By Gladys A. Reichard
This vigorous account of a pioneering anthropologist's studies with a Navajo relatives grew out of the author's wish to discover ways to weave as a fashion of partaking in Navajo tradition instead of gazing it from the surface. In 1930, whilst Gladys Reichard got here to stick with the kinfolk of Red-Point, a well known Navajo singer, it was once strange for an anthropologist to dwell with a relations and develop into in detail hooked up with women's actions. First released in 1934 for a favored viewers, Spider girl is valued at the present time not only for its info on Navajo tradition yet as an early instance of the type of own, sincere ethnography that provides genuine stories and conversations instead of generalizing the ideals and behaviors of an entire tradition. Readers drawn to Navajo weaving will locate it specially invaluable, yet Spider Woman's photograph of lifestyle is going a ways past rugs to explain journeys to the buying and selling publish, tribal council conferences, curing ceremonies, and the deaths of family.
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Additional resources for Spider Woman: A Story of Navajo Weavers and Chanters
Example text
He and his wife and daughters had worked for Fred Harvey, demonstrating weaving for tourists. The family traveled to San Francisco and San Diego for exhibitions in 1915, remaining in California for the greater part of two years. After returning to the reservation, Red Point apprenticed himself to a number of singers, learning several important Navajo ceremonies over the years. In 1923 he participated in the dedication of the El Navajo Hotel in Gallup (Parezo 1983). Mary Colter, who designed the interior, used sandpainting motifs based on reproductions by Red Point and other Navajo singers.
Her dissertation was a grammar of the Wiyot Indians of California, among whom she had done field work in 192223. The Columbia Anthropology Department of the early 1920s revolved around Franz Boas, widely known as the "father" of American anthropology. Boas rejected the evolutionary frameworks of nineteenth-century anthropologists. He took a position of cultural relativism, arguing that each culture should be judged on its own terms rather than by some Western standard. Instead of building grand explanatory schemes that placed the "civilized" at the top of an evolutionary ladder and the "savages" at the bottom, Boas advocated empirical research and careful de- Page ix scription as the basis of anthropology as a science.
John Curley (called Tallman in Spider Woman), who appears in several chapters, often expresses Anglo views and compares the differences between Navajo belief and the Christian religion. "He was raised Presbyterian, for years has been straddling on the edge of going back to Navajo. He 'done so' last winter by marrying (Navajo way) a woman from Black Mtn. Whom he had never seen. Reverse assimilation! John said his relatives had been coaxing him to marry for a long time.... So he finally said they should pick him out a woman with certain qualifications, among which were that he would not avoid his m-in-law.