West of the Thirties

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From 1933 to 1937, the great American  anthropologist Edward T. Hall lived and worked on  reservations in the Southwest, a frontier where four  cultures--Navajo, Hopi, Hispanic, and Anglo--clashed.  Re-creating that stark and haunting landscape, Hall  pieces together a firsthand account of two proud  worlds--the frugal, Pueblo-dwelling Hopi with their  isolated villages high on the mesa tops and their  deeply felt religious faith and the Navajos, whose  rhythm and ceremonious forms of respect Hall  learned as he worked with them. In these early  experiences, as Hall discovered the deeply human logic of  these tribes, he began to recognize how culture  itself, not only theirs but his own, was at work in  each person's behavior. The respect he felt and  diplayed won him a friendly Navajo nickname--Chiz  Chili, meaning Slim Curly Hair--and a mentor, the  great Indian trader, Lorenzo Hubbell. Set under the  vast arch of sky in a place of unforgettable  beauty, West Of The Thirties is  about the Navajos and Hopis as one receptive young  white man perceived them, but it is also about the  core of being human, which Hall would later develop  into a theory of implicit culture. In these  pages, we see theory in the flesh, taking a hundred  different human forms and engaging us in a lost  world, the West of the  thirties.