Contents

         VOLUME 34, NUMBER 3, AUTUMN 1992

Land, Sky, and People: The Southwest Defined

Edited by Joseph Carleton Wilder
UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA PRESS
THE SOUTHWEST CENTER
TUCSON

Publishing the Southwest

Land, Sky, and People: The Southwest Defined
   James W. Byrkit

"The fact remains that, while we have some conception of the Southwest as a whole, we are not at all happy with the names by which the region is usually designated. A region ought to have a name, simple and suggestive of its distinctive qualities, because to lack a name is to invite fuzziness of treatment for any entity which one singles out for systematic study."

-Edward Spicer & Raymond H. Thompson, Plural Society in the Southwest

p256 p258

   The Problem: No Consistent Definition
   Developing a Methodology
   Geographic Focal Areas of the Southwest
   Unique Cultural Traditions
   The Anglo-American Experience
   Southwestern Cultural Imagery
   The Southwest Defined
   Summary

See the related Photos and Maps.

This composition is not intended to be a scholarly monograph, but, rather, an essay--empirical yet speculative, documented but irreverent. Most of the "facts" here are self--evident and well known. I have broken no new scholarly ground, I have used virtually no primary sources, and I have taken much from such tertiary sources as college textbooks, maps, encyclopedias and other reference books. Like several other recent contributors to Journal of the Southwest, I am deeply grateful to Joseph Wilder for his patience, encouragement, tolerance, and general cerebral stimulation. However, the words in this are all mine. Dr. Wilder's gentle and cautionary hand has not always prevailed, so any imprudence appears here despite his advice and because of his tolerance. In these ways, as well as many others, he is the ideal editor.


JAMES BYRKIT is professor of interdisciplinary Studies in the Office of Environmental Science at Northern Arizona University. He is the author of Forging the Copper Collar (1982), editor of Charles Lummis's Letters from the Southwest (1989), and has published more than thirty articles, chapters, and reviews, most of them on Southwest topics.

Copyright © 1992 by the Arizona Board of Regents. All rights reserved.