Adams] SHONTO : ROLE OF NAVAHO TRADER 9 



the values of my employer, particularly in regard to Navaho-Wliite 

 relations, and had acquired a sense of superior status despite my 

 intellectual principles. I began by doing and saying things of which 

 I did not approve, because I was paid for it, and ended by justifying 

 them to myself and others in the same terms as did the other traders 

 of my acquaintance. Clearly, our behavior and our role were being 

 determined for us, in spite of enormous individual differences in per- 

 sonality, education, and experience, by constant factors in the struc- 

 ture of our social milieu. 



In the most immediate sense our social milieu was the Navaho 

 community as it had evolved under a century of direct and indirect 

 Anglo-American influence, and my first objective was to trace the 

 course of this evolution (cf. "Background," pp. 30-53) and describe 

 its end product as it stood in 1955 ("Navaho Life," pp. 53-94). I 

 would be particularly concerned with community economics, as the 

 phase of Navaho life which most directly concerned the trader. In 

 any case I had always intended to undertake a detailed description 

 and analysis of the modern Navaho economy, simply because it con- 

 stituted one of the great gaps in the anthropological literature. (This 

 intention was duly carried out, and comprises the section "Navaho 

 Economics" of the present study.) 



The factors conditioning the trader's behavior are obviously not 

 confined to the Navaho community in which he lives. He himself is 

 a member of another sociocultural system which impinges on him 

 particularly in his professional capacity as a businessman. As an 

 agent, in a sense, of the modem American industrial and mercan- 

 tile economy, he is subject to numerous limitations imposed by them. 

 It was necessary, therefore, to ascertain the place of the trader in 

 the modern American society and economy, and its effect on his 

 behavior (see pp. 167-184). 



In the broadest sense, the social milieu of the trader is the whole 

 complex of Navaho-White relations of which he is a part. The inter- 

 relationship of the two sociocultural systems is thoroughly structured 

 both at the commmiity level (pp. 184-214 and pp. 214-230) and at the 

 level of the total society (pp. 231-267), providing the trader with 

 numerous behavioral mandates which I would have to discover and 

 define. Finally, I would have to ascertain the operational motives of 

 the trader himself and determine how and in what ways they affected 

 his behavior (pp. 267-296). 



THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS 



In short, my problem was to reduce the total phenomenon of Navaho- 

 White contact to the scope of a single, arbitrarily but rigidly delimited 

 social system involving members of both groups (i.e., a "contact com- 

 munity"). I had then to study the internal structure of that social 

 system with particular reference to the status of the trader, and to 



