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Paul Radin
Paul Radin
Paul Radin was an American anthropologist of Polish-Jewish birth, a student of Franz Boas, and for five decades a fieldworker among the Winnebago (Ho-Chunk) of Wisconsin and Nebraska. His position in the depth tradition rests on a single indispensable volume — The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology (1956) — in which his translation and commentary on the Winnebago trickster cycle appear alongside essays by carl-jung and karl-kerenyi. The volume is the only place in the Lineage where an ethnographic primary source sits directly adjacent to its Jungian and classical-philological readings, and it is therefore load-bearing beyond its page count.
Radin’s method was distinctive within Boasian anthropology. He insisted on the individual informant as a thinking subject — naming Sam Blowsnake of the Thunderbird clan as his principal raconteur, recording the cycle in the Winnebago syllabary in 1912, distinguishing Blowsnake’s literary register from that of Blowsnake’s brother whose version of The Twins was “closer in style of narration and in vocabulary to what can be termed the classical manner of telling this myth” (Radin 1956). The same conviction shaped his earlier Primitive Man as Philosopher (1927), which argued against the evolutionist assumption that speculative and religious thought were late European acquisitions, and identified within every archaic society a figure Radin called the thinker — the reflective second voice inside the tradition.
Radin’s relation to analytical psychology was cordial and critical. He met carl-jung in Zurich in 1925, participated in the Psychological Club, and remained, by his Bollingen colleagues’ account, “never a Jungian” — his Marxism and skeptical rationalism held him apart from what he regarded as the murkier regions of Jung’s thought (Du Bois, in Culture in History). He nevertheless lectured at Eranos in the 1940s and collaborated with Jung and karl-kerenyi on the 1956 volume. The Bollingen Foundation supported his later writing.
For Sebastian’s purposes, Radin is the fieldworker who gave Jung and Kerényi an empirical foothold far from the European materials that risked circularity. The trickster could be tested at maximum cultural distance. The archetype survived the test — and survived in the hands of a man who did not believe in it.