8 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [BuU. 188 



1934 ; Hannum, 1946 ; Sclimedding, 1951), these have failed to recognize 

 the trader in general as anything more than a purely personal force 

 on the Navaho scene. They have consistently dramatized his life 

 and relations with his Navaho neighbors without providing any real 

 cultural insight into them. From the standpoint of straightforward 

 information the best of the trader biographies, although the least 

 known, is that of Schmedding (1951). It is, also, the only genuinely 

 autobiographical account. 



In sum, I found that existing literature provided little insight into 

 the cross-cultural problem which I had come upon more or less acci- 

 dentally through my experience at Shonto Tradmg Post, and wliich 

 I now proposed to investigate. Consequently, it has been necessary 

 for me to work out my own field methods and systems of analysis as 

 best I could on the basis of my own previous experience. And if the 

 resulting report is far longer than either the members of my faculty 

 thesis committee or I had anticipated, it is because in many areas of 

 intercultural relations there has been no existing body of knowledge 

 upon which I could draw. In dealing especially with the Navaho 

 economy, as the reader of "Navaho Economics" (pp. 94-148) will dis- 

 cover, I have had to start from absolute scratch. 



REFINEMENT OF TUE PllOBLEM 



At the time of my enrollment at the University of Arizona, I had 

 only a series of vague and half -formulated ideas as to how I should 

 go about studying trader-Navaho relations. It is true that when 

 I returned to Shonto a year later I still had not ironed out a good 

 many of the details, but in the intervening months I had at least 

 sharpened my perception and refined my definition of the prob- 

 lem to a manageable point. Credit for this achievement belongs very 

 largely to Dr. Edward H. Spicer, my faculty advisor and the chair- 

 man of my thesis committee, with whom I had a series of conferences 

 as well as a seminar on anthropological field methods which allowed 

 me to work out some of my own theoretical and methodological 

 problems. 



As an initial step it was necessary to establish the fact that there 

 was such a thing as an institutionalized "role of the trader" apart 

 from the personal role of any given trader. On this point I had no 

 doubt whatsoever. My acquaintance with my employer and with 

 many other traders in every part of the Navaho Reservation con- 

 vinced me that all of us, although with various degrees of sophistica- 

 tion, had closely similar perceptions of Navaho life and of our own 

 place in it. I found also that the nature and limits of our relations 

 with our Navaho customers and neighbors were closely comparable. 

 Most important of all, in my years of association with Shonto Trad- 

 ing Post I recognized clearly that I had come increasingly to share 



