Molded in the Image of Changing Woman: Navajo Views on the Human Body and Personhood

Maureen Trudelle Schwarz is an anthropologist, and this University of Arizona Press book is her ethnographic study of Navajo, Dine, views on the human body and personhood, written in direct consultation with named and credited Dine community members. Its strength is that collaborative method itself, Schwarz worked with the community to ensure the material presented reflects how Dine consultants themselves wanted their tradition represented, and the book deliberately withholds restricted ceremonial knowledge those consultants identified as not appropriate for outside publication. Its limit is that it documents the specific understanding of the Dine consultants Schwarz worked with in this period, so a claim about Navajo belief more broadly, or from a different community or era, is better checked against a source specific to that context.