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F. H. Cushing’s initiatory experience among the Zuñi and the topic of his main theoretical efforts made him the pioneer of participant observation and the discoverer of totemism’s structural logic, admired by the greatest anthropologists of the early twentieth century. Meanwhile, he is strikingly underrated within the current teaching of the history of anthropology. We shall inquire whether such a marginalization could be owed to Cushing’s willingness to be a mediator for Amerindian otherness, a status that is hardly compatible with the academic categories of the social sciences.