292 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 175 



Statements obtained from persons who have unsitccess fully at- 

 tempted suicide do yield some clues, but are open to criticism on the 

 score that, as all psychiatrists know, a really determined person can 

 kill himself even when restrained and mider constant supervision. 

 Plence, the range of phenomena, from threats of suicide — motivated 

 by the desire to dramatize oneself or to blackmail someone, etc. — to 

 seemingly bona fide suicidal attempts that were frustrated at the last 

 possible moment through the seemingly "chance" intervention of some 

 external agency, forms a continuum. This does not mean, however, 

 that we must lapse into a complete interpretative nihilism. Indeed, 

 even though many last-minute "chance" rescues may have been un- 

 consciously "engineered" by the would-be suicide, one is nonetheless 

 entitled to wonder precisely how many actually successful suicides 

 were intended originally as simply exhibitionistic "attempted sui- 

 cides," which just "happened" to succeed because of an accidental 

 failure of the intended rescuer to appear at the right moment. Of 

 course, at this point one may begin to suspect that the "chance" failure 

 of the rescuer to turn up in time was also "engineered" by the would-be 

 suicide, and that the suicide was therefore a genuine one, and so on, 

 ad infinitum. Moreover, we must also take into account the possibility 

 that in some instances a seemingly genuine and intentional suicidal 

 act may not have been seen by the victim himself in that light. Thus, 

 a minimally acculturated middle-aged Navaho Indian, who worked 

 far from his reservation as a railroad track worker, contracted a 

 severe upper respiratory infection and had to be hospitalized in a 

 setting where no one spoke Navaho. When, after improving slightly, 

 he was still not permitted to leave the hospital, he appears to have 

 evolved the conviction that he had been — incomprehensibly and un- 

 justly — imprisoned. Wishing to escape "imprisonment," he therefore 

 jumped off the roof terrace of the four-story hospital. In this instance 

 it is almost impossible to know whether this man really thought that 

 he could escape alive in that manner, or whether he actually tried 

 to kill himself. Due allowance being made for a great scientist's dic- 

 tum, that nature is unconcerned over the greatness of the analytical 

 difficulties wherewith its phenomena confront the mathematician, 

 somewhere or other a line must be drawn between excessively obsessive 

 methodological refinement-mongering, and naively sweeping gener- 

 alization-mongering. 



In practical terms, this means that we will make use of whatever 

 data we possess in our attempt to understand Mohave suicides and 

 Mohave beliefs concerning suicide, but will always bear in mind that 

 both our data and our interpretations are necessarily segmental ones 

 and possess only a limited validity. However, since the real focus 

 of this work is the place of suicide in Mohave culture, our inter- 



