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American/Indian
Author(s) -
Murray D. W.
Publication year - 1991
Publication title -
anthropology and humanism quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.153
H-Index - 17
eISSN - 1548-1409
pISSN - 0193-5615
DOI - 10.1525/ahu.1991.16.3.82
Subject(s) - navajo , ambivalence , dilemma , tragedy (event) , politics , native american , sociology , history , ethnology , aesthetics , gender studies , genealogy , political science , epistemology , social psychology , social science , psychology , art , law , philosophy , linguistics
Understanding Native Americans is beset with symbolic difficulties. One of these is the fact of their being embedded within the social and political structures of the United States, with whose history their own stories are often coeval. They are neither “subcultures” nor fully “Others.” Neither American folk models of the “Indian” nor social science models of “Natives” capture their circumstance. By recounting a personal tragedy encountered during Navajo fieldwork, I examine the peculiar and ambivalent “marginality” of Native lives, and contrast their lived dilemma with the intellectualized one of the anthropologist.