Devereux] MOHAVE ETHNOPSYCHIATRY AND SUICIDE 453 



coming obsolete. This impression is further confirmed by Hama: 

 Utce:'s ironical remarks about Syuly (Case 109), since, despite her 

 efforts to be a good Mohave, Hama : Utce : no longer shares all of the 

 traditional outlook of her tribe. The wholesale destruction of property 

 is also increasingly interfered with, since, to take but one example, in 

 the 1930's the Government refused to lend money to the Mohave for 

 the building of houses, unless they guaranteed not to burn them down. 

 However, in the 1930's any house owned outright — with the possible 

 exception of some American-style frame houses (pi. 5, a) — was still 

 burned down at the death of an adult inhabitant. Last of all, the im- 

 pact of American culture led — without seriously impairing the old 

 pattern of generosity — to an increasing awareness of legal title to 

 property, at the expense of the psychological sense of coownership 

 rooted in the regularly shared usufruct of the property in questiton.^^ 

 On the other hand the Mohave Indians' awareness of the existence of 

 inheritances among whites does not appear to have influenced their 

 funeral practices even as late as the 1930's, and at least some valuable 

 property apparently continues to be burned even at present. 



Attitudes toward funeral suicide can be summarized in a few sen- 

 tences. The attempted funeral suicide of a bereaved father or mother 

 was considered less silly than a similar attempt made by a bereaved 

 spouse. Moreover, whereas the Mohave were more critical of a 

 widower than of a widow who tried to leap on the funeral pyre of a 

 deceased spouse, simply because men are supposed to accept the loss of 

 a love object more stoically than women, a bereaved and "suicidal" 

 father was not held to have shown more weakness than a bereaved mo- 

 ther who tried to leap on her child's funeral pyre. This finding once 

 more imderscores the extent to which the Mohave differentiate affec- 

 tively between mere sexual relations and matters related to procrea- 

 tion and to the perpetuation of the tribe (Devereux, 1950 a)." 

 At the same time it is of great interest that apparently no one 

 ever tried to jump on the funeral pyre of an infant or young child, 

 presumably because the Mohave were so accustomed to a high rate of 

 child mortality that they reacted to the loss of a young child less 

 vehemently than to the loss of a grown son or daughter. 



Although extreme emotionality at funerals was expected and prac- 

 tically extorted from the mourners, because it abridged their period 

 of mourning — thereby enabling them to observe the taboo on the names 

 of the dead — the Mohave felt that such hyperemotionality was in- 

 compatible with their tribal ego ideal of stoical strength, which, as 



T8 It should be stressed that the Mohave were simply generous rather than "communistic," 

 a distinction which, as Herskovlts (1940) has shown, is of some importance for the under- 

 standing of primitive economic processes. 



" Anyanyema :m (Case 111) was criticized not because he tried to commit funeral suicide 

 ou his son's pyre, but because he had driven his son to suicide. 



