Paul Radin: 4 books

Anthropology is a science whose most significant discoveries have come when it has taken its bearings from literature, and what makes Paul Radin’s Primitive Man as Philosopher a seminal piece of anthropological inquiry is that it is also a book of enduring wonder. Writing in the 1920s, when anthropology...

Sam Blowsnake (S.B.) was a member of the Winnebago tribe. In this autobiography, translated into English by Dr. Paul Radin, Crashing Thunder describes the life, ways, acculturation, and the peyote cult of his people. He tells about his brother-in-law the shaman, adolescence, initiation into the Medicine...

The myth of the Trickster—ambiguous creator and destroyer, cheater and cheated, subhuman and superhuman—is one of the earliest and most universal expressions of mankind. Nowhere does it survive in more starkly archaic form than in the voraciously uninhibited episodes of the Winnebago Trickster...

A short book about the peyote drug. The book covers experiences of peyote users, their conversions, the ceremonies, and accounts of the leaders of the peyote. "In the middle of the night we were to eat peyote. We ate it and I also did. It was the middle of the night when I got frightened, for...