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One of a series of books, the authors summarize in it their accumulated knowledge of the Navaho trible. The companion volume, Children of the People, to follow shortly, will deal with the individual and with personality. The presentation of Navaho culture in this volume is illuminating and often permits one to see what is psychologically meaningful. Many statements made in this book about the Navaho are valid also for other primitives, some for all. From history, through anthropogeography and social life, the authors proceed to discuss contacts with white civilization, and then religion, myths and ethics. A remark made by one informant on white and native medicine is one of the many worth quoting: 'You go to a hospital and maybe once a day the doctor comes around and he stays three, maybe five minutes. Once in a while they give you a little medicine, just a little bit of it. About the only thing they do is to put something in your mouth and see how hot you are. The rest of the time you just lie there. But the medicine men help you all the time—they give you lots of medicine and they sing all night' (pp. 99–100). In other words, the point is to get plenty of attention.
The whole culture seems to revolve around one main theme: healing the sick, which includes those who have had bad dreams. 'A dream of anything sick or weak or deformed is a cause for anxiety. If bad dreams keep coming, the hogan (house) will be torn down and a new one built some distance away, because the bad dreams are supposed to come from ghosts who are frequenting their old haunts and trying to draw their relatives into ghostland with them' (p. 142).
There must be a powerful guilt feeling in this culture, and the emphasis on elimination from the body (sudbath, sweatbath,