MEANING - DESIGN ANTHROPOLOGYClaude Levi-Strauss called mythemes, in response to what his colleague,...

MEANING

Claude Levi-Strauss

Foreword by Wendy Doniger

SCHOCKEN BOOKS NEW YORK

Contents

Foreword by Wendy Doniger vii

A Note from the Publisher xvii

An Introduction 3

ONEThe Meeting of Myth and Science 5

TWO'Primitive' Thinking and the 'Civilized' Mind 15

THREE

Harelips and Twins: The Splitting of a Myth 25

FOURWhen Myth Becomes History 34

FIVE

Myth and Music 44

Select Bibliography 55

First paperback edition published by Schocken Books in 1979

Foreword copyright © 1995 by Wendy Doniger

Copyright © 1978 by University of Toronto Press

All rights reserved under International and Pan-AmericanCopyright Conventions. Published in the United Statesby Schocken Books Inc., New York. Distributed byPantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Levi-Strauss, Claude.Myth and meaning."Talks were broadcast on the CBC Radio series, Ideas inDecember 1977."

1. Structural anthropology—Addresses, essays, lectures. 2.Mythology—Addresses, essays, lectures. 3. Philosophy,Primitive—Addresses, essays, lectures. I. Tide.

GN362.L47 1979 301.2' 1 78-25833ISBN 0-8052-1038-5

Manufactured in the United States of America['95] 9 8 7

Foreword

Once upon a time, when Claude Levi-Strauss wasvisiting Berkeley, California, he took his host to lunch ata popular restaurant. There was a line of people waitingto be seated, and the hostess asked the great Frenchanthropologist his name, for the waiting list. When heobliged her, her eyes grew wide with admiration: "Oh,wow!" she said. "The anthropologist or the jeans?"1

There have always been two of him—an appropriate fatefor a man who has spent his life preaching that humanbeings tend to split everything into twos. Both of himare anthropologists, but they are different sorts ofanthropologist. Like the mythical beast once describedby Woody Allen, Levi-Strauss has the head of a lion andthe body of a lion, but not the same lion.2

•This is an oral tradition, its origins shrouded in the obscurity of time.The anthropologist is in fact related to the jeans, as I could explain to youwith one of those kinship charts, full of triangles and squares, that hedelights in in The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1969).

2Woody Allen, "Fabulous Tales and Mythical Beasts," in Without Feathers(New York, 1976).

viii Foreword

Born in 1908 and since 1959 Professor ofAnthropology (now emeritus) at the College de France,that most austere French academic institution, ClaudeLevi-Strauss is best known as the founder of structuralanthropology, a system that he first expounded in 1958in a series of essays published in a book appropriatelytitled Anthropologie Structurale (in English, StructuralAnthropology, 1963). In that book as well as insubsequent works, he asserted that all mythology isdialectic in its attempt to make cognitive sense out of thechaotic data provided by nature, and that this attemptinevitably traps the human imagination in a web ofdualisms: Each dualism (such as male/female) produces atension that seems to be resolved by the use of amediating term (such as androgyny), but then that newterm turns out to be one-half of a new dualism (such asandrogyny/sexlessness) ad infinitum.

Myth is a form of language, and language itselfpredisposes us to attempt to understand ourselves andour world by superimposing dialectics, dichotomies, ordualistic grids upon data that may in fact be entirelyintegrated. And underneath language lies the binarynature of the brain itself. Right and left, good and evil,life and death—these are inevitable dichotomiesproduced by the brain that has two lobes and controlstwo eyes, two hands. We are split creatures literally bynature, and we organize data like a simple digitalmachine. Our common sense is binary; the simplest andmost efficient way to process experience seems to be bydividing it in half, and then to divide the halves in half,

ix Foreword

reformulating every question so that there are only twopossible answers to it, yes or no.

The pieces that result from this breakdown are whatClaude Levi-Strauss called mythemes, in response towhat his colleague, the linguist Roman Jakobson, calledphonemes—the atomic building-blocks of meaningfulsounds that make up words. Myths, like all things inconstant use, break and are fixed again, become lost andare found, and the one who finds them and fixes them,the handyman who recycles them, is what ClaudeLevi-Strauss calls a bricoleur—a term that he madefamous even in English-speaking circles—and that theEnglish used to call a "rag-and-bones man." Mythemesare made in what the poet William Butler Yeats (in"The Circus Animals") called "the foul rag and bonesshop of the heart." In the ecology of narratives,recycling is a very old process. Each telling of a mythdraws upon these rags and bones, and each piece has itsown previous life-history that it brings into the story.

Levi-Strauss developed his ideas about mythology ina set of four volumes published between 1964 and 1971under the title Mythologiques, later translated intoEnglish as Introduction to a Science of Mythology. The titlewas wrongly translated by the publisher, he once toldme, and it is wrong because it has perpetuated theimpression that Levi-Strauss regards himself as ascientist and that the formulas he isolated as the basis ofmyth are intended as a kind of grid that automaticallysupplies answers to any problems of mythologicalinterpretation.

x Foreword

In fact, the basic metaphor of Mythologiques is takennot from science but from art: from the patterns andfugues of music. Levi-Strauss has always insisted that amyth can be translated only by another myth, never by ascientific formula. Moreover, in Tristes Tropiques (1955)he founded a new genre of introspective, subjective,lyrical writing about fieldwork that rescued the field ofanthropology from scientific posturings. He has alwaysbeen interested in the messiest, juiciest aspects of humanculture—eating and killing and marrying. Indeed, he isthe one who taught us that every myth is driven by theobsessive need to solve a paradox that cannot be solved.His critics see him as reducing myths to logicaloppositions, but I see him as illuminating humanambivalences. Paradoxes are to Levi-Strauss what whaleswere to Captain Ahab.

Why, then, do many mythologists (particularly butnot onlyjungians) accuse him of being coldly scientific?Well, probably because he has insisted that the logicalpatterns of myths can be expressed in a series ofmathematical formulas, particularly what he calls the"canonical formula" (a:b::c:a-l). If we combine thismathematical Mr. Hyde with the lyrical Dr. Jekyll wehave just seen, we come up with our anthropologistcomposed of two different lions separated at the neck.The head—by far the better known—is Levi-Strauss thecold, cerebral critic, while the body—seldom fullyappreciated—is Levi-Strauss the passionate, politicalpoet. The head is the author of the complex, theoretical,multivolume Mythologiques; the body is the author of the

xi Foreword

lyrical, autobiographical, self-reflexive, andself-questioning Trims Tropiques. The head tells you, inthe abstract, how to analyze a myth in a sequence ofscientific, deductive steps; but the body flies through thetexts by the seat of its pants, pulling fantastic rabbits outof its hat, as if to say, "Do as I do, not as I say."

And there is another important dichotomy thatemerges from his work, the tension betweenparticularity and universalism. Noting that his data areprimarily derived from the fieldwork that he did inSouth America, among tribes such as the Bororo and theJivaro, Levi-Strauss claims to speak only about groups ofpeoples who are geographically and culturally related;conversely, he spins theories that imply universalistclaims about the way all human beings think, not merelySouth Americans (and not merely tribals). Levi-Straussis a closet universalist. He acknowledges his debt toFreud, the father of all latter-day universalists, and whenhe doth protest too much that he is not setting forthuniversal human paradigms, he is, I think, simplyexpressing his terror that he might be mistaken in thedark for Jung.

But in Myth and Meaning he comes out of theuniversalist closet at last. For there is somethingdecidedly archetypal about many of his ideas when wesee them expressed so starkly as they are here, as in thefollowing assertion (on p. 13): "[S]ince, after all, thehuman mind is only part of the universe, the need tofind order probably exists because there is some order inthe universe and the universe is not a chaos." In this

xii Foreword

book all the opposed pairs of Levi-Strausses combinefully at last, like the split images of a camera that finallycomes into focus. Only here does one have a lucid,candid, personal exposition of the major ideas that havedriven him all his life.

Myth and Meaning touches upon all of Levi-Strauss'sgreat methodological paradoxes: the parallel tensionsbetween myth and science, myth and history, myth andmusic, and "primitive" and "civilized" (the essaybeginning on page 15 offering a new insight into theconundrum of "the savage" that he first opened up in LaPense'e Sauvage, The Savage Mind, in 1962). The clarityand directness with which Levi-Strauss explores thesequestions in Myth and Meaning is unprecedented.

An obvious reason for this clarity is the simple factthat the book was originally spoken in English, in a seriesof talks for the Canadian Broadcasting Company. Andthis makes more difference than one might at firstsuppose, in two ways: by not being written and by notbeing in French. In this very book, he defines what heregards as the decisive contrast between "primitive" and"civilized" thinking, arguing that instead of "primitive"we should say "without writing" (p. 15). He furtherobserves that people who do not use writing use more oftheir sensory perceptions and have developed certainmental capacities of observation that we have lost. Onecan shine this light back upon the author and argue thatin this basically oral text he shows a sensitivity andpower of expression that is absent from his morepolished writings.

xiii Foreword

The use of English instead of French is also mostbeneficial. As Levi-Strauss candidly admits, "I simplifyvery much because it is too complicated for me toexplain this in English." Stifling, for the sake ofargument, one's Anglo-Saxon outrage at the usual Gallicbelief that only the French are capable of thinking, onemight interpret this as a modest statement that thelimitations of Levi-Strauss's English forced him tosacrifice the verbal triple-trapeze flips that he delights inin French or, at least, inspired him to start working witha verbal net. And this is what he has done in this book.Nothing he wrote—or, indeed, spoke—before or afterconveyed his ideas with such personal force andcommitment.

