Devereux] MOHAVE ETHNOPSYCHIATRY AND SUICIDE 447 



pp. 356-371) a horse represents its owner. This explains why, when 

 someone dies, his farmland is either left fallow for several years, or 

 else is alienated, not only among the Mohave, but also among the Yuma 

 (Forde, 1931). Hence, what stood in need of a discussion was not so 

 much the tendency to equate a man with his property, as the mourners' 

 attitude toward the property which is being destroyed. In other 

 words, we had to examine "whose" property is really destroyed, even 

 when only the legal property of the deceased is cremated. It was 

 found that, even though — when seen from the viewpoint of the sud- 

 denly legalistically minded and possessive dead — most of the property 

 destroyed was his and his alone, the mourners viewed the matter in 

 terms of the more generous and flexible social realities of Mohave life, 

 where the difference between the ownership and the use of property is 

 minimal and almost negligible. 



Summing up, since the mourner cannot but feel that in cremating 

 the dead person's property he is depriving himself of goods which, 

 through prolonged use, he views as being partly his, and since, more- 

 over, the Mohave condemn the sudden possessiveness and acquisitive- 

 ness of the dead, one is practically forced to conclude that the mourner 

 who jumps on the funeral pyre throws himself quite as much after 

 "his own" property, as after that of the dead man and after the de- 

 ceased himself. This conclusion leads directly to the problem of a sub- 

 jective latent hostility to the deceased. 



Hostility to the dead. — In many instances the Mohave mourner 

 controls his unconscious hostility toward the dead by projecting his 

 death wishes upon a witch, who supposedly killed the deceased by 

 witchcraft. It is a psychological truism that such an — objectively 

 unrealistic — accusation would be made only by someone who tries 

 hard to deny his own hostilities and does so by projecting them upon 

 someone else.®^ 



The fact that the mourner actually impoverishes liimself at the 

 funeral ^ definitely suggests the presence of self -aggression and maso- 

 chism, since not only the dead man's actual property, but also that of 

 the mourners is sometimes cast on the funeral pyre. It is psychologi- 

 cally necessary to assume that this self -aggression and/or self-impov- 

 erisliment occur in response to the supposed hostility and sudden 



•a Many Australians typically seels to assuage their grief over the death of a fellow 

 member of the tribe by attacking another tribe — apparently not invariably because they 

 believe that the attaclied tribe had actually killed the deceased by witchcraft. This Is the 

 well-kown defense of "handing on the trauma," which occurs also In other primitive 

 societies. Thus, when Queen Kauna of Nukuoro lost her Infant son, she first ordered all 

 small boys to be killed and then made all pregnant women abort, so as to force her subjects 

 to share her mourning (Eilers, 1934). 



«» Compare also the fact that a father, whose son is about to die, often throws away 

 (=tcupilyk) (Kroeber, 1925 a) the songs which he learned in dream, and which represent 

 psychologically valuable "Incorporeal property." 



