The Southern Ute Tribe as a Fixed Membership Group

This report bears upon the nature of the Southern Ute tribe and the relationships between certain features of that particular structural unit and marked propensities for cultural variability and cultural change within its bounds. In this report my approach will be selective, synthetic, and interpretative. I will not discuss at any length the extent and content of Southern Ute cultural variability except by way of illustration, for these matters are properly the subject of other Tri-Ethnic Project reports. I will, however, use various sources of data to advance a central argument. This argument proposes that the acceptance of the provisions of the Indian Reorganization Act, together with other acculturative influences, made possible the development of a type of structural unit which, in terms of Ute aboriginal precedents, is an organizational novelty and which makes possible the acceptance of internal cultural diversity and the adaptation to externally imposed change. I will, therefore, characterize the modern Southern Ute tribe as a corporate, fixed-membership group and then attempt to show how the characteristics of this type of structural unit are associated with cultural heterogeneity and instability

Argument (complex analysis) · Diversity (politics) · Ethnic group · Geography · Novelty · Sociology · Subject (documents) · Tribe · Unit (ring theory) · Variation (astronomy) · Anthropology · Computer Science · Psychology · Social Psychology · South Asian Studies and Conflicts

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