SOURCE: "The Collaboration of Two Men and a Plant," in New York Times Book Review, October 22, 1972, pp. 7, 10, 12, 14.

[In the following essay, Riesman, an anthropology professor at Carleton College, discusses what Casianeda's books reveal about the short-comings of anthropology.]

Anthropology is, for many of its American practitioners and amateurs, a way of trying to get out of our particular culture, or at least a way of finding out whether "other ways of life" are possible and, if so, perhaps better than our own. Yet despite the impetus of such curiosity, the bulk of the writing actually published in this field only tends to confirm what we think we already know about the nature of man, society, the human condition. For when we study "other cultures" this way, we assume in advance that "understanding" means "explanation" in terms with which we are already familiar from our own experience and knowledge...