ABSTRACT
Sometimes, strange tales emerge when we condense, streamline, and translate the desiderata of our fieldwork. Margaret Mead, for example, has been criticized for making essentializing and inaccurate comments about a particular group of people in Papua New Guinea, using information given to her by a neighboring group. One of these groups lived by fishing, and the other practiced agriculture; each group told myths about their superiority over the other. But Mead, with her limited knowledge of Papuan speech genres, did not recognize what she heard as caricature and confabulation. Rather, she apparently felt compelled to author an ethnographic “truth” about one group of Papuans, based upon the comments of the other group.3
