Rethinking Navajo Social Theory Warren Shapiro Department of Anthropology Rutgers University New Brunswick, New Jersey USA
[email protected] Hal Schefler, in arguing that native concepts about procreation provide the basis for kin reckoning universally, presented considerable evidence for his argument, in addition to the extension rules for which he is best known, This essay applies this evidence to the Navajo materials and shows that a Schef*lerian analysis is correct. By contrast, the analysis of Nava- jo kinship by Gary Witherspoon, indebted to David Schneider’s ideas, is shown to be wide of the mark. Schef*ler also argued, in much the same logical vein, that gender classi*ication around the world is bipartite, that claims of a “third sex” are without merit. The argument is applied to “third sex” claims by Wesley Thomas, which claims are shown to be baseless. Keywords: Navajo, kinship theory, gender classi*ication, semantic analysis, scholarly re- sponsibility 1.0 Introduction The Navajo are easily the most ethnographically studied people in the world.1 Their ideas about kinship were relatively well known (see references) even before the publication of Gary Witherspoon’s (1975) Navajo Kinship and Marriage and his other publications (see below).Witherspoon’s analysis rejects the idea that Navajo kinship is grounded in the pro- creative relations within the nuclear family. As such it is self-consciously indebted to David Schneider’s writings. Here it needs to be recalled that these writings, especially A Critique of the Study of Kinship (Schneider 1984), alleged that Western ethnographers applied to non- Western forms of kin-reckoning ideas based only on their own ethnic background, which, he maintained, are largely inapplicable to these exogenous materials.