438 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 175 



then, the custom was completely obsolete and all but forgotten.*'* As 

 regards the semicomical display of grief of a certain deserted Mohave 

 husband, or the altogether exceptional behavior of another deserted 

 husband who killed his ex-wife's new husband, these incidents were 

 viewed by the Mohave solely as breaches of decorum and not as 

 neurotic or psychotic symptoms. 



Men who were neither stoical enough to slirug off such losses, nor 

 exhibitionistic enough to fight their rivals, sometimes developed hi :wa 

 itck. Although this was a supposedly masculine reaction *^ it was 

 also clearly a pattern of misconduct, which revealed the man's essen- 

 tial lack of stoicism. Hence, even though they comforted him 

 while he was acutely depressed, after his recoveiy they openly laughed 

 at his past antics ( Case 21 ) . 



Summing up, the Mohave man was trained and expected to accept 

 both potentially reversible losses — such as the desertion of his wife — 

 and completely irreversible losses — such as the death of a wife, or of a 

 member of his family — in a steadfast and stoical manner. Hence, 

 even though an occasional man did attempt funeral suicide, the 

 Mohave Indian's conception of w^hat constitutes a masculine reaction 

 to an emotional loss forced them to define funeral suicide as a typi- 

 cally feminine reaction pattern. 



This sex-linked conception of funeral suicide was further rein- 

 forced by the fact that the woman Avas expected to display stoicism 

 only in a purely sexual context.*'' Her usually calm acceptance of a 

 husband's or sweetheart's desertion, the fact that no woman ever tried 

 to kill herself because she was deserted, and the overwhelming pre- 

 ponderance of male cases of hi :wa itck, was, probably rightly, viewed 

 by the Mohave simply as further evidence that women are less in- 

 volved with those whom they love or marry than are men. More- 

 over — and perhaps precisely because women did not, as a rule^ over- 

 react to disappointments in love — the Mohave woman was free to seek 

 to win back her runaway husband,, even after he settled down with 



" Significantly, the last person who tried to revive this custom was the transvestite 

 Sahaykwisa :, presumably because she was always looking for an opportunity to reaffirm 

 her "masculinity." Partly because this practice was outmoded, partly because it repre- 

 sented only a tolerated masculine pattern of misconduct, rather than an ideal masculine 

 pattern and chiefly because such pretensions on the part of a female transvestite seemed 

 grotesque, her grand gesture was universally ridiculed. Hence, when seeking to win back 

 her third eloped wife, she behaved in a more restrained- — i.e., "ideally masculine" — manner, 

 by not approaching the runaway wife directly : she was simply hanging around in the 

 vicinity of Haq'au's camp. However, even this relatively restrained behavior only led to 

 further humiliations, partly because her desire to win back her ex-wife, or to bewitch her, 

 was a feminine, rather than masculine, impulse, and partly because she went about it in 

 an Informal way, instead of seeking, as before, to "fight" the man with whom her former 

 wife was now living (Case 105). This series of incidents sheds a great deal of light upon 

 the neurotic sources of certain forms of extreme traditionalism. 



*° O :otc'B claim of suffering from hi:wa itck, was unanimously rejected by the tribe 

 (Case 104). 



*" She was not expected to cry out either during defloration or during childbirth, and 

 was ridiculed If she did (Devereux, 1950 g). 



