the frames of one’s habitual perceptions and actions. When Myerhoff was a teenager, she moved with her mother and stepfather from Cleveland to Los Angeles, and eventually began her career as a social scientist. In 1958, she received a BA in Sociology from the University of California and an MA in Human Development from the University of Chicago in 1963. She then entered UCLA’s Anthropology PhD program. At UCLA, Hilda Kuper, a student of Malinowski, became a beloved teacher of Myerhoff. Myerhoff and Kuper would remain friends and correspondents throughout her life. As many anthropologists who practiced in the 1960s and 1970s, Myerhoff was influenced by Victor Turner, Claude Levi-Strauss, Clifford Geertz, Mary Douglas, Mircea Eliade, Max Gluckman, Arnold Van Gennep, Alan Watts, and C.G. Jung, all of whom wrote on symbolic systems of ritual, myth, and religious cosmology. In 1968, Myerhoff received her PhD in Anthropology from UCLA for her dissertation on Huichol ritual form Myerhoff began her fieldwork with the Huichol Indians of Northern Mexico in 1965 while a graduate student. She and her colleague Peter Furst became the first non-Huichol people to embark on the peyote hunt, an annual ritual pilgrimage to the sacred land of Wirikuta in search of peyote, a hallucinogenic cactus plant. Myerhoff interpreted this rite to be a recovery of the Huichol peoples’ original condition of oneness; she viewed this quest as universal and understood the Peyote Hunt to be one example among many “returns to paradise.” As she explained, “the peyote hunt provides one version of the fulfillment of a panhuman quest—the desire for total unity among all creatures and all people—and accordingly we find in it significance beyond the specificity of Huichol religion and world view.” Although Myerhoff argued for universal application of the peyote hunt’s symbolic meaning, the study itself was deliberately narrow. Myerhoff primarily sought to understand “how the deer-maize-peyote symbols and the peyote hunt rituals gave meaning to Huichol life” She explained that choosing to work with Ramon, a religious leader who served as intermediary between Huichol people and Gods or outsiders, precluded her from spending comparable time with other Huichol people. She noted, therefore, that her account of the peyote hunt and the deer and maize rituals was not an account of Huchiol culture, religious cosmology, or even the definitive word on the peyote ritual, but rather, was her interpretation of Ramon’s interpretation By positioning herself as