ABSTRACT
The history of anthropological research on the Plains Sun Dance is a mirror of the development of early Classic era historical analysis into several "schools": functionalist, psychological, structural, and others. The emphasis in the Sun Dance paper actually seems away from historical reconstruction and toward the more or less functional analysis of organization, mythology, and processes of diffusion and modification. If the Sun Dance and arrow-releases did show a comparable areal picture, and therefore gave analogous results for the theoretician, "the meaning of these results must be different". In Leslie Spier's judgment the extreme variety in meaning and organization of the dance offered sharp contrast to the relatively formal stability. The term "history" meant only general development and origins, not the exhaustive analysis of social, economic, and political structure through time.
