The Hopi Indians of Old Oraibi

Abstract

From August of 1933 to March 1933, Mischa Titiev lived among the Hopi Indians of Old Oraibi, an ancient pueblo of the Hopi Indian Reservation in northeastern Arizona. A trained anthropologist, Dr. Titiev was adopted into the tribe and into the Sun clan during his stay - evidence enough of his remarkable acceptance by the people whose life he shared even as he sympathetically observed their ways. Subsequently, Titiev made return trips to Old Oraibi over a period of four decades, observing both the changes in the individual lives of those he had known and the signs of cultural change in the community. This fascinating diary of his extended 1933-34 visit - now published for the first time, and incorporating the observations made during the author's many subsequent stays - thus stands as a unique and irreplaceable record of Hopi life, and a rare longitudinal study of sociocultural change.