Case Studies in Cultural Control: John M. Roberts’s Four Southwestern Men

Abstract

During the summers of 1949, 1950, and 1951, John M. Roberts collected data on the levels of knowledge that a Zuni, a Navaho, a Mormon, and a Spanish American had of their own cultures. Specifically, Roberts asked the informants about their knowledge of the topics listed in the 1945 edition of the Outline of Cultural Materials and Gifford’s list of culture elements. He then developed a scale of cultural control of information that ranged from 1 (ignorance )to 5 (personal control ). We used Roberts’s scores for each of the four men for 18 areas of utilitarian cultural knowledge and 18 areas of expressive cultural knowledge to examine patterns in the informants’ knowledge of the two realms. Results indicate that the four men seemed to have better control of utilitarian than expressive topics.