The reader of Levi-Strauss's other books who isfoolish enough to seek a punch line is likely to bedisappointed. The formula that the author oftenprovides at the end of a book, holding it up proudlyfor us to see, like a cat that brings its master a half-masticated mouse, is anticlimatic; often it ends up bybleeding the myth of all its meanings. But before he getsto that end, Levi-Strauss reveals to us more complexlevels of meaning. He tells the stories, and tells aboutthe stories, and suggests many rich patterns ofinterpretation before boiling it all down to a set oflogical symbols.

The trick is to jettison Levi-Strauss right before themoment when he finally deconstructs himself. It is apoint that is hard to gauge and calls to mind the story ofthe woman on the bus who, when asked by a stranger

xiv Foreword

about a particular stop, advised him, "Just watch me andget off one stop before I do." We must jump offLevi-Strauss's bus one stop before he does. And once wehave jumped off, we usually find that we are not thereyet. We have to get on another bus (theological,psychological), or, indeed, several buses. We need a lotof transfers on the mythic journey. But if we knowwhere to look, Levi-Strauss provides those transfers,too. In Myth and Meaning he provides a great number ofsuch transfers in the form of clues to his understandingof human experience, and this time the windows arecleaner and you can see out, as well as in.

What we see is the very essence of Levi-Strauss'sapproach to myth. He says (on p. 8), "Probably there isnothing more than that in the structuralist approach; itis the quest for the invariant, or for the invariantelements among superficial differences." Yet, if we takea closer look at his system, the mythemes do allow fordifference as well as sameness: If a woman kills her sonin one variant, the theme might be inverted so that theson kills his mother in another. But the mythemes canbe arranged in any order, thereby excluding cause andeffect or chronology.

In this short, clear text, Levi-Strauss squarely facesthe issue of chronology, long the stumbling block ofstructuralism. His structural models have been faultedfor being disconnected from history, from change, fromthe flow of time: They seem to exist in a Platonic voidthat would make them equally relevant at all moments inthe life of a culture. But in Myth and MeaningLevi-Strauss makes explicit the connection with history

xv Foreword

that he has, in fact, always intended his structures tohave, and he argues for the diachronic aspects of myths(changing through time) as well as their synchronicaspects (transcending the barriers of time). He putshistorical flesh on the structural bones by tracing thespecific cultural development of a corpus of myths in"Harelips and Twins: The Splitting of a Myth" (p. 25).

This is also the most intimate and endearing book hehas produced since Tristes Tropiques. Frequently hewaxes autobiographical: Learning that, as an adolescent,he drew costumes and sets for operas (p. 8) gives newmeaning to the metaphor of music in Mythologiques aswell as to the stunning structural analysis of Wagner'sRing cycle that he includes in this volume (pp. 46-49).And the image (again on p. 8) of the two-year-oldClaude pretending to read, and explaining to hisunderstandably flabbergasted mother that he hadfigured out that both boulanger ("baker") and boucher("butcher") begin with the same phoneme (he may nothave used that term, but still) serves well as a foundingmyth of structuralism. Here one can truly grasp a senseof the man beyond the mythemes.

If someone who had just heard Levi-Strauss's namefor the first time asked me to explain, standing on onefoot, what he was all about, I would pick up Myth andMeaning and start reading it out loud.

—WENDY DONIGER

The University of Chicago

A Note

from the Publisher

Ever since the advent of science in the seventeenthcentury, we have rejected mythology as a product ofsuperstitious and primitive minds. Only now are wecoming to a fuller appreciation of the nature and roleof myth in human history. In these five lectures, the dis-tinguished social anthropologist, Claude Levi-Strauss,offers the insights of a lifetime spent interpreting mythsand trying to discover their significance for humanunderstanding.

Entitled 'Myth and Meaning,' the talks were broad-cast on the CBC Radio series, Ideas, in December 1977.They were assembled from a series of lengthy conver-sations between Professor Levi-Strauss and Carole OrrJerome, producer in the Paris bureau of the CBC. Theprograms were organized by Geraldine Sherman, exec-utive producer of Ideas, and produced by Bernie Lucht.

The lectures have been expanded for publication toinclude some material which, for reasons of time,could not be used in the original broadcasts. Thespoken words have been minimally edited to make

xviii A Note from the Publisher

them conform to the more rigid conventions of print.Carole Orr Jerome's main questions to ProfessorLevi-Strauss, which helped shape the course of thelectures, were as follows:

CHAPTER ONE

Many of your readers think that you are trying tobring us back to mythical thought, that we have lostsomething very precious and that we must try to gainit back. Does this mean that science and modernthought must go out the window and that we mustgo back to mythical thought?

What is structuralism? How did you arrive at theidea that structural thought was a possibility?

Is it necessary to have order and rules to havemeaning? Can you have meaning in chaos? What doyou mean that order is preferable to disorder?

CHAPTERS TWO AND THREE

There are those who say that the thinking of so-calledprimitive people is inferior to scientific thinking. Theysay that it is inferior, not because of a matter of style,but because, scientifically speaking, it is wrong. Howwould you compare 'primitive' thought with 'scienti-fic' thought?

Aldous Huxley, in his discussion in The Doors ofPerception, said that most of us use only a certainamount of our mental powers and the rest of themare completely shut away. Do you feel that in thekind of lives we lead today, we are using less of our

xix A Note from the Publisher

mental capacities than the people you write of whothought in a mythical fashion?

Nature shows us a variegated world, and we'vetended to pick up on the differences between usrather than the similarities in the development of ourcultures. Do you think we are developing to a pointwhere we can start closing many of the divisions thatexist between us?

CHAPTER FOUR

There is the old problem of the investigator whochanges the subject of his investigation by simplybeing there. In looking at our collections of mytho-logical stories, do they have meaning and order oftheir own, or has order been imposed by the anthro-pologists who have collected the stories?

What is the difference between the conceptualorganization of mythological thinking and that ofhistory? Does the mythological telling of a story dealwith historical facts, then transform them and usethem in another way?

CHAPTER FIVE

Could you talk in general about the relationshipbetween myth and music?

You have said that both myth and music stemfrom language but evolve in different directions.What do you mean by this?

MYTH AND MEANING

An Introduction

Although I am going to talk about what I have written,my books and papers and so on, unfortunately I forgetwhat I have written practically as soon as it is finished.There is probably going to be some trouble about that.But nevertheless I think there is also something signif-icant about it, in that I don't have the feeling that Iwrite my books. I have the feeling that my books getwritten through me and that once they have got acrossme I feel empty and nothing is left.

You may remember that I have written that mythsget thought in man unbeknownst to him. This hasbeen much discussed and even criticized by my English-speaking colleagues, because their feeling is that, froman empirical point of view, it is an utterly meaninglesssentence. But for me it describes a lived experience,because it says exactly how I perceive my own rela-tionship to my work. That is, my work gets thoughtin me unbeknown to me.

I never had, and still do not have, the perception offeeling my personal identity. I appear to myself as the

4 An Introduction

place where something is going on, but there is no T ,no 'me.' Each of us is a kind of crossroads wherethings happen. The crossroads is purely passive; some-thing happens there. A different thing, equally valid,happens elsewhere. There is no choice, it is just a mat-ter of chance.

I don't pretend at all that, because I think that way,I am entitled to conclude that mankind thinks thatway too. But I believe that, for each scholar and eachwriter, the particular way he or she thinks and writesopens a new outlook on mankind. And the fact that Ipersonally have this idiosyncracy perhaps entitles meto point to something which is valid, while the way inwhich my colleagues think opens different outlooks,all of which are equally valid.

ONE

The Meeting ofMvth and Scicm

Let me start with a personal confession. There is amagazine which I read faithfully each month from thefirst line to the last, even though I don't understandall of it; it is the Scientific American. I am extremelyeager to be as informed as possible of everything thattakes place in modern science and its new develop-ments. My position in relation to science is thus nota negative one.

Secondly, I think there are some things we havelost, and we should try perhaps to regain them, be-cause I am not sure that in the kind of world in whichwe are living and with the kind of scientific thinkingwe are bound to follow, we can regain these thingsexactly as if they had never been lost; but we can tryto become aware of their existence and their impor-tance.

