486 BUREAU OF AlVIERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 175 



behavior of others — this social mass need not necessarily serve as a 

 challenge for the development of psychiatry. Thus, the psychiatric 

 knowledge and curing rites of the Sedang Moi are quite rudimentary. 

 Moreover, owing to the legalistic and punitive temper of that tribe, its 

 "psychiatry" is, at times, indistinguishable from law. Yet there are 

 quite as many insane among the Sedang as among the Mohave. 



Apparently the genesis of psychiatry also presupposes more than 

 just a therapeutic orientation, which is present in most cultures. In- 

 deed, it is, at least in principle, possible to develop a respectable science 

 of psychiatric diagnosis even in an imaginary society which postulates 

 that insanity is the consequence of so great a sin and represents such a 

 danger to society, that the psychotic must be executed as soon as he is 

 diagnosed as such. We therefore suggest that the crucial factor re- 

 sponsible for the emergence of a science of psychiatry, however 

 primitive, is the implicit assumption that the seemingly chaotic be- 

 havior of the insane maJces some kind of sense in terms of itself^ and 

 not simply in terms of some external frame of reference such as pos- 

 session, defective genes, or organic illness. 



Needless to say, psychiatry is not the only trait whereby the "so- 

 cial mass" of the insane is made manifest. Laws, attitudes, social 

 concern over insanity, etc., are also repercussions of the social mass of 

 the insane person and of the social image ("collective representation") 

 of insanity. Even psychiatry itself may acquire a semiautonomous 

 "social mass" of its own ; witness, to take a striking though unconven- 

 tional example, the fantastically large current crop of sophisticated 

 jokes, beloved by the intelligentsia, about psychiatrists, and especially 

 psychoanalysts, which are not to be confused with jokes about morons 

 and lunatics, favored chiefly by the unsophisticated. A discussion of 

 this topic is, however, beyond the scope of the present essay, chiefly 

 because my preliminary investigations of this field indicate that exist- 

 ing studies have barely scratched the surface of the problem, which 

 has, so far, not even been recognized as a problem sui generis. It is 

 therefore sufficient to give only one example of the complexities con- 

 fronting the student who wishes to explore, e.g., the "social mass" of 

 the idea of suicide in Mohave society. 



Although the Mohave are not exceptionally prone to suicide, the idea of suicide 

 has a great cultural mass and is a major reference point in Mohave theorizing 

 about death. Thus, they consider as suicide : 



(1) The prenatal deaths of bewitched fetuses and of potential future shamans 

 (pt. 7, pp. 331-339). 



(2) Certain types of pediatric illnesses of sucklings (pt. 7, pp. 340-348). 



(3) The death of twins who have not yet married (pt. 7, pp. 348-356) . 



(4) The symbolic, ritual "suicide" of men who marry a female relative of 

 theirs (pt. 7, pp. 35(5-371). 



(5) The death of the willing victims of witches (pt. 7, pp. 383-386). 



(G) The vicarious suicide of witches who incite others to kill them (Kroeber, 

 1925 a; and pt. 7, pp. 387-426). 



(7) The death of isolated warriors, who deliberately stray into enemy terri- 

 tory (Halpern, personal communication, 1938; and pt. 7, pp. 426-431). 



