ABSTRACT
Every generation has its anthropologists, every epoch its ethnographers. Whether self-promoted or picked up by the public, candidates emerge in every period as the popular representatives of our discipline. Turnbull’s work on the Ik was taken as an illuminating commentary on the human condition; Castaneda’s first book confirmed hippies’ hopes about the mystical value of their drug-induced visions. Books which seem too much of a piece with their time, however, die with the passing of that time. The Mountain People is now scorned, The Teachings of Don Juan has come to be regarded as no more than an ingenious fake.
