MYTHOLOGICAL LOGIC

The four volumes of Lévi-Strauss’s Mythologiques are the most extensive

and impressive example of structural analysis to date. The very grandeur
of the project – an attempt to bring together the myths of the North
and South American continents, to display their relations so as to offer
proof of the unifying powers of the human mind and the unity of its
products – make it a work that one could not hope to evaluate or even
describe in brief compass. But one may approach it with more limited
ambitions: to see in what ways the linguistic model might animate and
support an analysis of fictional discourse.
The investigation of myth is part of a long-term project which uses
ethnographic material to study the fundamental operations of the
human mind. At the conscious and especially the unconscious level,
Lévi-Strauss argues, the mind is a structuring mechanism which
imposes form on whatever material it finds to hand. Whereas Western
civilizations have developed abstract categories and mathematical symbols
to facilitate intellectual operations, other cultures use a logic
whose procedures are similar but whose categories are more concrete
and hence metaphorical. To take a purely hypothetical example,
instead of saying that two groups are similar but distinct, yet not in
competition, they might call the first ‘jaguars’ and the second ‘sharks’.
In his work on La Pensée sauvage and Le Totémisme aujourd’hui Lévi-Strauss
tried to show that anthropologists have failed to explain numerous facts
about primitive peoples because they have not understood the rigorous
logic that underlies them. Atomistic and functionalist explanations fail
in a wide range of cases and make other peoples appear excessively
primitive and credulous. If a clan has a particular animal as a totem it is
not necessarily because they grant it special economic or religious
significance. The feeling of reverence or particular taboos connected
with a totem may be results rather than causes. ‘To say that clan A is
“descended” from the bear and clan B is “descended” from the eagle is
only a concrete and abbreviated way of stating the relationship between
the development of a method 47
A and B as analogous to the relationship between the two species’ (Le
Totémisme aujourd’hui, p. 44). To explain a totem is to analyse its place in a
system of signs. Bear and eagle are logical operators, concrete signs,
with which statements about social groups are made.
Myth has been chosen as the area for a ‘decisive experiment’ in the
investigation of this concrete logic because in most activities it is difficult
to tell which regularities of the system are due to common mental
operations and which to external contraints. But in