ABSTRACT
Dictionaries are quite clear that myths deal with the supernatural or with manifest error and usually both. This chapter discusses that myth, as usually defined, understood, and used, constitutes a particularly sharp example of the traditional ethnocentric, scientistic approach to religion. As the term is used by students of mythology, a myth is a culturally specific response to questions beginning with such words as why and how and when. The chapter argues that it is precisely because of this inescapably ethnocentric–to say nothing of judgmental–assumption about the nature of myth that anthropologists have experienced conflict about how to deal with the subject. A myth is an account–an account of reality–and it comes into existence, at least in the form in which anthropologists usually have it in the anthropological literature, as a response to the presence and questions of a particular ethnographer.
