The Named Informant Method

Radin’s methodological contribution to the depth tradition’s source-base is his insistence that mythological material comes from named individuals whose literary intelligence is itself a variable. For the 1956 Winnebago volume he identifies his principal raconteur — Sam Blowsnake of the Thunderbird clan, who wrote the cycle in the Winnebago syllabary in 1912 — distinguishes Blowsnake’s register from his brother’s, and states on the record that “Sam Blowsnake was facile of speech, sociable, superficial, self-important, possessed of very little religious feeling and with little interest in the past. He had, however, great literary gifts” while “his brother was his complete antithesis. He was deeply religious, a complete conformist” (Radin 1956, p. 112).

The discipline is philological at bottom. The text is not treated as the voice of a people abstracted from its speakers; it is treated as the work of this raconteur in that year under these conditions, with offerings of tobacco made to the older source-informant, the raconteur’s fee paid, the syllabary version preserved. The Jungian concept of amplification operates at a different grain — ranging across unsigned traditions to gather parallel motifs. The two procedures are compatible only when the amplification does not overwrite the informant’s signature.

The thread is methodologically load-bearing for Sebastian. When the Lineage reads indigenous materials, the named-informant discipline is what keeps the reading honest. It is why Radin, who never subscribed to the archetypal hypothesis, produced the book on which the hypothesis’ strongest empirical test was run.

Sources

• paul-radin: Sam Blowsnake as principal raconteur; comparison with Blowsnake’s brother (Radin 1956, pp. 111–112).
• carl-jung: trust in Radin’s text as “pristine mythological form” preserved by the method (Jung 1956).
• karl-kerenyi: use of Radin’s text as source for philological comparison with Greek materials (Kerényi 1956).