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Navajo Kinship and Marriage

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Like all ethnography, this is as much an illustration of the theory guiding it as it is a study of the Navajo.

The theory? Witherspoon came out of Chicago under the influence of David Schneider and Clifford Geertz, and it shows. Schneider more so than Geertz. Put differently, it is not an exercise in interpretive anthropology, at least in any reflective sense.

The basis of the theory is Talcott Parsons distinction between the cultural (a system of symbolic meanings) and the social (the actual relationships between people). Parsons - and the School of Social Relations at Harvard - was the common denominator between Geertz and Schneider. The book, predictably, has two parts: the first part analyzes Navajo kinship as a cultural system (meanings), the second part as a social system.

Witherspoon's writing is clear, and his theoretical discussion is simple and straightforward. It is also not terribly innovative. But of course, as he stresses repeatedly in his writings, Witherspoon spent very little time in graduate school.

His analysis of Navajo kinship is very Polynesian - that is, it either anticipates Schneider's discussion of the tabinau on Yap, or it reflects what Schneider was already lecturing on at Chicago a decade prior to his Critique of Kinship.

The points Witherspoon makes here about the Navajo are later given fuller elaboration in his Language and Art in the Navajo Universe. The points he makes about kinship are developed more completely in Schneider's later work.

In sum, if you are interested in Schneider's cultural theory, Witherspoon applies it with much greater clarity than Schneider, and if you are interested in Navajo ethnology, this is a undemanding introduction.