In the third place, my feeling is that modern scienceis not at all moving away from these lost things, butthat more and more it is attempting to reintegratethem in the field of scientific explanation. The real

6 Myth and Meaning

gap, the real separation between science and what wemight as well call mythical thought for the sake offinding a convenient name, although it is not exactlythat - the real separation occurred in the seventeenthand the eighteenth century. At that time, with Bacon,Descartes, Newton, and the others, it was necessaryfor science to build itself up against the old genera-tions of mythical and mystical thought, and it wasthought that science could only exist by turning itsback upon the world of the senses, the world we see,smell, taste, and perceive; the sensory was a delusiveworld, whereas the real world was a world of mathe-matical properties which could only be grasped by theintellect and which was entirely at odds with the falsetestimony of the senses. This was probably a neces-sary move, for experience shows us that thanks to thisseparation - this schism if you like - scientific thoughtwas able to constitute itself.

Now, my impression (and, of course, I do not talkas a scientist - I am not a physicist, I am not a biolo-gist, I am not a chemist) is that contemporary scienceis tending to overcome this gap, and that more andmore the sense data are being reintegrated into scien-tific explanation as something which has a meaning,which has a truth, and which can be explained.

Take, for instance, the world of smells. We were ac-customed to think that this was entirely subjective,outside the world of science. Now the chemists areable to tell us that each smell or each taste has a cer-tain chemical composition and to give us the reasons

7 The Meeting of Myth and Science

why subjectively some smells or some tastes feel to usas having something in common and some others seemwidely different.

Let's take another example. There was in philoso-phy from the time of the Greeks to the eighteenthand even the nineteenth century - and there still is tosome extent - a tremendous discussion about the ori-gin of mathematical ideas - the idea of the line, theidea of the circle, the idea of the triangle. There were,in the main, two classical theories: one of the mind asa tabula rasa, with nothing in it in the beginning; ev-erything comes to it from experience. It is from seeinga lot of round objects, none of which were perfectlyround, that we are able nevertheless to abstract theidea of the circle. The second classical theory goesback to Plato, who claimed that such ideas of the cir-cle, of the triangle, of the line, are perfect, innate inthe mind, and it is because they are given to the mindthat we are able to project them, so to speak, on real-ity, although reality never offers us a perfect circle ora perfect triangle.

Now, contemporary researchers on the neurophysi-ology of vision teach us that the nervous cells in theretina and the other apparatus behind the retina arespecialized: some cells are sensitive only to straightdirection, in the vertical sense, others in the horizon-tal, others in the oblique, some of them to the rela-tionship between the background and the central fig-ures, and the like. So - and I simplify very much be-cause it is too complicated for me to explain this in

8 Myth and Meaning

English - this whole problem of experience versusmind seems to have a solution in the structure of thenervous system, not in the structure of the mind or inexperience, but somewhere between mind and experi-ence in the way our nervous system is built and in theway it mediates between mind and experience.

Probably there is something deep in my own mind,which makes it likely that I always was what is nowbeing called a structuralist. My mother told me that,when I was about two years old and still unable toread, of course, I claimed that actually I was able toread. And when I was asked why, I said that when Ilooked at the signboards on shops - for instance, bou-langer (baker) or boucher (butcher) - I was able toread something because what was obviously similar,from a graphic point of view, in the writing could notmean anything other than 'bou,' the same first sylla-ble of boucher and boulanger. Probably there is noth-ing more than that in the structuralist approach; it isthe quest for the invariant, or for the invariant ele-ments among superficial differences.

Throughout my life, this search was probably a pre-dominant interest of mine. When I was a child, for awhile my main interest was geology. The problem ingeology is also to try to understand what is invariantin the tremendous diversity of landscapes, that is, tobe able to reduce a landscape to a finite number ofgeological layers and of geological operations. Later asan adolescent, I spent a great part of my leisure timedrawing costumes and sets for opera. The problem


there is exactly the same - to try to express in onelanguage, that is, the language of graphic arts andpainting, something which also exists in music and inthe libretto; that is, to try to reach the invariant prop-erty of a very complex set of codes (the musical code,the literary code, the artistic code). The problem is tofind what is common to all of them. It's a problem,one might say, of translation, of translating what isexpressed in one language - or one code, if you prefer,but language is sufficient - into expression in a differ-ent language.

Structuralism, or whatever goes under that name,has been considered as something completely new andat the time revolutionary; this, I think, is doubly false.In the first place, even in the field of the humanities,it is not new at all; we can follow very well this trendof thought from the Renaissance to the nineteenthcentury and to the present time. But it is also wrongfor another reason: what we call structuralism in thefield of linguistics, or anthropology, or the like, isnothing other than a very pale and faint imitation ofwhat the 'hard sciences,' as I think you call them inEnglish, have been doing all the time.

Science has only two ways of proceeding: it is ei-ther reductionist or structuralist. It is reductionistwhen it is possible to find out that very complex phe-nomena on one level can be reduced to simpler phe-nomena on other levels. For instance, there is a lot inlife which can be reduced to physicochemical process-es, which explain a part but not all. And when we are


I'm not trying to formulate a philosophy, or even atheory. Since I was a child, I have been bothered by,let's call it the irrational, and have been trying to findan order behind what is given to us as a disorder. It sohappened that I became an anthropologist, as a mat-ter of fact not because I was interested in anthropol-ogy, but because I was trying to get out of philosophy.It also so happened that in the French academicframework, where anthropology was at the time nottaught as a discipline in its own right in the universi-ties, it was possible for somebody trained in philoso-phy and teaching philosophy to escape to anthropol-ogy. I escaped there, and was confronted immediatelyby one problem - there were lots of rules of marriageall over the world which looked absolutely meaning-less, and it was all the more irritating because, if theywere meaningless, then there should be different rulesfor each people, though nevertheless the number ofrules could be more or less finite. So, if the same ab-surdity was found to reappear over and over again,and another kind of absurdity also to reappear, thenthis was something which was not absolutely absurd;otherwise it would not reappear.

Such was my first orientation, to try to find an or-der behind this apparent disorder. And when afterworking on the kinship systems and marriage rules, Iturned my attention, also by chance and not at all onpurpose, toward mythology, the problem was exactlythe same. Mythical stories are, or seem, arbitrary,meaningless, absurd, yet nevertheless they seem to re-

12 Myth and Meaning

appear all over the world. A 'fanciful' creation of themind in one place would be unique - you would notfind the same creation in a completely different place.My problem was trying to find out if there was somekind of order behind this apparent disorder - that'sall. And I do not claim that there are conclusions tobe drawn.

It is, I think, absolutely impossible to conceive ofmeaning without order. There is something very curi-ous in semantics, that the word 'meaning' is probably,in the whole language, the word the meaning of whichis the most difficult to find. What does 'to mean'mean? It seems to me that the only answer we cangive is that 'to mean' means the ability of any kind ofdata to be translated in a different language. I do notmean a different language like French or German, butdifferent words on a different level. After all, thistranslation is what a dictionary is expected to giveyou - the meaning of the word in different words,which on a slightly different level are isomorphic tothe word or expression you are trying to understand.Now, what would a translation be without rules? Itwould be absolutely impossible to understand. Becauseyou cannot replace any word by any other word orany sentence by any other sentence, you have to haverules of translation. To speak of rules and to speak ofmeaning is to speak of the same thing; and if we lookat all the intellectual undertakings of mankind, as faras they have been recorded all over the world, thecommon denominator is always to introduce some


kind of order. If this represents a basic need for orderin the human mind and since, after all, the humanmind is only part of the universe, the need probablyexists because there is some order in the universe andthe universe is not a chaos.

What I have been trying to say here is that there hasbeen a divorce - a necessary divorce - between scientificthought and what I have called the logic of the concrete,that is, the respect for and the use of the data of the sen-ses, as opposed to images and symbols and the like. Weare witnessing the moment when this divorce will per-haps be overcome or reversed, because modern scienceseems to be able to make progress not only in its owntraditional line - pushing forward and forward but stillwithin the same narrow channel - but also at the sametime to widen the channel and to reincorporate a greatmany problems previously left outside.

In this respect, I may be subjected to the criticismof being called 'scientistic' or a kind of blind believerin science who holds that science is able to solve ab-solutely all problems. Well, I certainly don't believethat, because I cannot conceive that a day will comewhen science will be complete and achieved. Therewill always be new problems, and exactly at the samepace as science is able to solve problems which weredeemed philosophical a dozen years or a century ago,so there will appear new problems which had nothitherto been not perceived as such. There will alwaysbe a gap between the answer science is able to give us

14 Myth and Meaning

and the new question which this answer will raise. SoI am not 'scientistic' in that way. Science will nevergive us all the answers. What we can try to do is to in-crease very slowly the number and the quality of theanswers we are able to give, and this, I think, we cando only through science.

TWO

'Primitive' 1 hinkine

and the 'Civilized* Mind

The way of thinking among people we call, usuallyand wrongly, 'primitive' - let's describe them ratheras 'without writing,' because I think this is really thediscriminatory factor between them and us - has beeninterpreted in two different fashions, both of whichin my opinion were equally wrong. The first way wasto consider such thinking as of a somewhat coarserquality, and in contemporary anthropology the exam-ple which comes to mind immediately is the work ofMalinowski. I must say immediately that I have thegreatest respect for him and consider him a very greatanthropologist, and I'm not at all deriding his contrib-ution. But nevertheless the feeling in Malinowski wasthat the thought of the people he was studying was,and generally speaking the thought of all the popula-tions without writing which are the subject matter ofanthropology was entirely, or is, determined by thebasic needs of life. If you know that a people, who-ever they are, is determined by the bare necessities ofliving - finding subsistence, satisfying the sexual drives,

16 Myth and Meaning

and so on - then you can explain their social institu-tions, their beliefs, their mythology, and the like. Thisvery widespread conception in anthropology generallygoes under the name of functionalism.

