American Indian Culture and Research Journal

World-system theory has provided a vehicle for the global analysis of politico-economic change. However, as formulated, the theory has focused on the historical process of European incorporation of non-European societies at the macro-level in a fashion that obscures the emergence of new social categories and processes at the micro-level. This article analyzes the relationship between ethnicity and gender in two peripheral contexts-among Basotho women of Lesotho and Navajo women of the American Southwest. In the British social anthropological tradition, anthropologists have attempted cross-cultural comparisons between and among cultures at similar stages of sociocultural integration in order to formulate general laws of society. In the 1970s, when American anthropologists began to work in urban contexts, they often referred to research on different ethnic/racial groups in the same context as well as the same ethnic/racial group in different context. Having abandoned ahistoricism, they began to consider the period during which their research was conducted. Here I have chosen to compare two groups of women on the basis of their place in the world-system. Both groups occupy peripheral areas, engage in sheep- and goat-herding and in tapestry weaving. In examining the history of incorporation of each society, I have discerned parallels and divergences. Of primary concern is how these societies compare contemporaneously.