Levi-Strauss: The Structural Study of Myth

Anthropologists no longer study primitive religion, inviting amateurs to come into the mix. Crude psychological theories from Durkheim and others misapplied by their successors. Reducing psychological drives resulted in hampering of studies.

Nothing is more misunderstood than myths. Some claim human societies merely express through their mythology fundamental feelings common to the whole of humanity or attempt to provide an explanation for them which they otherwise fail to understand. Psychoanalysts and many anthropologists have have shifted the issue away from natural and cosmological toward sociological and psychological explanations: an evil grandmother in myth means an evil grandmother in society and the myth reflects ths social structure and social relations, or, perhaps an outlet for repressed feelings.

If the content of myth is contingent, then how are we going to explain the fact that myths throughout the world are so similar? Ancients tried to link the combination of sounds associated with meanings to a reason. It is the combination of sounds, not the sounds themselves, which provides significant data.

Myth is language for to be known it must be told. It is a part of human speech. In order to preserve its specifity, we must be able to show that it is both the same thing as language and also different from it. Myth always refers to events alleged to have taken place a long time ago, but the pattern is timeless: explaining the present and the past as well as the future.

Whatever our ignorance of the language or culture of a people, a myth is still felt as a myth by any reader anywhere in the world for its substance does not lie in its style, its music, or its syntax, but in the story which it tells. Myth is language, functioning on an especially high level where meaning succeeds practically at taking off from the linguistic ground on which it keeps rolling.

Technique entails breaking down each myth indivudally, placing its story into short sentances, and cataloguing them. The problem with previous tudies has been the quest for the true version or an earlier one. If myth is made up of all its variants, structural analysis should take them all into account.

The function of repetition is to render the structure of the myth apparent. For we have seen that the synchronic-diachronic structure of the myth permits us to organize it into columns to be read synchronically. The structure of a myth comes to the surface through repetition. If the purpose of myth is to provide a logical model capable of overcoming contradiction, an infinite amount of myths will be produced. The thought in myth is as rigorous as that of science, the difference lying not in the quality of the intellectual process but in the nature of the things to which it is applied.