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    12 views10 pages

    Strauss

    Uploaded by

    Stefano José Ferreccio Bugueño

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
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    of 10
    phenomenon. ‘The adaptation of poetic means for some heterogeneous purpose does not conceal thet primary essence, just as elements of emotive lan- guage, when utilized in poetry, still maintain their emotive tinge. A flibusterer may recite Hiawatha because itis long, yet poeticalness still remains the primary intent of this text itself. Self-evidently, the existence of versified, musical, and pictorial com ‘mercials does not seperate the questions of verse or ‘of musical and pictorial form from the study of To sum up, the analysis of verse is entirely within the competence of poetics, and the latter may be defined as that part of linguistics which teeats the poetic function in its relationship to the other functions of language. Poetics in the wider sense of the word deals with the poetic funetion not only in poetry, where this fonction is superimposed upon the other functions of Ian- guage, but also outside of poetry, when some ther funetion is superimposed upon the poetic poetry, music, and fine ars, function, Claude Lévi-Strauss b. 1908 Claude Lévi-Strauss, one of the major figures of social anthropology and of twentieth-century intel- lectual life generally, was born in Brussels and took degrees in philosophy and law at the University of Paris (1927-32). From 1934 to 1937, Lévi-Strauss served as a professor of sociology at the University of Sdo Paulo in Brazil; his research among the Brazilian Indians informs the heart of his intellectual autobiography, Tristes tropiques (1955). From 1941 to r945 he was a visiting professor at the New School for Social Research in New York, where he came in contact with the ideas of Roman Jakobson. Made director of studies at the Ecole Practique des Heute Etudes of the University of Paris in 1950, he was appointed in 1939 10 the chair of social anthropology at the Collage de France. Lévi- Strauss's works include The Blementary Structures of Kinship (1049), Structural Anthropology (7958). The Savage Mind (1962), and the four volumes of Mythologiques (1964~71). “The Structural ‘Study of Myth” frst appeared in Journal of American Folklore 78 (1955); this version is from the 1963 translation of Structural Anthropology. His latest books are ‘The Jealous Potter (1983), Regarder couter lite (1993), Saudades do Brasil (1995), and The Story of Lynx (1995). ‘LAVI-STRAUSS |THE STRUCTURAL STUDY OF MYTH 859 The Structural Study of Myth ‘Ir swould seem that mythological worlds have been built up only 0 be shattered again, and that new worlds were built from: te fragments. — Franz Boas! Despite some recent attempts to renew them, seems that during the past twenty years anthro- ppology has increasingly womed from studies in the field of religion, At the same time, and precisely because the interest of professional anthropolo- gists has withdrawn from primitive religion, all Kinds of amateurs who claim to belong to other Aisciplines have seized this opportunity to move in, thereby turning into their private playground ‘what we had left as wasteland, The prospects ‘or the scientific stady of religion have thus been tndermined in two ways. ‘The explanation for this situation lies 10 some ‘extent inthe fact that the anthropological study of religion was started by men like Tylor, Frazer, and Duckheim, who were psychologically ori ented although not in a position to keep up with the progress of psycholo; ‘ory. Their interpretations, therefore, soon became vitited by the outmoded psychological approach which they used as their basis. Although they were undoubtedly right in giving their attention to intellectual processes, the Way they handied these remained s0 crude that it diseredited them alto- gether. This is much to be regretted, since, as Hocart so profoundly noted in his introduction to 2 posthumous book recently published,” psycho logical interpretations were withdrawn from the intellectual ficld only to be introduced again in the field of affectvity, thus adding to “the inher- ent defects of the psychological school ... the mistake of deriving clear-cut idees ... from Translated by Chive Jacobson and Brooke Grundiest Sebgept, ‘in Boas'sIurodsetion to James Tei, “Traiions ofthe ‘Thompson River Indians of Blish Columbia” Memoirs of the Amerlan Fobiore Society, VI (1898), p. 18. (Lévie ‘Straee) 3A. M, Hocat, Social Origins (Lomion: 1954). p. 7. (LéiSeaus}| 860 ‘vague emotions.” Instead of trying to enlarge the framework of our logic to include processes which, whatever their apparent differences, belong to the same kind of intellectual operation, ‘naive attempt was made to reduce them to inar- tieulate emotional drives, which resulted only in hampering our studies. OF all the chapters of religious anthropology probably none has tarried to the