246 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 175 



of the typical "ethnic neuroses" (Devereux, 1956 b) of our civilization, 

 or, perhaps, of higher cultures in general. 



Be that as it m.aj, there appears to be one Mohave family of the 

 Mah gens, many of whose members could, loosely speaking, be classi- 

 fied as psychopathic. They have a record of brazen incest, witch- 

 craft, and troublemaking, and are generally suspected and disliked 

 by the rest of the tribe. Their objectionable activities often have a 

 marked quality of wanton provocativeness, of a seemingly inexplicable 

 "impulsiveness" and instability, etc., that might induce Occidental 

 psychiatrists to diagnose them as psychopaths. Since the proper 

 diagnosis of the various members of this family cannot be adequately 

 settled in this work, we simply propose to list the incidents in which 

 members of this family appear to have been involved over a period 

 of several generations : 



Incest: 



Mah (Devereux, 1939 a) 



YellakHi:ha (=gTebe spittle) and Atceyer Hita :pk'a (=bird brought-over, 

 or bird put-in ) ( ibid. ) 



Incest and robbery: 



See Case 15. 

 Maladjustment in childhood: 

 See Case 77. 



The responsibility for diagnosing, or not diagnosing, this family as 

 psychopathic is, thus, left to the reader. By ordinary clinical criteria 

 they may be diagnosed as psychopaths and Mohave society does view 

 them as chronic troublemakers. On the other hand, they do not fully 

 satisfy our criterion that the psychopath is a person who, having no 

 cultural loyalties of his own, predatorily exploits the cultural loyal- 

 ties of others for his own selfish ends, because several members of 

 this family appear to have been bona fide shamans, which is proof 

 of a certain degree of social and psychological conformity, and/or 

 potential witch killers, which is indicative of a certain degree of (pos- 

 sibly misguided) cultural loyalty and sense of responsibility toward 

 the tribe. 



The fact that we are dealing here not with a single individual, but 

 with a whole lineage, also suggests a certain degree of conformity, at 

 least on the primary group level, since no really convincing case has 

 ever been made for the assertion that "psychopathic inferiority" is 

 truly constitutional, or liereditary. 



In brief, the diagnosis of this lineage is left open. It is simply 

 noted that various members of this lineage Avere reputedly engaged 

 in a series of antisocial acts and that the lineage as a whole is there- 

 fore more or less in disrepute. The real psychiatric meaning of this 

 finding is a moot question both on the clinical level, because of a lack 

 of really adequate data, and on the theoretical level, because of the 



