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Inadequate ethnological data
The error of the nineteenth-century folklorists was not that they focused on similarities, but that their methods for alleging such similarities were not always sound. Much of what they did involved picking and choosing arbitrarily among inadequate ethnological data and inferring similarity where in many cases it did not exist.But with over a century of subsequent fieldwork to draw on, today both anthropologists and folklorists are in a better position to make cross-cultural comparisons than were the early folklorists. According to Dundes, studies in the distribution of myths reveal that while there is no myth that is truly universal, so is there no myth that has ever been found to…
