Doctoral Dissertation Research: An Anthropology of Community Politics in Indigenous Communities

New York University, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

Scientific work on indigenous communities has established a clear linkage between traditional moral values and the claims for sovereign political organization. What scholars know less about is how indigenous social organizations develop in culturally diverse ways, and what sovereignty means, culturally and morally, within an indigenous context. This project, which trains a graduate student in how to conduct rigorous empirically-grounded scientific fieldwork, seeks to understand the role of cultural and moral values in organizational development. As a project which employs a collaborative ethnographic approach, engaging Navajo in the gathering and archiving of data, the project would also broaden the participation of an underrepresented group in the sciences. Teresa Montoya, under the supervision of Dr. Fred Myers of the New York University will conduct a 15-month ethnographic project exploring community political life on the Navajo Nation in two neighboring settlements: Pine Springs, Arizona (Oak Springs Chapter) and Sanders, Arizona (Nahata Dziil Chapter). Specifically, this research examines the correlation between political sovereignty - a legal category established through federal treaty obligations and subsequent acts of legislation - and the cultural ideal of K'e, a Navajo term that emphasizes the moral value of kinship and social organization. Based on preliminary research observing and analyzing local meetings, the researcher hypothesizes that in each location, community members draw upon both cultural and political discourses to support and sustain their organizational efforts. An investigation of the differential employment of these discourses utilizing methods of participant observation, focus groups, and semi-structured interviews allows for a comparative analysis of contemporary Navajo community action. This project brings together insights from current ethnographies addressing kinship and relatedness, critical Indigenous approaches to sovereignty and Navajo subjectivity, and the anthropology of representational politics. Taken together this literature informs the hypothesis that neither the cultural nor the political frame has adequately helped social scientists understand contemporary Navajo community organization. The researcher hypothesizes that community political activity is not limited to official institutional structures and that cultural understandings of K'e cannot be isolated from political ambitions. Methods include the use of interviews, focus groups, and participant observation in the Navajo communities of Pine Springs and Nahata Dziil, as well as targeted archival research and collaborative ethnographic methods with local community organizations. By examining the confluence of social and political discourses of relatedness in everyday Navajo lives, this project offers three major contributions to the discipline of anthropology: (1) it reframes what is often presumed to be an oppositional relationship between the expression of so-called traditional Indigenous values and enactment of political sovereignties; (2) it examines how Navajo people are reworking idioms of relatedness not to return to a prior stable past but to creatively engage with and perhaps challenge unsustainable processes of extraction that target their bodies, histories, and communities; and (3) it explores new developments in Indian Country around the increasingly polysemic and multifarious expressions of sovereignty in tribal and community politics.