Devereux] MOHAVE ETHNOPSYCHIATRY AND SUICIDE 199 



she must have experienced great anguish (caused by a resurgence of all her old 

 guilt feelings) when Kumadhi: Atat, a close relative of her son, expressed the 

 desire to marry him. This, in turn, may explain why she quarreled with Ku- 

 madhi : Atat. As regards Pi : it Hi : dho Kwa-ahwat, his absolute refusal to 

 cohabit with a woman who "thiew herself at him" is extremely atypical for a 

 Mohave, and may indicate that his puzzling chastity was also partly motivated 

 by shame over his mother's intra-gens "incest." At the same time, it should be 

 stressed that even though Mohave women do most of the (extramarital) courting 

 (Nettle, MS., n.d.), they tend to dislike women who pursue men too insistently. 

 The suspicion that Kumadhi : Atat was a witch, and therefore likely to bewitch 

 primarily members of her own family, may also have deterred Pi : it Hi : dho 

 Kwa-ahwat from marrying her. The final deterrent may have been the Mohave 

 belief that families guilty of incest soon become extinct." 



Several years later, when these events were once more discussed with another 

 informant, it was again stressed that Kumadhi : Atat would not join her victims 

 if, instead of being killed outright, she was bewitched by another shaman. "In 

 that case, all her victims would belong to the shaman who bewitched her, and he 

 will separate her from them. That is why shamans are so afraid of being 

 bewitched by another shaman, because, in that case, they lose their ghostly 

 followers." 



It is perhaps significant that, in the end, Kumadhi : Atat, who, as we saw, was 

 relatively well educated, developed syphilis of the central nervous system (Case 

 75), a condition long known to be far rarer in American Indians (Kraepelin, 

 1904) than in whites.^"* Bold as the hypothesis may be, we cannot entirely 

 disregard the possibility that her tertiary syphilis was, in some obscure way, 

 related to her relatively high educational level,"" and, possibly, also to her 

 neurosis. 



CASE 50 (Informants : Hivsu : Tupo : ma and Kama : Utce : ) : 



Kanvotce, of the Nyoltc gens, was a fullblood Mohave girl in her late teens. 

 At that time (1890?) I (Hivsu : Tupo : ma) was just about 15 years old, and 

 Kwathany Hi:wa (lizard-species heart, also called Himey Kuvalakas), a full- 

 blood Mohave of the Nyoltc gens, then approximately 20 years of age, were 

 attending the Parker (Reservation?) School. Kanvotce was Kwathany Hi :wa's 

 girl. He bewitched her by the very slow method (Devereux, 1937 c), so that she 

 had fits once in a while. I used to say in school that Kwathany Hi : wa had done 

 this, whereupon he would say: "This kid is a shaman!" I, however, would 

 reply : "No, I am not. I just know. You had better cure her !" When he left 

 school he married her and, for a while at least, she was well. However, when she 

 deserted him for Kumet Ahmat, of the Nyoltc gens, a 35-year-old fullblood Mo- 

 have, and moved with him to Needles, Calif., she soon began to have fits once 

 more. I was at that time in Needles,^^ and realized that Kwathany Hi :wa was 



** Note in this context that, according to the Mohave, only witches tend to commit incest 

 (Devereux, 1939 a). Since witclies also tend to bewitch chiefly those whom they love, and 

 members of their own families, this may explain why families in which incest occurred 

 are believed to become rapidly extinct. 



^ The causes of this difference are not fully understood, and an examination of the 

 various attempts to explain it is beyond the scope of this work. 



^ The late William A. Wliite, M.D., for many years superintendent of St. Elizabeth's 

 Hospital, Washington, D.C., once informed me that the only paretic Indian he himself 

 had seen was an Apache miner, who had lived most of his life like a white (personal 

 communication, 1935). 



"' Hivsu : Tupo :ma had fled the attentions of a syphilitic older woman, going from 

 Parker, Ariz., to Needles, Calif. (Devereux, 1950 a). 



