2 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [BuU. 188 



The trading community of Shonto, hereinafter designated as the 

 community, is confined to those Navaho individuals who are con- 

 sidered by the owner of Shonto Trading Post to be "Shonto Navvies." 

 These are the families who trade exclusively, or nearly so, at the one 

 store, and thus enable the trader to observe every phase of their 

 economic life. As delimited for the purposes of the present study, this 

 group was originally found to include 103 households and 39 residence 

 groups. For the sake of symmetry and statistical simplicity, it was 

 then decided to eliminate the three most uncertain households (con- 

 stituting a single residence group), so as to reduce the total number 

 of Navaho households studied to an even 100. The group is collectively 

 designated as "Shonto community" in succeeding pages solely for want 

 of any other appropriate term, and with no intention of suggesting 

 a visible social identity. 



The 100 Shonto households selected, with their 568 individual 

 inhabitants, constitute the entire Navaho universe of this study. They 

 have not been selected, nor are they advanced, as being in any way 

 a sample or even "typical" of a larger social whole. On the con- 

 trary, considerable pains have been taken in later pages to show how 

 and why Shonto differs from other parts of the Navaho coimtry, 

 and particularly from those which have been the scenes of recent 

 studies by anthropologists. The investigation of Shonto and the 

 present report are confined to the problem of determining the struc- 

 tural interrelationships and the processual interaction of a single 

 American-inspired and American-operated trading post and its 

 Navaho clientele. As for a wider applicability, the present research 

 can serve only to frame a hypothesis, not to test it (cf. pp. 305-307). 



GENESIS OF THE STUDY 



Like many other anthropological projects, this one arose from an 

 original interest in a specific sociocultural situation rather than in a 

 more theoretical social or cultural problem. It was the situation at 

 Shonto which drew attention to the general problem of the role of 

 the entrepreneur in culture contact — not vice versa. In other respects, 

 however, the personal and professional circumstances under which 

 the study evolved have been sufficiently deviant from the usual ex- 

 periences of anthropologists that it seems not only justifiable but neces- 

 sary to set them down in considerable detail. 



FIRST ACQUAINTANCE WITH SHONTO COMMUNITY 



I got my first view of Shonto Trading Post, in the capacity of 

 an ordinary tourist, during the summer of 1948. I had just received 

 my bachelor's degree in anthropology from the University of Cali- 

 fornia, and was spending the summer with my family on the Navaho 