The other fashion is not so much that theirs is aninferior kind of thought, but a fundamentally differ-ent kind of thought. This approach is exemplified bythe work of Levy-Bruhl, who considered that the ba-sic difference between 'primitive' thought - I alwaysput the word 'primitive' within quotes - and modernthought is that the first is entirely determined by emo-tion and mystic representations. Whereas Malinowski'sis a utilitarian conception, the other is an emotionalor affective conception; and what I have tried to em-phasize is that actually the thought of people withoutwriting is, or can be in many instances, on the onehand, disinterested - and this is a difference in rela-tion to Malinowski - and, on the other hand, intellec-tual - a difference in relation to Levy-Bruhl.

What I tried to show in Totemism and in The Sav-age Mind, for instance, is that these people whom weusually consider as completely subservient to the needof not starving, of continuing able just to subsist invery harsh material conditions, are perfectly capableof disinterested thinking; that is, they are moved by aneed or a desire to understand the world around them,its nature and their society. On the other hand, toachieve that end, they proceed by intellectual means,exactly as a philosopher, or even to some extent a sci-entist, can and would do.

17 'Primitive' Thinking and the 'Civilized' Mind

This is my basic hypothesis.I would like to dispel a misunderstanding right

away. To say that a way of thinking is disinterestedand that it is an intellectual way of thinking does notmean at all that it is equal to scientific thinking. Ofcourse, it remains different in a way, and inferior inanother way. It remains different because its aim is toreach by the shortest possible means a general under-standing of the universe - and not only a general buta total understanding. That is, it is a way of thinkingwhich must imply that if you don't understand every-thing, you don't explain anything. This is entirely incontradiction to what scientific thinking does, whichis to proceed step by step, trying to give explanationsfor very limited phenomena, and then going on toother kinds of phenomena, and so on. As Descarteshad already said, scientific thinking aimed to dividethe difficulty into as many parts as were necessary inorder to solve it.

So this totalitarian ambition of the savage mind isquite different from the procedures of scientific think-ing. Of course, the great difference is that this ambi-tion does not succeed. We are able, through scientificthinking, to achieve mastery over nature - I don'tneed to elaborate that point, it is obvious enough -while, of course, ̂ tfcjfr. w|»»e<ff^tti-in, giving man•m&te material power over the environment. Howevpr,k gives man, very importantly, the illusion that he capunderstand the universe and that he does understand f

v^w universe. !£&;%$ 6sarse,oaly an illusion. •'

18 Myth and Meaning

We should note, however, that as scientific thinkerswe use a very limited amount of our mental power.We use what is needed by our profession, our trade, orthe particular situation in which we are involved atthe moment. So, if somebody gets involved for twentyyears and even more in the way myths or kinship sys-tems operate, then he uses this part of his mental pow-er. But we cannot request that each of us be interestedin exactly the same things; so each of us uses a certainamount of our mental power for what is needed orfor what interests us.

Today we use less and we use more of our mentalcapacity than we did in the past; And it is not exactlythe same kind of mental capacity as it was either. Forexample, we use considerably less of our sensory per-ceptions. When I was writing the first version of Myth-ologiques (Introduction to a Science of Mythology), Iwas confronted with a problem which to me was ex-tremely mysterious. It seems that there was a particu-lar tribe which was able to see the planet Venus in fulldaylight, something which to me would be utterly im-possible and incredible. I put the question to profes-sional astronomers; they told me, of course, that wedon't but, nevertheless, when we know the amount oflight emitted by the planet Venus in full daylight, itwas not absolutely inconceivable that some peoplecould. Later on I looked into old treatises on naviga-tion belonging to our own civilization and it seemsthat sailors of old were perfectly able to see the planetin full daylight. Probably we could still do so if wehad a trained eye.


It is exactly the same with our knowledge aboutplants or animals. People who are without writinghave a fantastically precise knowledge of their environ-ment and all their resources. All these things we havelost, but we did not lose them for nothing; we are nowable to drive an automobile without being crushed ateach moment, for example, or in the evening to turnon our television or radio. This implies a training ofmental capacities which 'primitive' peoples don't havebecause they don't need them. I feel that, with thepotential they have, they could have changed the qual-ity of their mind, but it would not be needed for thekind of life and relationship to nature that they have.You cannot develop all the mental capacities belong-ing to mankind all at once. You can only use a smallsector, and this sector is not the same according tothe culture. That is all.

It is probably one of the many conclusions of an-thropological research that, notwithstanding the cul-tural differences between the several parts of mankind,the human mind is everywhere one and the same andthat it has the same capacities. I think this is acceptedeverywhere.

I don't think that cultures have tried systematicallyor methodically to differentiate themselves from eachother. The fact is that for hundreds of thousands ofyears mankind was not very numerous on the earth;small groups were living in isolation, so that it was on-ly natural that they developed characteristics of theirown and became different from each other. It was notsomething aimed at. Rather, it is the simple result of

20 Myth and Meaning

the conditions which have been prevailing for an ex-tremely long time.

Now, I would not like you to think that this in it-self is harmful or that these differences should be over-come. As a matter of fact, differences are extremelyfecund. It is only through difference that progress hasbeen made. 'lWw»jfrHWmwwgfrtOOW i» probably rf

i#t«t M« raay.rcaii owf^eotmBuntamon ~ that is, the t

tendency to know exKtiy in one point of the worldwh*t is going on in all other parts of die world. In or-4

der for a culture to be really itself and to produce ,something, the culture and its members must be con-vinced of their originality and even, to some extent,Q£ tfms superiority over the others; it is only under

of under-communication that it can pro-g. We.ate aow threatened with the pros-

pect of our being only consumers, able to consume *anything from any point in die world and from everyculture, but of losing all originality.

We can easily now conceive of a time when therewill be only one culture and one civilization on theentire surface of the earth. I don't believe this willhappen, because there are contradictory tendenciesalways at work - on the one hand towards homogeni-zation and on the other towards new distinctions. Themore a civilization becomes homogenized, the moreinternal lines of separation become apparent; andwhat is gained on one level is immediately lost on an-other. This is a personal feeling, in that I have no clearproof of the operation of this dialectic. But I don't


see how mankind can really live without some internaldiversity.

Let us now consider a myth from western Canadaabout the skate trying to master or dominate theSouth Wind and succeeding. It is a story of a time thatexisted on earth before mankind, that is, of a timewhen animals and humans were not really distinct;beings were half-human and half-animal. All were ex-tremely bothered by the winds, because the winds,especially the bad winds, were blowing all the time,making it impossible for them to fish and to gathershellfish on the beaches. So they decided that theyhad to fight the winds and compel them to behave moredecently. There was an expedition in which severalhuman animals or animal humans took part, includingthe skate, which played an important role in capturingthe South Wind. The South Wind was liberated onlyafter he promised not to blow all the time, but onlyfrom time to time, or at certain periods. Since thattime, it is only at certain periods of the year, or oneday out of two, that the South Wind blows; duringthe rest of the time, mankind can fulfil its activities.

Well, this story never happened. But what we haveto do is not to satisfy ourselves that this is plainly ab-surd or just a fanciful creation of a mind in a kind ofdelirium. We have to take it seriously and to ask our-selves the questions: why the skate and why the SouthWind?

When you look very closely at the mythical material

22 Myth and Meaning

exactly as it is told, you notice that the skate acts onaccount of very precise characteristics, which are oftwo kinds. The first one is that it is a fish like all flatfish, slippery underneath and rough on the back. Andthe other capacity, which allow the skate to escape verysuccessfully when it has to fight against other animals,is that it is very large seen from above or below, andextremely thin when seen from the side. An adversarymay think that it is very easy to shoot an arrow andkill a skate because it is so large; but just as the arrow isbeing aimed, the skate can suddenly turn or slip andshow only its profile, which, of course, is impossibleto aim at; thus it escapes. So the reason why the skate ischosen is that it is an animal which, considered fromeither one point of view or from the other, is capableof giving - let's say in terms of cybernetics - only a'yes' or 'no' answer. It is capable of two states whichare discontinuous, and one is positive, and one is neg-ative. The use the skate is put to in the myth is - though,of course, I would not like to strain the simile too far- like the elements in modern computers which canbe used to solve very difficult problems by adding aseries of 'yes' or 'no' answers.

