THE EFFECTS OF GLOBALIZATION ON CULTURE AND SOCIETY
WITHIN THE UNITED STATES AS COMPARED TO CULTURE AND SOCIETY WITHIN THE NAVAJO NATION
Although some non-revisionist anthropologists might wince at the thought of comparing social and cultural life within the United States with the social and cultural life within the Navajo reservation, it will become clearly valid upon the realization that -- although the reservation shares the same land mass as the United States -- the Navajo tribe is clearly an indigenous people and culture. Modern cultural anthropology is undergoing the impact of critical revisionist theory. Indeed, structural ethnography, cultural ethnography, and psycholinguistic ethnography are now being used to deal with the essentialist conceptions of culture, human agency, and meaning itself (Langer, 1994, 118). Perry (1991) argues that "at best, ethnographic reconstruction is limited to the gleaning of all-too-meager bits and pieces. In many cases, patterns of behavior and belief once shared among a population who later diverged may change so much that eventually they are no longer detectable as similarities" (p. 82).
This problem is heightened when a third element -- that of cultural germination based on extra-continental persuasion is added. In this case, the most globalizing influence of all, the Internet. It is the thesis of this paper that the impact of the Internet has had separate but equal impact on the two groups of people whom we will call "Americans" and "Navajos."
Traditionally, when the people being studied have been ignored by traditional ethnographers as not significantly defined in the normative notions of self and society are achieved only at the expense of an "Other/Our" identity (Marcus & Fischer, 1986, 114). The particular conceit of ethnography (that much-debated and oft-criticized sector of cultural anthropology) that a people, or peoples (considering the diversity within the Nav...