Navajos and Energy Development: Economic Decision Making Under Political Uncertainty

One of the chief stumbling blocks to the more active participation of anthropologists in social environmental impact assessment is the difficulty encountered in relating ethnographic research systematically to the more quantitative methodologies used by other social science disciplines. The potential contributions of cognitive anthropological and ethnoscience approaches are demonstrated through description of Navajo categories of the social costs resulting from energy resources and agribusiness development. The way in which decision models are derived from Navajo-language discourse, and their representation of native strategies for mitigating adverse environmental effects, are then described. While the decision model has some limitations under conditions of political uncertainty, the model's contributions to remedies of this problem are also noted, particularly in its amenability to questionnaire design and testing through mathematical models. One such mathematical model, entailment analysis, is described...