436 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 175 



Idlling both himself and his mother at birth (pt. 7, pp. 331-339) . Any 

 other person who does not wish to be separated forever from an in- 

 dividual who predeceases him, must die as soon as possible, in order 

 to catch up with the ghost of the deceased in the land of the dead.*^ 



The most effective way in which a mourner can make sure that 

 he will not be forever separated from the deceased is to commit 

 funeral suicide. 



"VVlien the matter is viewed in this light, it becomes quite evident 

 that funeral suicide is a ritual and not an impulsive act, and that it 

 is motivated primarily by eschatolegical considerations and social 

 expectatons, rather than by an acute mourning depression. This 

 finding is crucial for an understanding of the funeral-suicide pattern, 

 as well as of the relevant case material. 



The most effective way of demonstrating the scope of this insight 

 is to apply it to the problem of the unsuccessfulness of all known at- 

 tempts to commit funeral suicide. As stressed in the introductory sec- 

 tion, the Mohave attitude toward this custom is a rather ambiguous 

 one. The Mohave both expected — and, by expecting them, almost en- 

 couraged — such attempts and, at the same time, took effective meas- 

 ures to frustrate them. Hence, as soon as the chief mourner made 

 the expected — and more or less desultory — gesture of attempting fu- 

 neral suicide — which, as he well knew, was bound to be frustrated — 

 the conventional proprieties of the latent culture pattern were held to 

 have been complied with, which is all the situation called for. Hence, 

 anyone who actually managed to sustain severe burns, as Syuly (Case 

 109) did, was thought to have behaved in an almost incomprehensible, 

 and possibly even ridiculous, manner.*^ 



The inference that most Mohave attempts to commit funeral suicide 

 were primarily conventional "gestures," which lacked the reinforce- 

 ment of a more subjective motivation, is supported by the finding that 

 only one of four recorded attempts had an explicitly stated and 

 psychologically understandable subjective background (Case 111), 

 and that only one would-be suicide (Case 109) actually sustained 

 serious bodily harm. This almost means that one should eliminate 

 from the series of ritual attempts to commit funeral suicide the case 

 of Anyanyematm (Case 111), since this man had valid subjective 



"■ A moment of reflection will show that this belief could probably have arisen only in 

 a tribe where people seldom reached old age. Otherwise a person dying 20 years after 

 the relative predeceasing him would still have a chance to spend at least a few years in 

 tlie company of the predeceased relative, who fully recapitulates his earthly life — and lives 

 out his earthly life span a second time — in the land of the dead. Sucli cultural clues to 

 unrecorded aboriginal conditions are usually ignored. 



« An illuminating parallel is the post-World War I dueling pattern in Hungary. 

 Although the offended person felt obliged to send his seconds to the one who had insulted 

 him, it was often a foregone conclusion that his seconds would contrive to obtain an 

 apology and effect a reconciliation. The empty gesture of sending one's seconds to the 

 offending person satisfied the superannuated conventions of chivalry, while preventing 

 many actual duels, which were increasingly incompatible with modern customs. 