While it is obviously wrong and impossible from anempirical point of view that a fish is able to fight awind, from a logical point of view we can understandwhy images borrowed from experience can be put touse. This is the originality of mythical thinking - toplay the part of conceptual thinking: an animal whichcan be used as what I would call a binary operator can


have, from a logical point of view, a relationship witha problem which is also a binary problem. If the SouthWind blows every day of the year, then life is impos-sible for mankind. But if it blows only one day out oftwo - 'yes' one day, 'no' the other day, and so on -then a kind of compromise becomes possible betweenthe needs of mankind and the conditions prevailing inthe natural world.

Thus, from a logical point of view, there is an affin-ity between an animal like the skate and the kind ofproblem which the myth is trying to solve. The storyis not true from a scientific point of view, but wecould only understand this property of the myth at atime when cybernetics and computers have come toexist in the scientific world and have provided us withan understanding of binary operations which had al-ready been put to use in a very different way withconcrete objects or beings by mythical thought. Sothere is really not a kind of divorce between mytho-logy and science. It is only the present state of scien-tific thought that gives us the ability to understandwhat is in this myth, to which we remained complete-ly blind before the idea of binary operations becomefamiliar to us.

Now, I would not like you to think that I am put-ting scientific explanation and mythical explanationon an equal footing. What I would say is that thegreatness and the superiority of scientific explanationlies not only in the practical and intellectual achieve-ment of science, but in the fact, which we are witness-

24 Myth and Meaning

ing more and more, that science is becoming able toexplain not only its own validity but also what wasto some extent valid in mythological thinking. What isimportant is that we are becoming more and more in-terested in this qualitative aspect, and that science,which had a purely quantitative outlook in the seven-teenth to nineteenth centuries, is beginning to inte-grate the qualitative aspects of reality as well. Thisundoubtedly will enable us to understand a greatmany things present in mythological thinking whichwe were in the past prone to dismiss as meaninglessand absurd. And the trend will lead us to believe that,between life and thought, there is not the absolutegap which was accepted as a matter of fact by theseventeenth-century philosophical dualism. If we areled to believe that what takes place in our mind issomething not substantially or fundamentally differ-ent from the basic phenomenon of life itself, and ifwe are led then to the feeling that there is not thiskind of gap which is impossible to overcome betweenmankind on the one hand and all the other living be-ings - not only animals, but also plants - on the other,then perhaps we will reach more wisdom, let us say,than we think we are capable of.

THREE

Harelips and T wins:

The Snlittine of a Mvth

Our starting point here will be a puzzling observationrecorded by a Spanish missionary in Peru, Father P.J.de Arriaga, at the end of the sixteenth century, andpublished in his Extirpation de la Idolatria del Peru(Lima 1621). He noted that in a certain part of Peruof his time, in times of bitter cold the priest called inall the inhabitants who were known to have been bornfeet first, or who had a harelip, or who were twins.They were accused of being responsible for the coldbecause, it was said, they had eaten salt and peppers,and they were ordered to repent and to confess theirsins.

Now, that twins are correlated with atmosphericdisorder is something very commonly acceptedthroughout the world, including Canada. It is wellknown that on the coast of British Columbia, amongthe Indians, twins were endowed with special powersto bring good weather, to dispel storms, and the like.This is not, however, the part of the problem which Iwish to consider here. What strikes me is that all the

26 Myth and Meaning

mythographers - for instance, Sir James Frazer whoquotes Arriaga in several instances - never asked thequestion why people with harelips and twins are con-sidered to be similar in some respect. It seems to methat the crux of the problem is to find out: why hare-lips? why twins? and why are harelips and twins puttogether?

In order to solve the problem, we have, as some-times happens, to make a jump from South Americato North America, because it will be a North Ameri-can myth which will give us the clue to the SouthAmerican one. Many people have reproached me forthis kind of procedure, claiming that myths of a givenpopulation can only be interpreted and understood inthe framework of the culture of that given population.There are several things which I can say by way of ananswer to that objection.

In the first place, it seems to me pretty obviousthat, as was ascertained during recent years by the so-called Berkeley school, the population of the Ameri-cas before Columbus was much larger than it had beensupposed to be. And since it was much larger, it is ob-vious that these large populations were to some extentin contact with one another, and that beliefs, prac-tices, and customs were, if I may say so, seepingthrough. Any neighbouring population was always, tosome extent, aware of what was going on in the otherpopulation. The second point in the case that we areconsidering here is that these myths do not exist iso-lated in Peru on the one hand and in Canada on the

27 Harelips and Twins: The Splitting of a Myth

other, but that in between we find them over and overagain. Really, they are pan-American myths, ratherthan scattered myths in different parts of the contin-ent.

Now, among the Tupinambas, the ancient coastalIndians of Brazil at the time of the discovery, as alsoamong the Indians of Peru, there was a myth concern-ing a woman, whom a very poor individual succeededin seducing in a devious way. The best known version,recorded by the French monk Andre Thevet in the six-teenth century, explained that the seduced womangave birth to twins, one of them born from the legiti-mate husband, and the other from the seducer, who isthe Trickster. The woman was going to meet the godwho would be her husband, and while on her way theTrickster intervenes and makes her believe that he isthe god; so, she conceives from the Trickster. Whenshe later finds the legitimate husband-to-be, she con-ceives from him also and later gives birth to twins.And since these false twins had different fathers, theyhave antithetical features: one is brave, the other acoward; one is the protector of the Indians, the otherof the white people; one gives goods to the Indians,while the other one, on the contrary, is responsiblefor a lot of unfortunate happenings.

It so happens that in North America, we find exact-ly the same myth, especially in the northwest of theUnited States and Canada. However, in comparison withSouth American versions, those coming from the Cana-dian area show two important differences. For instance,

28 Myth and Meaning

among the Kootenay, who live in the Rocky Moun-tains, there is only one fecundation which has as aconsequence the birth of twins, who later on become,one the sun, and the other the moon. And, amongsome other Indians of British Columbia of the Salishlinguistic stock - the Thompson Indians and the Okan-agan - there are two sisters who are tricked by appar-ently two distinct individuals, and they give birth,each one to a son; they are not really twins becausethey were born from different mothers. But sincethey were born in exactly the same kind of circum-stances, at least from a moral and a psychologicalpoint of view, they are to that extent similar to twins.

Those versions are, from the point of view of whatI am trying to show, the more important. The Salishversion weakens the twin character of the hero be-cause the twins are not brothers - they are cousins;and it is only the circumstances of their births whichare closely parallel - they are both born thanks to atrick. Nevertheless, the basic intention remains thesame because nowhere are the two heroes really twins;they are born from distinct fathers, even in the SouthAmerican version, and they have opposed characters,features which will be shown in their conduct and inthe behaviour of their descendants.

So we may say that in all cases children who aresaid to be twins or believed to be twins, as in theKootenay verison, will have different adventures lateron which will, if I may say so, untwin them. And thisdivision between two individuals who are at the begin-


ning presented as twins, either real twins or equiva-lents to twins, is a basic characteristic of all the mythsin South America or North America.

In the Salish versions of the myth, there is a verycurious detail, and it is very important. You remem-ber that in this version we have no twins whatsoever,because there are two sisters who are travelling in or-der to find, each one, a husband. They were told by agrandmother that they would recognize their husbandsby such and such characteristics, and they are theneach deluded by the Tricksters they meet on their wayinto believing that they are the husband whom each issupposed to marry. They spend the night with him,and each of the women will later give birth to a son.

Now, after this unfortunate night spent in the hutof the Trickster, the elder sister leaves her younger sis-ter and goes visiting her grandmother, who is a moun-tain goat and also a kind of magician; for she knowsin advance that her granddaughter is coming, and shesends the hare to welcome her on the road. The harehides under a log which has fallen in the middle of theroad, and when the girl lifts her leg to cross the log,the hare can have a look at her genital parts and makea very inappropriate joke. The girl is furious, andstrikes him with her cane and splits his nose. This iswhy the animals of the leporine family now have asplit nose and upper lip, which we call a harelip inpeople precisely on account of this anatomical pecu-liarity in rabbits and hares.

In other words, the elder sister starts to split the

30 Myth and Meaning

body of the animal; if this split were carried out tothe end - if it did not stop at the nose but continuedthrough the body and to the tail - she would turn anindividual into twins, that is, two individuals whichare exactly similar or identical because they are botha part of a whole. In this respect, it is very importantto find out what conception the American Indians allover America entertained about the origin of twins.And what we find is a general belief that twins resultfrom an internal splitting of the body fluids whichwill later solidify and become the child. For instance,among some North American Indians, the pregnantwoman is forbidden to turn around too fast when sheis lying asleep, because if she did, the body fluidswould divide in two parts, and she would give birth totwins.

There is also a myth from the Kwakiutl Indians ofVancouver Island which should be mentioned here. Ittells of a small girl whom everybody hates because shehas a harelip. An ogress, a supernatural cannibal wo-man, appears and steals all the children including thesmall girl with the harelip. She puts them all in herbasket in order to take them home to eat them. Thesmall girl who was taken first is at the bottom of thebasket and she succeeds in splitting it open with a sea-shell she had picked up on the beach. The basket is onthe back of the ogress, and the girl is able to drop outand run away first. She drops out feet first.

