Devereux] MOHAVE ETHNOPSYCHIATRY AND SUICIDE 415 



fetched to the occidental mind, but are quite real relationships in the small 

 Mohave tribe. 



In one way, however, Tcematcem(a.) did, in contracting these relationships, 

 follow a genuine, though subsidiary Mohave marriage pattern, in that he first 

 married Nyoltc, who, by every standard, belonged to his own generation, and 

 then established connections with O :otc, who, by her association with Anyay 

 Ha :m, "technically" belonged to a parent generation, since in a loosely informal 

 way O :otc was Nyoltc's stepmother-in-law as well as her aunt by marriage. 

 The statement that "technically" O :otc belonged, through her affair with Anyay 

 Ha :m, to an older generation, is, moreover, perfectly in accordance with the 

 Mohave habit of considering someone formerly married to an older person sex- 

 ually repulsive, because "the smell of the old person still clings to them." (I.e., 

 they, too, smell like old people, and are therefore sexually as ineligible as though 

 they were, in fact, old. ) 



Now, there exists a minor Mohave marriage pattern which permits a man, 

 disgusted with the flightiness and bad housekeeping of his young wife, to desert 

 her and to marry his hardworking mother-in-law instead (Devereux, 1951 f). 

 This, in a very roundabout way, is precisely what Tceraatcem(a) did when, after 

 being Nyoltc's husband, he allegedly became O rote's lover. 



Now, it is a well-established psychological and anthropological fact that the 

 idea of having relations with two women connected with a given man has a 

 certain perverse appeal for some people. To take an anthropological example 

 first, a Naga (Fiirer-Haimendorf, 1946), who manages to have an affair simul- 

 taneously with two sisters,^ or has seduced a married woman, is entitled to sew 

 an extra row of shells on his breechcloth, as a "badge of merit" for his "feat." 

 The infantile source of this wish is the incomplete displacement of oedipal 

 interests from the mother to the sister, in early childhood. This displacement 

 is, of course, a healthy — albeit transitory — component of psycho-sexual matura- 

 tion, in that it leads up to the permanent displacement of affect from the sister 

 to a suitable unrelated love object. This displacement pattern is relatively 

 clearly implemented in a number of tribes which practice stepdaughter mar- 

 riage (Kroeber, 1940). Compared to the stepdaughter marriage pattern, the 

 Mohave pattern of marrying one's mother-in-law is, however, regressive rather 

 than progressive, in that it represents a shift of interest from women of one's 

 own generation to women of the parent generation.®" 



While too much should not be made of Tcematcem ( a ) 's successive neurotic 

 choices of widowed partners, the matter seemed worth mentioning at least in 

 passing, both because he was first involved in a suicide and then came uncom- 

 fortably close to incest, which is characteristically related to witchcraft in 

 Mohave society. 



Two objections must be met before concluding the present discussion : 



(1) It will be stressed that no explicit connection has been shown to exist 

 between Anyay Ha :m and Tcematcem ( a ) . This objection is invalid, since even 

 though Tcematcem (a) only married Anyay Harm's widowed daughter-in-law, 

 given the smallness of the tribe and the extensiveness of Mohave social relation- 

 ships, such a connection is a genuine one by Mohave standards. Moreover, it is 

 extremely unlikely that Tcematcem ( ii ) would have gone out of his way to estab- 

 lish a connection with O :otc, had he been socially isolated from her murdered 

 lover Anyay Ha :m, and had O :otc not been his wife Nyoltc's aunt by marriage. 



(2) It will be pointed out that the preceding comments are overly speculative, 

 in that affairs are equated with marriages and all kinds of kinship ties are 

 equated with each other. 



^ Sororal polygyny is, of course, routine in many cultures. 



** The psyctiodynamics of tliis shift are related to the dynamics of gerontophilia. 



