Devereux] MOHAVE ETHNOPSYCHIATRY AND SUICIDE 457 



The fact that Utu :ra seems to have been the only Mohave who managed, 

 "accidentally on purpose," to condense^ these three separate practices into 

 a single dramatic gesture suggests that he must have been a relatively atypical 

 individual, who experienced not only unusually strong guilt feelings, but also 

 felt quite hostile to the wife who had "deserted" him by dying,'" and therefore 

 was punitive toward himself. This set of inferences is compatible both with 

 Mohave cultural attitudes and practices and with Freud's (1925 d) charac- 

 terization of the psychology of mourning. 



CASE 111 (Informants: Hivsu: Tupo:ma and Hama: Utce:) : 



Anyanyema:m, a 45-year-old fullblood Mohave of the Nyoltc gens, had, 

 by his fullblood Yuma wife, a 25-year-old son named Tunayva Kor, of the 

 Nyoltc gens. Anyanyema :m, who lived at Parker, Ariz., owned a very fast 

 horse, which Tunayva Kor took to Samtcevu :t — a locality near Needles, Calif., 

 inhabited by several Mohave families — in order to enter it in some races, 

 Tunayva Kor's base of operation as a jockey appears to have been the Mohave 

 settlement just across the river from Needles, presumably because he had 

 some relatives there. Anyanyema :m was quite put out by this — "perhaps he 

 was proud of that horse" — and went to Needles after his son and his horse. 

 For a week Anyanyema :m lived in the house of his son's hosts, constantly 

 nagging him about the horse. One day, around 4 :00 or 5 :00 p.m., the son finally 

 lost patience, went to get the horse, which was picketed near the house, led 

 it up to his father and said : "I thought you were my father and liked me as 

 I like you, but you seem to care more for the horse than for me and nag me 

 all the time. The gun is in the house ; I will shoot myself. Here is your horse ; 

 you were after me about it all the time." Tunayva Kor then went into the 

 house, picked up a .32 caliber revolver right in front of his hosts, went to a shed 

 near the house and shot himself in the heart. "He fell over dead then and 

 there." His relatives picked up the gun and "got mad" at Anyanyema :m, who 

 was "all broken up and cried." "You are the cause of all this," the family said, 

 and, to this day, the Mohave feel that Anyanyema :m behaved toward his^ sou 

 in an incomprehensibly selfish " and improper way. 



At his son's cremation Anyanyema :m tried to jump on the funeral pyre, but, 

 even though they still blamed him, his relatives managed to restrain him in 

 time. "Years later they still blamed him for his son's death." This hap- 

 pened some 15 years ago (1921?). After a while, Anyanyema :m returned to 

 Parker, where he died a few years later. "He smoked an awful lot and there- 

 fore coughed a great deal.""* [Did Anyanyema :m dream of his dead son?] 

 "Even if he had dreamed of his son, he would not have told anyone about it." 

 After a few moments of silence Hama: Utce: said: "It must be awful to have 

 caused someone's death and then to go on living — on and on." (Cf. Case 115.) 



Comment 



Tunayva Kor's suicide is a perfect example of the Mohave Indian's tendency to 

 react in a highly emotional way to rejection on the part of those from whom he 

 is entitled to expect consistent support (pt. 7, pp. 457-484). Indeed, 



*5 The tendency to condense, or to compress, things Is a marked characteristic of 

 Mohave cultural processes (Devereux, 1957 b). 



»» The Hopl explicitly justify their anger toward the recently dead, by saying that they 

 died only in order to grieve the survivors (Kennard. 1937). The notion of hostility toward 

 those whom one's death will grieve Is Implicitly present In Mohave beliefs concerning, 

 e.g., the "suicide" of sucklings and twins (pt. 7, pp. 340-.356). 



" Note the completely unconvincing and even Illogical "explanation" that Anyanyema :m 

 may have objected to his son's racing his horse, because he was "proud of that horse." 



88 This was a friendly jibe at the anthropologist. 