This position of the harelipped girl is quite symmet-rical to the position of the hare in the myth which I


previously mentioned: crouching beneath the heroinewhen he hides under the log across her path, he is inrespect to her exactly in the same position as if he hadbeen born from her and delivered feet first. So we seethat there is in all this mythology an actual relation-ship between twins on the one hand and delivery feetfirst or positions which are, metaphorically speaking,identical to it on the other. This obviously clears upthe connection from which we started in Father Arri-aga's Peruvian relations between twins, people bornfeet first, and people with harelips.

The fact that the harelip is conceived as an incipi-ent twinhood can help us to solve a problem which isquite fundamental for anthropologists working espe-cially in Canada: why have the Ojibwa Indians andother groups of the Algonkian-speaking family selec-ted the hare as the highest deity in which they be-lieved? Several explanations have been brought for-ward: the hare was an important if not essential partof their diet; the hare runs very fast, and so was anexample of the talents which the Indians should have;and so on. Nothing of that is very convincing. But ifmy previous interpretations were right, it seems muchmore convincing to say: 1, among the rodent familythe hare is the larger, the more conspicuous, the moreimportant, so it can be taken as a representative ofthe rodent family; 2, all rodents exhibit an anatomicalpeculiarity which makes out of them incipient twins,because they are partly split up.

When there are twins, or even more children, in the

32 Myth and Meaning

womb of the mother, there is usually in the myth avery serious consequence because, even if there areonly two, the children start to fight and compete inorder to find out who will have the honour of beingborn first. And, one of them, the bad one, does nothesitate to find a short cut, if I may say so, in orderto be born earlier; instead of following the naturalroad, he splits up the body of the mother to escapefrom it.

This, I think, is an explanation of why the fact ofbeing born feet first is assimilated to twinhood, be-cause it is in the case of twinhood that the competi-tive hurry of one child will make him destroy themother in order to be the first one born. Both twin-hood and delivery feet first are forerunners of a dan-gerous delivery, or I could even call it a heroic delivery,for the child will take the initiative and become a kindof hero, a murderous hero in some cases; but he com-pletes a very important feat. This explains why, inseveral tribes, twins were killed as well as childrenborn feet first.

The really important point is that in all Americanmythology, and I could say in mythology the worldover, we have deities or supernaturals, who play theroles of intermediaries between the powers above andhumanity below. They can be represented in differentways: we have, for instance, characters of the type ofa Messiah; we have heavenly twins. And we can seethat the place of the hare in Algonkian mythology isexactly between the Messiah - that is, the unique


intermediary - and the heavenly twins. He is not twins,but he is incipient twins. He is still a complete individ-ual, but he has a harelip, he is half way to becoming atwin.

This explains why, in this mythology, the hare as agod has an ambiguous character which has worriedcommentators and anthropologists: sometimes he is avery wise deity who is in charge of putting the uni-verse in order, and sometimes he is a ridiculous clownwho goes from mishap to mishap. And this also isbest understood if we explain the choice of the hareby the Algonkian Indians as an individual who is be-tween the two conditions of (a) a single deity benefi-cient to mankind and (b) twins, one of whom is goodand the other bad. Being not yet entirely divided intwo, being not yet twins, the two opposite character-istics can remain merged in one and the same person.

FOUR

When Mvth

This topic presents two problems for the mythologist.One is a theoretical problem of great importance be-cause, when we look at the published material both inNorth and South America and elsewhere in the world,it appears that the mythic material is of two differentkinds. Sometimes, anthropologists have collectedmyths which look more or less like shreds and patches,if I may say so-, disconnected stories are put one afterthe other without any clear relationship between them.In other instances, as in the Vaupes area of Colombiawe have very coherent mythological stories, all dividedinto chapters following each other in a quite logicalorder.

And then we have the question: what Joes a collec-tion mean? It could mean two different things. Itcould mean, for instance, that the coherent order, likea kind of saga, is the primitive condition, and thatwhenever we find myths as disconnected elements,this is the result of a process of deterioration and dis-organization; we can only find scattered elements of

35 When Myth Becomes History

what was, earlier, a meaningful whole. Or we couldhypothesize that the disconnected state was the ar-chaic one, and that the myths were put together in anorder by native wise men and philosophers who donot exist everywhere, but only in some societies of agiven type. We have exactly the same problem, for in-stance, with the Bible, because it seems that its rawmaterial was disconnected elements and that learnedphilosophers put them together in order to make acontinuous story. It would be extremely important tofind out if, among the people without writing who arestudied by the anthropologists, the situation is thesame as with the Bible or is completely different.

This second problem is, though still theoretical, ofa more practical nature. In former times, let's say inthe late nineteenth century and early twentieth cen-tury, mythological material was collected mostly byanthropologists, that is, people from the outside. Ofcourse, in many cases, and especially in Canada, theyhad native collaborators. Let me, for instance, quotethe case of Franz Boas, who had a Kwakiutl assistant,George Hunt (as a matter of fact, he was not exactlyKwakiutl because he was born of a Scottish father anda Tlingit mother, but he was raised among the Kwak-iutl, married among the Kwakiutl, and completelyidentified with the culture). And for the Tsimshian,Boas had Henry Tate, who was a literate Tsimshian,and Marius Barbeau had William Benyon, who was alsoa literate Tsimshian. So native co-operation was sec-ured from the beginning, but nevertheless the fact is

36 Myth and Meaning

that Hunt, Tate, or Benyon worked under the guidanceof the anthropologists, that is, they were turned intoanthropologists themselves. Of course, they knew thebest legends, the traditions belonging to their ownclan, their own lineage, but nevertheless they wereequally interested in collecting data from other fami-lies, other clans, and the like.

When we look at this enormous corpus of Indianmythology, such as, for instance, Boas' and Tate'sTsimshian Mythology, or the Kwakiutl texts collectedby Hunt, and edited, published, and translated too byBoas, we find more or less the same organization ofthe data, because it is the one which was recommend-ed by the anthropologists: for instance, in the begin-ning, cosmological and cosmogonic myths, and lateron, much later on, what can be considered as legend-ary tradition and family histories.

It has so happened that this task, started by the an-thropologists, the Indians are taking now up them-selves, and for different purposes, for instance, tohave their language and mythology taught in elemen-tary schools for Indian children. That is very impor-tant, I understand, at the moment. Another purposeis to use legendary tradition to validate claims againstthe white people - territorial claims, political claims,and so on.

So it is extremely important to find out if there is adifference and, if there is, what kind of difference be-tween traditions collected from the outside from thosecollected on the inside, though as if they were collec-


ted from the outside. Canada is fortunate, I shouldsay, in that books about its own mythology and leg-endary traditions have been organized and publishedby the Indian specialists themselves. This began early:there is Legends of Vancouver by Pauline Johnson, is-sued before the First World War. Later on, we hadbooks by Marius Barbeau, who was, of course, not In-dian at all, but who tried to collect historical or semi-historical material and make himself the spokesman ofhis Indian informants; he produced, so to speak, hisown version of that mythology.

More interesting, far more interesting, are bookssuch as Men ofMedeek, published in Kitimat in 1962,which is supposedly the verbatim account collectedfrom the mouth of Chief Walter Wright, a Tsimshianchief of the middle Skeena river, but collected bysomebody else, a white field worker who was not evena professional. And even more important is the recentbook by Chief Kenneth Harris, who is also a Tsimshianchief, published in 1974 by himself.

So we can, with this kind of material, make a kindof experiment by comparing the material collected byanthropologists, and the material collected and pub-lished directly by the Indians. I should not say 'collec-ted,' as a matter of fact, because instead of being tra-ditions from several families, several clans, several line-ages put together and juxtaposed to each other, whatwe have in these two books is really the history ofone family or one clan, published by one of its des-cendants.

38 Myth and Meaning

The problem is: «*»W d*« oWthokxtv end and ,lAmX&m****** rtwttr In the case, entirely new tous, of a history without archives, there being of courseno written documents, tiMmwmm&p a verbal tradition*I»ilrtaii1»<^m<d to h« hiatory at tH^samc time Now,if we compare these two histories, the one obtainedon the middle Skeena from Chief Wright, and the onewritten and published by Chief Harris from a familyup Skeena in the Hazelton area, we find similaritiesand we find differences. In the account of ChiefWright, we have what I would call the genesis of a dis-order: the entire story aims at explaining why aftertheir first beginning, a given clan or lineage or groupof lineages have overcome a great many ordeals,known periods of success and periods of failures, andhave been progressively led towards a disastrous end-ing. It is an extremely pessimistic story, really the his-tory of a downfall. In the case of Chief Harris, there isa quite different outlook, because the book appearsprincipally geared at explaining the origin of a socialorder which was the social order in the historical per-iod, and which is still embedded, if I may say so, inthe several names, titles, and privileges which a givenindividual, occupying a prominent place in his familyand clan, has collected by inheritance around himself.So it is as if a diachronic succession of events was sim-ultaneously projected on the screen of the present inorder to reconstitute piece by piece a synchronic or-der which exists and which is illustrated by the rosterof names and privileges of a given individual.


