Derereuxl MOHAVE ETHNOPSYCHIATRY AND SUICIDE 431 



Stewart (1946). After the present work went to press, Kroeber 

 (1957) published data on such seances which he had obtained in 1953 

 and 1954 and which he correlated with a previously puzzling passage 

 of the Hipahipa epic (Kroeber, 1925 a). The chief differences be- 

 tween Kroeber's accounts and the present one are that not the shaman 

 himself, hut a medium supervised by a shaman, went into a trance, 

 and that the medium was possessed not by the spirit of the sacred 

 mountain, but by the soul or ghost of the lost person. The other 

 differences concern minor technicalities only. 



The most important comment to be made pertains, however, to the 

 fact that, contrary to most statements in the literature (Stewart, 1946) , 

 spirit possession did, apparently, occur in Mohave society and could 

 be brought about by ritual means. This finding suggests that it is 

 rather risky to deny the occurrence of some major cultural trait in any 

 culture whatsoever, until that culture has been most exhaustively 

 studied, since traits which are extremely conspicuous in some cultures 

 have a way of turning up in some relatively marginal and subordi- 

 nate! segment of another culture, when one least expects it. At other 

 times such items can turn up simply in the form of idiosyncratic be- 

 liefs held by individual neurotics (cf. especially Devereux, 1955 a, 

 1957 a).^^ In brief, it seems probable that students of trait distribu- 

 tions would be well advised to leave traits reported to be absent en- 

 tirely out of consideration, especially if these traits are widely dis- 

 tributed in other areas, have important psychological connotations, 

 and do not require an advanced technology. Moreover, the integra- 

 tion of these seances with the broad vicarious suicide pattern suggests 

 that it was far more fully integrated with the mainstream of Mohave 

 culture than Kroeber (1957) claims it was. 



FUNERAL SUICIDE 



Introduction. — The proper evaluation of Mohave funeral suicide 

 is quite difficult, especially since, in the last resort, psychoanalytically 

 all real suicides are more or less also funeral suicides, in the sense of 

 being mourning reactions involving an identification with someone 

 consciously known or unconsciously fantasied to be dead. 



The culturally most important aspect of Mohave funeral suicide is 

 its extraordinarily ambiguous position in Mohave culture. On the 

 one hand, funeral suicide was so closely related to major eschatolog- 

 ical beliefs, and — though theoretically "disapproved" of — seems to 

 have been so common in aboriginal times that people attending a fu- 

 neral practically expected such attempts and therefore kept a watch- 



«2 After Gayton (1935) stated that the Orpheus myth was absent among the Yuman 

 tribes, I published a Mohave legend, collected in 1932, which was unmistaljably of the 

 Orpheus type (Devereux, 1948 h). 



