Residential ideology and practice among the Sheep Springs Navajo
Creators: name: Reynolds, Terry Ray
Publisher: name: University of British Columbia
Year: 2010

description: This study's purpose is to determine whether the oft-reported variations in Navajo residence practices are simply responses to contingencies arising from environmental, demographic, and historical factors or if responses are conditioned in some way by Navajo ideas about the ordering of residential reality and bahaviour. It is based on field research among the Sheep Springs Navajo of northwestern New Mexico. Data about Navajo residential ideology are derived from these people's statements about residence sites and groups and from Navajo origin myths. This information is synthesized into a descriptive account of the content of Sheep Springs Navajos' residential ideology. They believe reality has a rational order. Humans are reasoning, goal-directed beings. Their behaviour is directed toward the propagation of the human species and the maintenance of human life from conception to the death of old age. These goals provide the basis for their views on the standards they think should order human behaviour and on the modes of behaviour they think best or at least acceptable in meeting these standards. Standards important to residence are not specific to it, that is, all persons should make a living and should help one another at all times in all places. It is only the procedures for behaviour that are specific to the residence context. For these people, residence is a matter of subsistence economics. Behavioural modes take into account conditions affecting people's access to livelihood resources and to manpower for exploiting and processing resources. Alternative, acceptable ways to locate residence sites and to aggregate persons into residence groups are based on these conditions. Since the amount of conformity existing between residence practices and behavioural modes gives an indication as to whether variant behaviour is in some way conditioned by ideology, comparisons are made between specific aspects of Sheep Springs Navajos' residence practices and their behavioural procedures. These are done using analytic units and variables derived from Navajo residential ideology rather than from anthropological considerations of social life. A further test is made of the agreement between ideology and practice by determining how much error in making predictions about variant behavioural forms can be reduced by using the ideologically-recognized conditions. These comparisons show very high proportions of Sheep Springs Navajos are following preferred or acceptable modes of residence behaviour. Because so many follow a preferred mode or one of the acceptable ones, the patterns of variant behaviour are not very pronounced and low reduction in prediction error is achieved by using conditions derived from their procedures. Many variations however tend to be in the direction predicted by these conditions. Variant residence practices do have some relationship to the acceptable behavioural alternatives, but there are contingencies to which practices respond that are not taken specifically into account in the alternative residential behaviour modes of the Sheep Spring Navajos. Some of these contingencies can still be dealt with by other mechanisms inherent in the structure of their ideas about ordering behaviour. Consequently, at the same time Sheep Springs Navajos' residential ideology and practices generally conform with each other, there is variation in their residence behaviour.