties and mourning depres- 



492655—61 13 



