This study documents the recent commercialization and secularization of a form of religious art by the Navajo Indians of northern Arizona and New Mexico. The form, commercial sandpainting, is made of pulverized dry materials glued onto a permanent backing. Sacred sandpaintings are impermanent pictures that attract powerful supernaturals who are invoked to cure and to bless. The paintings are intentionally destroyed at the end of the ceremony and their use is surrounded by supernaturally sanctioned prescriptions. Unlike the sacred form from which the decorative art stemmed, commercial sandpaintings are designed and made as part of the national Indian arts and crafts market. The development of commercial sandpaintings, therefore, involved a shift from a sacred to a secular domain and a shift from native use to non-native consumption. The purpose of this work is to understand how and why a group of people decided to commercialize a sacred art form and the social and artistic repercussions of intentional sale to outsiders and the breaking of widely held religious rules. It focuses on the mechanisms of this complex process of innovation and diffusion. Basically it identifies the innovators and founders (both Navajo and Anglo-American), when and where these events occurred, how the idea to make commercial sandpaintings spread, and why Navajos who subsequently became sandpainters decided to pursue the craft. It will be shown that while reasons were numerous, economics was always of central importance. It is concluded that the commercialization of ethnic art occurs because of poverty situations when makers have few economic alternatives and there is a demand for luxury items by another group.

This study documents consensus and variation in the interpretation of symbolism in Navajo sandpaintings of the heavens. Navajo sandpaintings are sacred designs created to attract supernaturals and to create a ritual reality in which the patient and supernaturals interact for the purpose of curing and blessing. Precise rules of tradition determine the form of all images. Yet even ritual forms are created by individuals whose unique experiences pattern their interpretation of forms. Thus, ritual images index a system of cultural knowledge which possesses the interpretive variability and consensus of belief characteristic of any system of cultural knowledge. This study focuses on celestial constellations because they are a universally perceivable domain which therefore facilitates cross-cultural and intracultural comparison. This study identifies those constellations which are salient for the Navajo and documents their visual depiction in sandpaintings. By examining a corpus of sandpaintings defined by subject matter--sandpaintings with constellations--across ceremonials (sandpainting not limited to one chantway), more detailed comparison of form and meaning becomes possible. Thus, such variation can be systematically documented. Several factors are at work to produce this variation: the nature of the oral transmission process, infrequent performance of sandpaintings which contain constellations, and the relatively monotonous nature of constellation images in comparison to other more distinctive features in the sandpaintings. Interpretive variability in meaning is related to chantway specialization: different chanters provide different interpretations of the same constellation depending upon their ceremonial specialization. A fundamental internal consistency exists in the use of the same cognitive principles applied by chanters to identify and order the constellations and in the way they project key symbols from their chant specializations onto the constellations. Because constellations do not play a dominant role in chantway stories (which form the basis for sandpaintings)--relative to other supernaturals--variation in their depiction and interpretation is not disruptive of the ceremonial-symbolic system.