Irving Goldman is one of the great unsung heroes of contemporary anthropology. I was exceedingly fortunate to have been his colleague at Sarah Lawrence College between 1971 and 1977, and to have enjoyed in that context his generous nature and his deep affection for both the enterprise of anthropology and the people anthropologists study. Goldman was famous for his seminars, in which he led undergraduates through close readings of ethnographic texts, encouraging them to seek and find in the minutia of ethnography the meanings and values informing and shaping particular cultural traditions.(Students who have had these seminars still talk about how intellectually exciting they found them.) Goldman pursues the same strategy in his own writings. Both Ancient Polynesian Society and Mouth of Heaven involve careful rereadings of the existing ethnographic corpus, yielding fresh and powerful interpretations. 1