316 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 175 



freezing weather, and contracted pneumonia, which proved to be fatal. 



The second argument in support of the assumption that, in the case 

 of the Mohave, effective laws against the killing of witches actually 

 reduced the incidence of witchcraft by making it impossible for the 

 unkilled witch to maintain forever his hold over his beloved victims 

 ( Devereux, 1937 c) , has a Malay parallel. According to Linton ( 1956) , 

 when the Dutch forbade the killing of amok runners, who seek to die 

 in glory (Anonymous, n. d.) , and sentenced them instead to hard labor 

 on the rock pile, the incidence of amok decreased very appreciably. 



ProhahTe changes in the incidence of real and alleged suicidal acts. — 

 A further point to be considered in any scrutiny of historical changes 

 in the incidence of both real and fictitious suicides is the fact that, 

 in prereservation days, obstetrical mortality, the mortality of infants 

 and twins, and the death rates of sick people were, of necessity, higher 

 than at present. Hence, there were many more deaths of a type that 

 the Mohave defined as "suicide." In support of this inference one 

 can cite the Mohave belief that "due to recent changes in the weather" 

 more twins are hoi-n nowadays than was formerly the case. This 

 Mohave belief is certainly attributable to the simple fact that, thanks 

 to the Indian Agency's medical resources, nowadays fewer twins die., 

 either during birth or in early infancy, than was formerly the case 

 (Devereux, 1941). 



Thus, while it is possible that the number of actual suicides is 

 nowadays on the increase, other forms of "sviicide" (neonates, twins, 

 witch's victims, etc.) were presumably more frequent in aboriginal 

 times than at present. 



There are indications that the frequency of real suicides may actually 

 have increased in modern times, as a result of acculturation. This is 

 suggested by the fact that an unduly large proportion of modern sui- 

 cides appears to have been better educated than the average of the 

 Mohave tribe. It should also be recalled that a wave of suicides ap- 

 pears to have swept over a great many Indian tribes when they were 

 placed on reservations and were denied access to their traditional 

 means for directing aggression against outsiders, instead of against 

 themselves. This discouragement and sense of frustration had, of 

 course, also a great many other roots (Devereux, 1942 c), at least some 

 of which deserve mention, since they are intimately related to the 

 entire problem of gratifications in relation to self-esteem. 



The basic problem can best be visualized by contrasting a 19th cen- 

 tury Mohave Indian, half naked but wearing the hest clothes his tribe 

 could make, and accustomed to run long distances as rapidly as any- 

 one else, to the same Mohave Indian in 1932, fully dressed in shdbhy 

 occidental clothes and driving a ramshacMe model T Ford. Though 

 he is now warmly clad and possessed of faster and less strenuous 



