Devereus] MOHAVE ETHNOPSYCHIATRY AND SUICIDE 369 



of land. Puzzlingly enough, one of the informants then added that "after 

 winning, the lot of them fight with each other." " 



Comment 



The informants, in seeking to elucidate the meaning of the wedding 

 rite for cousins, conjoined that rite with the eye-losing ceremony and 

 with boundary disputes. The nexus between these three observances 

 was especially stressed by shamans, perhaps because they are more 

 sensitive to miconscious meanings and comiections than are laymen, 

 who are less preoccupied with preconscious and unconscious psychic 

 materials and processes than shamans are. 



The following points deserve special notice : 



(1) The functional equivalence of "farmland" and "horse" is estab- 

 lished quite specifically by the incestuous wedding ritual. The 

 equivalence of crops and of the horse is established by all three 

 observances. 



(2) The unpublished full-length version of the Yellak-Halyeku :p 

 cycle (Kroeber, MS., n.d.) makes it quite clear that land tenure is an 

 integral and important aspect of the human estate. Indeed, according 

 to this myth, certain birds, who were originally "jDersons" (ipa :), but 

 not yet hmnan beings, became genuine hmnans after acquiring land. 

 This implies that the loss of farmland at incestuous weddings neces- 

 sarily represents an impairment of the bridegroom's social identity. 

 The same interpretation also fits the slaying of the bridegroom's horse, 

 since this custom is, quite explicitly, the modern equivalent of the 

 alienation of farmland in earlier times. 



(3) Since, in aboriginal times, the farmland of a deceased person 

 was either alienated or else left fallow for some years, and since f mieral 

 observances usually included the killing of a horse, the wedding rite 

 for incestuous couples necessarily symbolizes the partial social death of 

 the bridegroom. Moreover, since, in order to be permitted to contract 

 such a marriage, the bridegroom voluntarily surrendered a horse and 

 agreed to have it killed, it is clear that his partial social death was 

 viewed as a form of vicarious suicide. This point was made quite 

 explicitly by some of the best informants. 



(4) The state of being "almost like the dead" was explicitly men- 

 tioned both in conjunction with the wedding rite for incestuous couples 

 and in comiection with the loss of an eye.^^ 



*i Unfortunately, the complex implications of this last remark were not noticed in time, 

 and were therefore not investigated more in detail. 



'2 Whether or not this juxtaposition of the two occurrences is rooted in an unconscious 

 need to equate the loss of an eye with self-punishment for Incest (cf. Sophocles : Oedipus 

 trilogy) cannot be determined with any degree of certainty. 