same extent 2s studies in the field of mythology. From a theoret- ical point of view the situation remains very veh the same as it was fifty years ago, namely, chaotic, Myths are still widely interpreted in con ficting ways: as collective dreams, as the out- come of a kind of esthetic play, or as the basis of ritual, Mythological figures are considered as per- sonified abstractions, divinized heroes, or fallen gods. Whatever the hypothesis, the choice amounts to reducing mythology either to idle play (orto a crude kind of philosophic speculation. In order to understand what a myth really is, rust we choose between platitude and sophism? Some claim that human societies merely express, through their mythology, fimdamental feelings common to the whole of mankind, such es love, hate, or revenge or that they try to provide some kind of explanations for phenomena which they cannot otherwise. understand — astronomical, meteorological, and the like, But why shovld these societies doit in such elaborate and devious ‘ways, when all of them are also acquainted with empirical explanations? On the other hand, psy- choanalysts and many anthropologists ‘have shifted the problems away from the natural or cosmological toward the sociological and psy- chological fields, But then the interpretation becomes too easy: If a given mythology confers prominence on a certain figure, let us say an evil grandmother, it will be claimed that in such a society grandmothers are actually evil and that mythology reflects the social structure and the social relations; but should the actual date be con- would be as readily claimed that the purpose of mythology is to provide an outlet for repressed feclings, Whatever the situation, a STRUCTURALISHM AND DECONSTRUCTION clever dialectic will always find a way to pretend that a meaning has been found, Mythology confronts the student with a situa- tion which at frst sight appears contradictory. On the one hand it would seem thatin the course of a myth anything is likely to happen. There is no Jogi, no continuity. Any characteristic can be attributed to any subject; every conceivable rela- tion can be found. With myth, everything becomes possible. But on the other hand, this apparent arbitrariness is belied by the astounding similarity between myths collected in widely different regions. Therefore the problem: Ifthe content of amyth is contingent, how are we going to explain the fact that myths throughout the world are so similar? It is precisely this awareness of a basic antine ‘omy pertaining to the nature of myth that may Tead us toward its solution. For the contradiction Which we face is very similar to that which in ear- lier times brought considerable worry tothe first philosophers concerned with linguistic problems, linguistics could only begin to evolve as a science after this contradiction had been overcome. ‘Ancient philosophers reasoned about language the way we do about mythology. On the one hhand, they did notice that in a given language cer- tain sequences of sounds were associated with definite meanings, and they earnestly simed at discovering a reason. for the linkage between those sounds and that meaning. Their attempt, however, was thwarted from the very beginning by the fact thatthe same sounds were equally pre~ sent in other languages although the meaning they conveyed was entirely different. The contra- diction was surmounted only by the discovery that it is the combination of sounds, not the sounds themselves, which provides the signiti- eant data, It is easy to see, moreover, that some of the more recent interpretations ‘of mythological thought originated from the same kind of miscon- ception under which those early linguists were Iaboring. Let us consider, for instance, Jung's idea that a given mythological pattern — the so-called archetype — possesses a certain meaning. This is comparable to the long-supported esror that sound may possess a certain affinity with a mean- ing: for instance, the “Liquid” semivowels with Liviestaauss| HE STRUCTURAL STUDY OP MYTH water, the open vowels with things that are big, large, oud, or heavy, etc, a theory which stil has its supporters.” Whatever emendations the orig! nal formulation may now call for, everybody will agree that the Saussurean principle of the arbirrary character of linguistic signs was 2 pre- requisite for the aceession of linguistics tothe sci- entific level, To invite the mythotogist to compare his pre- carious situation with that of the linguist in the proscientific stage is not enough, As a matter of fact we may thus be led only from one difficulty to another. There is a very good reason why myth cannot simply be treated as language if its specific problems are to be solved; myth is lan- ‘guage: (0 be known, myth has to be told; itis a part of human speech. In order fo preserve its specificity we must be able to show that itis both the same thing as language, and also something

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