ABSTRACT
The specific accounts contained in ethnographies can never be limited to a project of scientific description so long as the guiding task of the work is to make the (often strange) behavior of a different way of life humanly comprehensible. To say that exotic behavior and symbols make sense either in 'human' or 'cultural' terms is to supply the same sorts of allegorical added meanings that appear in older narratives tiiat saw actions as 'spiritually' significant. Margaret Mead's 'experiment' in controlled cultural variation now looks less like science: dian allegory-a too sharply focused story of Samoa suggesting a possible America. Derek Freeman's critique ignores any properly literary dimensions in ethnographic work, however, and instead applies its own brand of scientism, inspired by recent developments in sociobiology.
