[1] It appears, for example, in literary contexts in the stories of Clara Lee[2] and Rose Porter,[3] in the verse of Frank L. Stanton,[4] and in editor and politician Edgar Howard's opinion pieces on other political figures.
[7] Use of the term in anthropology was established with the publication of Morris Edward Opler's 1941 study An Apache Life-Way: The Economic, Social, and Religious Institutions of the Chiricahua Indians.
[8] Recent explanations of the term in the field of Native American and other Indigenous studies "suggest the close interaction of worldview and economy in small-scale societies".
Such a perspective can be associated with the concept "worldview," a distinct way of thinking about the cosmos and of evaluating life's actions in terms of those views",[10] and focuses on "an interpretive effort to express indigenous understandings of human-earth relations as an interactive and pervasive context that outsiders might label religion.
"[9] The field of sociology also adopted the word 'lifeway', with one sociologist explaining that "the definition of status differences and the conceptualization of lifeway patterns ... reflect the central significant of economic referents;" "each lifeway pattern would appear .. as a linked values system [which] ... would exhibit customs, sanctions, habits, and meanings".