Adams] SHONTO : ROLE OF NAVAHO TRADER 77 



and the Negro prostitutes to whom railroad workers have frequent 

 recourse, Negro women being held up as a kind of standard of sexual 

 desirability. Negroes are seldom thought of in any other context 

 at Shonto, and any mention of them is almost invariably an occasion 

 for humor. 



Shonto's one professional prostitute occupies a universally recog- 

 nized status as such in the community, and openly solicits in and 

 around the trading post (contrast Bailey, 1950, p. 101). She is a 

 woman of 44 who has never borne children, and the daughter of 

 Navajo Mountain's most respected singer. Her husband, who abets 

 her activities to some extent as procurer, is reputed to be impotent 

 and is a universal object of derision. 



MATERIAL CULTURE 



Shonto's material culture is fundamentally American of 50 to 100 

 years ago, with a few more up-to-date introductions, one or two pe- 

 culiarly Navaho adaptations (e.g., the liogan) and a handful of 

 native survivals. (For a detailed inventory of modern Navaho ma- 

 terial culture see Roberts, 1951, pp. 15-24; also Kluckhohn and 

 Leighton, 1946, pp. 26-32.) The Navaho community is entirely 

 without electricity, gas, and plumbing, and largely without automo- 

 biles; its material development in general is consistent with these 

 conditions. 



SHELTER 



With two exceptions, all Shonto dwellings are hogans of one type 

 or another (see Mindeleff, 1898; Page, 1937). About three-fourths 

 of the hogans are of the "beehive" type, with vertical lower walls 

 formed by a circle of upright posts, surmounted by a hemispherical 

 cribbed roof, and the whole normally covered with earth. The related 

 hexagonal or octagonal hogan (see Page, 1937, pis. V, VI) with lower 

 walls formed by horizontal logs is found nowhere in the Shonto area. 

 Beehive hogans vary from 15 to nearly 30 feet in diameter, and from 

 7 to 12 feet in height. 



Nearly all remaining hogans are of the supposedly older conical 

 or "forked-stick" type (see Page, 1937, pis. I-IV). These are com- 

 monly somewhat smaller in size, averaging 7 to 8 feet in height and 

 14 to 16 feet in diameter. Cribbed huts, similar to the beehive hogan 

 but much smaller and lacking the vertical lower walls, are used for 

 storage and as auxiliary residences for second wives or older boys. 

 A few older persons, lacking resources to handle heavy timbers, also 

 live in cribbed huts. These are considered unsatisfactory, however, 

 and are often objects of derision. 



One man, an employee of Shonto Trading Post, has built a square 

 cabin of upright posts surmounted by a pitched plank roof. Another 



