On the Existence of Mikhailov

I n a seminal piece of anthropological research that has quickly become a classic, William Arens examined the credibility of the evidence for the existence of cannibalism as a social phenomenon, and concluded that the evidence was exceedingly weak (Arens, 1979). In fact, he concluded that while cannibalism had undoubtedly occurred in isolated " in extremis " situations, there was no good evidence for the existence of cannibalism as a routine social mechanism. 1 In a similar vein, the author was prompted to examine the evidence for the existence of A.I. Mikhailov, the legendary and apparently near-ubiquitous Soviet information scientist. At first glance this might seem unwarranted and gratuitous. After all, the appearance of Mikhailov, or at least his name, in the program was a fixture of international library and information science conferences for years, even decades. However, the actual appearance of Mikhailov at those conferences has been exceedingly, indeed it would appear vanishingly, small, and it was the realization of the consistency of this phenomenon, deriving from numerous informal conference conversations, that catalyzed the etiology of this project. Procedure The author interviewed 67 information colleagues at several recent international meetings. The selection criteria was admittedly nonrigorous-it was simply those information scientists known to the author to be active internationally and likely to have encountered Mikhailov (43 cases), or further informants, recommended by two or more of the first set of informants as someone who was particularly likely to have met Mikhailov at a personal level (24 cases). Number of Scheduled Appearances by Mikhailov Number of Respondents Reporting More than a dozen times 22 6-12 times 31 2-6 times 11 Once 3 Table 1. Number of meetings attended by individual respondents at which Mikhailov was scheduled to speak. Results All 67 respondents reported having been at professional meetings at which Mikhailov was scheduled to be on the program, in most cases many such meetings (delineated above in Table 1). Strikingly different, however, was the response to the question as to how often the respondent had actually seen Mikhailov or someone alleged to be Mikhailov. (Note: the question actually administered was " How often did you see or meet Mikhailov?, " so that the administration of the question would convey no negative bias as to the existence or reality of Mikhailov.) Comparatively few respondents, 21 or 31%, reported ever having seen or met Mikhailov; that is, 69% of the respondents reported …