Both stories, both books are positively fascinating,and are, literarily speaking, great pieces; but for theanthropologist, their main interest is to illustrate thecharacteristics of a kind of history widely differentfrom our own. J g i s s ^ m w e wiite it is practically en- ftirely based ujj>oti written documents, while in the case*pf ttaet? Wp histories thete are obviously no written *

w. Now, what strikes me when Itry to compare them is that both start with the accountof a mythical or perhaps historical - I don't know which,perhaps archaeology will settle the matter - time whenon the upper Skeena, near what is now Hazelton, therewas a big town the name of which Barbeau transcribedas Tenlaham and an account of what happened there.It is practically the same story in both books: it ex-plains that the city was destroyed, that the remnantsof the people went on the move, and started difficultperegrinations along the Skeena.

This, of course, could be a historical event, but ifwe look closely at the way it is explained, we see thatthe type of event is the same, but not exactly the de-tails. For instance, according to the version, there canbe at the origin a fight between two villages or twotowns, a fight which originated in an adultery; but thestory can be either that a husband killed the lover ofhis wife, or that brothers killed their sister's lover, orthat a husband killed his wife because she had a lover.So, you see, we have an explanatory cell. Its basicstructure is the same, but the content of the cell is notthe same and can vary; so it is a kind of mini-myth if

40 Myth and Meaning

I may say so, because it is very short and very con-densed, but k has sttil the property of a myth in thatwe cao observe it under different transformations.When one element is transformed, then the other ele-ments should be rearranged accordingly. This is thefirst aspect of these clan stories that interests me.

The second aspect is that they are histories whichare highly repetitive; the same type of event can beused several times, in order to account for differenthappenings. For instance, it is striking that in the stor-ies of the particular tradition of Chief Wright and ofthe particular tradition of Chief Harris, we find similarhappenings, but they don't take place in the samespot, they don't affect the same people, and, verylikely, they are not exactly in the same historicalperiod.

What we discover by reading these books is that theopposition - the simple opposition between mytholo-gy and history which we are accustomed to make - isnot at all a clear-cut one, and that there is an interme-diary level. Mythology is static, we find the samemythical elements combined over and over again, butthey are in a closed system, let us say, in contradis-tinction with history, which is, of course, an open,system.,

The open character of history is secured by the in-numerable ways according to which mythical cells, orexplanatory cells which were originally mythical, canbe arranged and rearranged. It shows us that by usingthe same material, because it is a kind of common


inheritance or common patrimony of all groups, of allclans, or of all lineages, one can nevertheless succeedin building up an original account for each of them.

What is misleading in the old anthropological ac-counts is that a kind of hodge-podge was made up oftradition and beliefs belonging to a great many differ-ent social groups. This makes us lose sight of a funda-mental character of the material - that each type ofstory belongs to a given group, a given family, a givenlineage, or to a given clan, and is trying to explain itsfate, which can be a successful one or a disastrous one,or be intended to account for rights and privileges asthey exist in the present, or be attempting to validateclaims for rights which have since disappeared.

When we try to do scientific history, do we reallydo something scientific, or do we too remain astrideour own mythology in what we are trying to make aspure history? It is very interesting to look at the wayboth in North and South America, and indeed every-where in the world, in which an individual, who hasby right and by inheritance a certain account of themythology or the legendary tradition of his owngroup, reacts when he listens to a different versiongiven by somebody belonging to a different family orto a different clan or lineage, which to some extent issimilar but to some extent too is extremely different.Now, we would think that it is impossible that twoaccounts which are not the same can be true at thesame time, but nevertheless, they seem to be acceptedas true in some cases, the only difference made is that

42 Myth and Meaning

one account is considered better or more accuratethan the other. In other cases, the two accounts canbe considered equally valid because the differencesbetween them are not perceived as such.

We are not at all aware in our daily life that we areexactly in the same situation in relation to differenthistorical accounts written by different historians. Wepay attention only to what is basically similar, and weneglect the differences due to the fact that the wayhistorians carve the data and the way they interpretthem are not exactly the same. So if you take two ac-counts by historians, with different intellectual tradi-tions and different political leanings, of such events asthe American Revolution, of the French-English warin Canada, or the French Revolution, we are not reallyso shocked that they don't tell us exactly the samething.

f ^ » m y irapressionis that by studying carefullythi* history, in the general sense of the word, whichcon temporary Indian authors try to give us of thejrown pa«t, by not consklerinf this history as a fancifulaccowtt^ but by tryiitf extremely carefully, with the,help of a type of salvage archaeology - excavatingvillage sites referred to in the histories - and by tryingto establish correspondences, inasmuch as this is pos-sible, between different accounts, and by trying tofind what really corresponds and what does not cor-respond, wft̂ Bd?-m the end reach a better uriderstand-ing^iwiMkthittoricat science reallyfo.

I am not far from believing that, i i | ^ 4 » m societies,


:.£uftc$i0f, that for societies without writing and with-out archives the aim of mythology is to ensure that asclosely as possible - complete closeness is obviouslyimpossible - the future will remain faithful to the pre-sent and to the past. For us, however, the futureshould be always different, and ever more different,from the present, some difference depending, ofcourse, on our political preferences. BtMbiwverthekssitthe gap which exists in our mind to some extent be-tween mythology and history can probably be breachedby studying histories which are conceived as not at all ,separated from but as a continuation of mythology v

FIVE

Mvth and Mu:

The relationship between myth and music on which Iinsisted so much in the initial section of The Raw andthe Cooked and also in the final section of L 'Hommenu - there is not yet an English title because it is nottranslated - was probably the topic which gave rise tomost misunderstandings, especially in the English-speaking world, though also in France, because it wasthought that this relationship was quite arbitrary. Myfeeling was, on the contrary, that there was not onlyone relationship but two different kinds of relation-ship - one of similarity and an other of contiguity -and that, as a matter of fact, they were actually thesame. But that I did not understand right away, and itwas the relation of similarity which struck me first. Ishall try to explain it in the following way.

In regard to the similarity aspect, my main pointwas that, exactly as in a musical score, it is impossibleto understand a myth as a continuous sequence. Thisis why we should be aware that if we try to read amyth as we read a novel or a newspaper article, that is

45 Myth and Music

line after line, reading from left to right, we don't un-derstand the myth, because we have to apprehend itas a totality and discover that the basic meaning ofthe myth is not conveyed by the sequence of eventsbut - if I may say so - by bundles of events even al-though these events appear at different moments inthe story. Therefore, we have to read the myth moreor less as we would read an orchestral score, not staveafter stave, but understanding that we should appre-hend the whole page and understand that somethingwhich was written on the first stave at the top of thepage acquires meaning only if one considers that it ispart and parcel of what is written below on the secondstave, the third stave, and so on. That is, we have toread not only from left to right, but at the same timevertically, from top to bottom. We have to understandthat each page is a totality. And it is only by treatingthe myth as if it were an orchestral score, writtenstave after stave, that we can understand it as a total-ity, that we can extract the meaning out of the myth.

Why and how does this happen? My feeling is thatit is the second aspect, the aspect of contiguity, whichgives us the significant clue. As a matter of fact, it wasabout the time when mythical thought - I would notsay vanished or disappeared - but passed to the back-ground in western thought during the Renaissance andthe seventeenth century, that the first novels began toappear instead of stories still built on the model ofmythology. And it was exactly at that time that wewitnessed the appearance of the great musical styles

46 Myth and Meaning

characteristic of the seventeenth and, mostly, theeighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

It is exactly as if music had completely changed itstraditional shape in order to take over the function -the intellectual as well as emotive function - whichmythical thought was giving up more or less at thesame period. When I speak here of music, I should, ofcourse, qualify the term. The music that took overthe traditional function of mythology is not any kindof music, but music as it appeared in western civiliza-tion in the early seventeenth century with Frescobaldiand in the early eighteenth century with Bach, musicwhich reached its full development with Mozart, Beet-hoven, and Wagner in the eighteenth and nineteenthcenturies.

What I would like to do in order to clarify thisstatement is to offer a concrete example, which I shalltake from Wagner's tetralogy, The Ring. One of themost important musical themes in the tetralogy is theone which we call in French 'le theme de la renuncia-tion a l'amour' - the renunciation of love. As is wellknown, this theme appears first of all in the Rhinegoldat the moment when Alberich is told by the Rhinemaidens that he can conquer the gold only if he re-nounces all kind of human love. This very startlingmusical motif is a sign to Alberich, given at the verymoment when he says that he takes the gold but herenounces love once and for all. All this is very clearand simple; it is the literal sense of the theme: Alberichis renouncing love.

47 Myth and Music

Now the second striking and important momentwhen the theme reappears is in the Valkyrie in a cir-cumstance which makes it extremely difficult to un-derstand why. At the moment when Siegmund hasjust discovered that Sieglinde is his sister and has fallenin love with her, and just when they are going to initi-ate an incestuous relationship, thanks to the swordwhich is buried in the tree and which Siegmund is go-ing to tear away from the tree - at that moment, thetheme of the renunciation of love reappears. This issome kind of a mystery, because at that moment Sieg-mund is not at all renouncing love - he's doing quitethe opposite and knowing love for the first time of hislife with his sister Sieglinde.

