432 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 175 



ful eye on persons likely to jump on the funeral pyre. Partly be- 

 cause of this watchfulness, no recorded attempt to commit funeral 

 suicide ever proved successful. Since this was known to the chief 

 mourners, the certainty that they would be stopped in time apparently 

 simply served to encourage them to make such a gesture. It is ex- 

 tremely interesting in this context that the one person who was ap- 

 parently not caught in time managed to "fall down" heside, and not 

 on^ the funeral pyre, and only burned his hair, which he, as the chief 

 mourner, would have had to cut short anyhow.^^ 



In brief, funeral suicide was largely a special kind of ritual ges- 

 ture — disapproved of and yet expected and almost demanded by 

 certain conventions. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the 

 mourner was expected to try to commit funeral suicide, while society 

 was expected to frustrate the attempt, the whole representing a kind 

 of tacit "contract." ^* It is, in fact, highly probable that this tacit 

 contract encouraged the chief mournei*s to make an exaggerated dis- 

 play of their grief, since they knew that the more loudly they an- 

 nounced their "intention" to commit funeral suicide, and the more 

 dramatically they "attempted" to carry it out, the more certain they 

 could be that measures would be taken to prevent them from ac- 

 tually harming themselves. This, in turn, enabled them to abreact 

 a maximum of grief and tension, while forcing their environment to 

 give them a maximum of gratifying attention and support, thereby 

 stealing the limelight from the corpse.^^ As for those who restrained 

 the would-be suicide and comforted him, they not only basked in the 

 glory of having had a share in some spectacular occurrence, but also 

 derived satisfaction from the fact that in Mohave society — as m many 

 others — comforting the bereaved is almost as respectable as being a 

 real mourner. 



This type of tacit contract to do the expected — though theoretically 

 "wrong" — thing is not quite the same as Linton's (1936) concept of a 

 "pattern of misconduct," which simply specifies the manner in which 



«3 It is of great Interest that the only nonfuneral cutting of the hair occurred when a 

 man, depressed by the desertion of his wife, contracted hi :wa itck (pt. 3, pp. 91-106) and 

 cut his hair short, as though he were mourning a dead spouse. When the depression 

 dissipated, he tried to remedy the situation by tying back his braids to his remaining hair 

 (Case 21). 



**A strong display of grief at funerals was mandatory. Thus, a relatively modern 

 version of Matavilye's funeral, obtained from Hivsu : Tupo :ma, specified that the whites 

 forever disgraced themselves by their indifference to the death of this deity. Impious 

 behavior at this divine funeral Is also mentioned in more archaic versions, which report 

 that Coyote shamelessly stole Matavilye's heart from the pyre and therefore became "crazy" 

 (Kroeber, 1948). Coyote's "craziness" is so generally accei)ted that the word "hukthar" 

 ( = coyote) also means "crazy" (Case 79), in the colloquial sense of that word. 



*5 The fact that voluminous widow's weeds and other extreme outward mournlncr reactions 

 represent a kind of social blackmail was demonstrated elsewhere (Devereux, 1956 a). 



