anthropologist—the myth teller1

Abstract

The meaning of the anthropological movement comes from the sense of mission created out of the ethnographer's encounter with his alter, the informant. The traditional pattern of ethnographer‐informant relations, in which the informant was the man of wisdom and the ethnographer his most briliant student, was permeated with a sense of rightness expressed in the morality of cultural relativism. Changes in the personnel who become the ethnographer and the informant and changes in their home societies have created a new reality against which the traditional pattern has collapsed. Out of the collapse arises the reaffirmation of the anthropologist as teller of the human myth.