258 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [BnlL 175 



must be avoided, because their bite is believed to be j)oisonous. The 

 Yuma kept one such woman alive until she died of old age in Janu- 

 ary 1933. This reluctance to abandon defective children to their fate 

 can be properly understood only if one contrasts it with the now ob- 

 solete practice of killing halfbreed babies and sometimes even full- 

 blood JNIohave infants whose fathers refuse to recognize them (De- 

 vereux, 1948 d) . 



The most plausible explanation of this discrepancy is the Mohave 

 feeling that children are the means of insuring the continuity of the 

 tribe, rather than that they are the "personal property" of their 

 parents. Thus, a child that refuses to be born is asked by the obstet- 

 rical shaman to remember that the tribe needs children; i.e., it is 

 asked to give up its personal reluctance to be born and to think of 

 itself as a link in the tribe's continuity (pt. 7, pp. 331-339) . Likewise, 

 when a suckling makes itself sick because it resents its mother's new 

 pregnancy, the pediatric shaman asks it not to be jealous of the unborn, 

 and to allow another Mohave to come into being (pt. 7, pp. 340-348). 

 In brief, both adults and children are expected to think of the child 

 first and foremost as a link in tribal continuity. By contrast, chil- 

 dren whose fathers refuse to recognize them belong to no gens and 

 therefore do not qualify as individuals capable of insuring social 

 and tribal continuity. Hence, such children can be destroyed without 

 a biological loss to the tribe. The idea that they should not be killed 

 because they too are human beings was a distinct innovation, intro- 

 duced by a kindly old man (Devereux, 1948 d). This reform, 

 which reflected a breakdown of Mohave insularity, found ready ac- 

 ceptance, perhaps for the same reasons that induced the Pawnee not to 

 resist the man who suddenly decided to rescue a captive about to be 

 sacrificed to the Morning Star and to declare that such sacrifices were 

 not to be performed in the future (Linton, 1922). It must be pre- 

 sumed that, in both instances, the killings, though culturally sanc- 

 tioned, had been essentially ego-dystonic all along, so that, when 

 conquest weakened the effectiveness of cultural imj^eratives, the people 

 were only too glad to abandon a custom that was never wholly con- 

 <renialtothem.^^ 



*" The Sedang Mol of Indochina explicitly state that certain rules, established by their 

 violent and unreasonable gods, are ethically objectionable, and are compiled with only 

 because of fear (Devereux, 1940 c). Hence, some of them were not at all displeased 

 when the French forbade them to engage In ritual slave raids. As for their ritual 

 cannibalism. It began to decline even before the French conquest. At first, they still 

 sacrificed captives, but merely pretended to eat their livers. As Mbra :o put It : "I never 

 really ate any part of the sacrificed slave's liver. I only touched ray lips with It." On 

 another occasion a man was simply tied to the sacrificial pole and was symbolically 

 pricked with a knife, without even piercing his skin ; actually, they killed a pig tied to 

 the same sacrificial polo. By 1933, they only sacrificed buffaloes tied to the customary 

 sacrificial pole, to which they also attached a small basket filled with wax figurines 

 representing slaves (Devereux, MS., 1933-34). These observations bear witness to the fact 

 that not only man's destructive Impulses, but also bla "better nature" may be at odds with 

 cultural pressures (Devereux, 1939 c). 



