I was interested in Patterns of Exchange because I often show the documentary Seasons of a Navajo in introductory anthropology courses. I show it in order for students to review key anthropological concepts related to subsistence patterns and economic exchange but also to think about the elderly couple and their family’s strategies as they herd sheep, grow corn, support each other, and (although it is only implied) sell rugs. I offer it as way to counter the notion that particular cultures are stagnant representatives of particular concepts, since the Navajo are often such representatives for “pastoralists” in introductory anthropology textbooks. The documentary makes obvious that this family brings many social and material strategies to the table. I was hoping Wilkins’ Patterns of Exchange would provide more information on the marketing of Navajo rugs.
Patterns of Exchange easily fulfilled this wish, and did more than that. For one thing, it is more historical in nature than expected: it outlines the history of Navajo rugs in the Southwest’s arts and crafts industry as well as in their past and present markets. Readers learn how weavers, family, and traders influence social and formal qualities in the creative process of making and trading rugs as well as how weavers, local traders, and not-so-local dealers market them. Wilkins characterizes the types of rug exchange and changes over time, and contends that although Navajo weavers were and are involved in translocal and increasingly global market settings, these settings are complex and difficult to characterize as purely capitalistic. Wilkins asserts that understanding Navajo responses to such market settings solely in terms of assimilation in an exploitative relationship is reductive, with little understanding of Navajo points of view. She skillfully delivers the diversity of weavers’ perspectives against those of traders and dealers through reference to published and archival sources as well as to her own ethnographic fieldwork.
After a short introduction, chapter 2 outlines ancient, historical, and recent trade in the Southwest. Wilkins first characterizes trade within and between Native groups, which was later disrupted by Spanish colonists, who brought slave trade and a system of often forced tributes. Raiding then developed between the Navajo, Pueblo groups, and the Spanish—the Navajo raiding the others’ settlements for their own relatives and resources such as sheep in the 1600s. Wilkins then compares this standard history of how Navajo acquired sheep to Navajo oral traditions that depict their relationship with sheep and their life in the Southwest as more ancient. She continues to describe the historical backdrop of Navajos captured as slaves as well as the U.S. military’s subjugation and forced internment of the Navajo in the 1860s, before the establishment of the Navajo reservation. She then chronicles the history of reservation trading posts, focusing on one Hubbell Trading Post before characterizing the history of some posts in the late-twentieth century. The chapter ends with a discussion of the significance of these posts to the Navajo in their continued use and integration within the Navajo’s sense of history, while to Euro-Americans only certain posts are seen as authentic in their representation of “the Old West.”
The remaining chapters continue to juxtapose Euro-American and Navajo perspectives. Chapter 3 showcases how Euro-Americans became avid consumers of Navajo rugs in the early-twentieth century, while chapter 4 continues Wilkins’ focus on the influence of one trader (J.L. Hubbell). Between these two chapters, Wilkins creates an interesting dialogue between the ideals set forth by the anti-modernist appreciation of Native art and one trader’s enterprising use of such ideals as a mediator between weavers, non-Native artists, dealers, and consumers. Chapter 3 highlights three traders (including Hubbell) and the differing ideals set forth in their trade catalogs, before Wilkins details what American Indian Art signified more broadly in the Victorian American home. Chapter 4 focuses, in particular, on Hubbell’s commissions and use of paintings depicting older patterns in requesting what weavers then created. Nevertheless, in the final section of the chapter Wilkins contends that Navajo weavers did not blindly copy these paintings; they exerted autonomy and Navajo ideals of personhood for themselves, other weavers, and the rugs.
Chapters 5, 6, and 7 continue to explain Navajo values in the negotiated relationships between weavers and rug buyers. Chapter 5 details the types of exchanges (gift, barter, varying kinds of monies, credit, and pawn) between traders and weavers through time, while chapter 6 follows weavers’ perspectives more closely in how they estimate and negotiate the value of their rugs. In these two chapters, Wilkins engages anthropological theories of exchange, characterizing rug exchange as being on a continuum between gifts and commodities, while also explaining Navajo understanding of material life through social obligations or “an ideology of helping” (115). Chapter 7 considers Navajo journey beliefs in the context of weavers traveling to showcase and sell their rugs throughout the twentieth century. The brief concluding chapter reflects on the market economies most recent (a new Wal-Mart) and historically distant in Navajo experience. Wilkins reflects on the increasingly global exchange of these rugs while historical memory revives “old” fixations in the creation of and places of exchange for this craft.
Patterns of Exchange is written accessibly and could easily be assigned in anthropology, folklore, and Native studies courses—especially those focusing on material culture, economic theories, and art. I assigned part of the first chapter in an introductory course this past semester because of its nuanced explanation of acculturation and globalization, and I plan to use the fifth chapter in a theory course as an example of an ethnography that simultaneously brings economic theories to light while also critiquing them. My only criticism of the book is that Wilkins claims to go beyond a focus solely on weavers, traders, and consumers in order to highlight “the interactions between these groups” (11). She manages to do so with weavers and traders across different periods (as the book title reflects). However, while early twentieth-century consumers enter her analysis, more recent consumers’ perspectives are largely missing.
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[Review length: 988 words • Review posted on September 10, 2012]