The third appearance of the theme is also in the Val-kyrie, in the last act when Wotan, the king of the gods,is condemning his daughter Brunhilde to a very longmagical sleep and surrounding her with fire. We couldthink that Wotan is also renouncing love because he isrenouncing his love for his daughter; but this is notvery convincing.

Thus you see that we have exactly the same prob-lem as in mythology; that is, we have a theme - here amusical theme instead of a mythological theme -which appears at three different moments in a verylong story: once at the beginning, once in the middle,and once at the end, if for the sake of the argumentwe limit ourselves to the first two operas of The Ring.What I would like to show is that the only way of un-derstanding this mysterious reappearance of the theme

48 Myth and Meaning

is, although they seem very different, to put the threeevents together, to pile them up one over the other,and to try to discover if they cannot be treated as oneand the same event.

We can then notice that, on the three differentoccasions, there is a treasure which has to be pulledaway or torn away from what it is bound to. Thereis the gold, which is stuck in the depths of theRhine; there is the sword, which is stuck in a tree,which is a symbolic tree, the tree of life or the treeof the universe; and there is the woman Brunhilde,who will have to be pulled out of the fire. The re-currence of the theme then suggests to us that, as amatter of fact, the gold, the sword, and Brunhildeare one and the same: the gold as a means to con-quer power, the sword as a means to conquer love,if I may say so. And the fact that we have a kindof coalescence between the gold, the sword, andthe woman is, as a matter of fact, the best explana-tion we have of the reason why, at the end of theTwilight of the Gods, it is through Brunhilde thatthe gold will return to the Rhine-, they have beenone and the same, but looked at through differentangles.

Other points of the plot are also made very clear.For instance, even though Alberich renounced love,he will later on, thanks to the gold, become able toseduce a woman which will bear him a son, Hagen.It is thanks to his conquest of the sword that Sieg-mund also will beget a son, who will be Siegfried.

49 Myth and Music

Thus the recurrence of the theme shows us somethingnever explained in the poems, that there is a kind oftwin relationship between Hagen the traitor and Sieg-fried the hero. They are in a very close parallelism.This explains also why it will be possible that Siegfriedand Hagen, or rather Siegfried first as himself andthen under the disguise of Hagen, will at differentmoments of the story conquer Brunhilde.

I could go on like this for a very long time, but per-haps these examples are sufficient to explain the simi-larity of method between the analysis of myth andthe understanding of music. When we listen to music,we are listening, after all, to something which goes onfrom a beginning to an end and which developsthrough time. Listen to a symphony: a symphony hasa beginning, has a middle, it has an end, but neverthe-less I would not understand anything of the symphonyand I would not get any musical pleasure out of it if Iwere not able, at each moment, to muster what I havelistened to before and what I am listening to now, andto remain conscious of the totality of the music. Ifyou take the musical formula of theme and variations,for instance, you can only perceive it and feel it onlyif for each variation you keep in mind the themewhich you listened to first; each variation has a fla-vour of its own, if unconsciously you can superimposeit on the earlier variation that you have listened to.

Thus there is a kind of continuous reconstructiontaking place in the mind of the listener to music orthe listener to a mythical story. It's not only a global

50 Myth and Meaning

similarity. It is exactly as if, when inventing the speci-fic musical forms, music had only rediscovered struc-tures which already existed on the mythical level.

For instance, it is very striking that the fugue, asit was formalized in Bach's time, is the true-to-liferepresentation of the working of some specific myths,of the kind where we have two characters or twogroups of characters. Let's say one good, the otherone bad, for instance, though that is an over-simplifi-cation. The story unrolled by the myth is that of onegroup trying to flee and to escape from the othergroup of characters; so you have a chase of one groupby the other, sometimes group A rejoining group B ,sometimes group B escaping - all as in a fugue. Youhave what we call in French ie sujet et la reponse.'The antithesis or antiphony continues through thestory until both groups are almost confused and con-founded - an equivalent to the stretta of the fugue;then a final solution or climax of this conflict is offer-ed by a conjugation of the two principles which hadbeen opposed all along during the myth. It could be aconflict between the powers above and the powersbelow, the sky and the earth, or the sun and subter-ranean powers, on the like. The mythic solution ofconjugation is very similar in structure to the chordswhich resolve and end the musical piece, for theyoffer also a conjugation of extremes which, for onceand at last, are being reunited. It could be shown alsothat there are myths, or groups of myths, which areconstructed like a sonata, or a symphony, or a rondo,or a toccata, or any of all the musical forms which

51 Myth and Music

music did not really invent but borrowed unconscious-ly from the structure of the myth.

There is a little story I would like to tell you. WhenI was writing The Raw and the Cooked, I decided togive each section of the volume the character of amusical form and to call one 'sonata,' another 'rondo,'and so on. I then came upon a myth, the structure ofwhich I could very well understand, but I was unableto find a musical form which would correspond tothis mythical structure. So I called my friend the com-poser, Rene Leibowitz, and explained to him myproblem. I told him the strucutre of the myth: at thebeginning two entirely different stories, apparentlywithout any relationship with each other, progressive-ly become intertwined and merge, until at the endthey make up only one theme. What would you call amusical piece with the same structure? He thought itover and told me that in the whole history of musicthere was no musical piece he knew of with that struc-ture. So there is no name for it. It was obviously quitepossible to have a musical piece with this structure;and a few weeks later he sent me a score which he hadcomposed and which borrowed the structure of themyth I had explained to him.

Now, the comparison between music and languageis an extremely tricky one, because to some extentthe comparison is extremely close and there are, atthe same time, tremendous differences. For example,contemporary linguists have told us that the basic ele-ments of language are phonemes - that is, thosesounds that we represent, incorrectly, by the use of

52 Myth and Meaning

letters - which have no meaning in themselves, butwhich are combined in order to differentiate meaning.You could say practically the same thing of the musi-cal notes. A note - A, B, C, D, and so on - has no mean-ing in itself; it is just a note. It is only the combinationof the notes which can create music. So you couldvery well say that, while in language we have phon-emes as elementary material, in music we would havesomething which in French I would call 'soneme' - inEnglish perhaps 'toneme' would do. This is a similarity.

But if you think of the next step or the next levelin language, you will find that phonemes are combinedin order to make words; and words in their turn arecombined together to make sentences. But in musicthere are no words: the elementary materials - thenotes - are combined together, but what you haveright away is a 'sentence,' a melodic phrase. So, whilein language you have three very definite levels - phon-emes combined to make words, words combined tomake sentences - in music you have with the notessomething of the same kind as phonemes from a logi-cal point of view, but you miss the word level andyou go directly to a sentence.

Now you can compare mythology both to musicand to language, but there is this difference: in myth-ology there are no phonemes; the lowest elements arewords. So if we take language as a paradigm, the para-digm is constituted by, first, phonemes; second, words;third, sentences. In music you have the equivalent tophonemes and the equivalent to sentences, but youdon't have the equivalent to words. In myth you have

53 Myth and Music

an equivalent to words, an equivalent to sentences,but you have no equivalent to phonemes. So there is,in both cases, one level missing.

If we try to understand the relationship betweenlanguage, myth, and music, we can only do so by us-ing language as the point of departure, and then it canbe shown that music on the one hand and mythologyon the other both stem from languages but grow apartin different directions, that music emphasizes thesound aspect already embedded in language, whilemythology emphasizes the sense aspect, the meaningaspect, which is also embedded in language.

It was Ferdinand de Saussure who showed us thatlanguage is made up of indissociable elements whichare on the one hand the sound and on the other themeaning. And my friend Roman Jakobson has justpublished a little book which is entitled Le Son et leSens, as the two inseparable faces of language. Youhave sound, the sound has a meaning, and no meaningcan exist without a sound to express it. In music, it isthe sound element which takes over, and in the mythit is the meaning element.

I have always dreamed since childhood about beinga composer or, at least, an orchestra leader. I triedvery hard when I was a child to compose the musicfor an opera for which I had written the libretto andpainted the sets, but I was utterly unable to do so be-cause there is something lacking in my brain. I feelthat only music and mathematics can be said to bereally innate, and that one must have some genetic ap-paratus to do either. I remember quite well how, when

54 Myth and Meaning

I was living in New York during the war as a refugee,I had dinner once with the great French composer,Darius Milhaud. I asked him, 'When did you realizethat you were going to be a composer?' He explainedto me that, when he was a child in bed slowly fallingto sleep, he was listening and hearing a kind of musicwith no relationship whatsoever to the kind of musiche knew; he discovered later that this was already hisown music.

Since I was struck by the fact that music and myth-ology were, if I may say so, two sisters, begotten bylanguage, who had drawn apart, each going in a differ-ent direction - as in mythology, one character goesnorth, the other south, and they never meet again -then, if I wasn't able to compose with sounds, per-haps I would be able to do it with meanings.

The kind of parallelism I have tried to draw - I havesaid it already but I would like to emphasize it onceagain - applies only, as far as I am aware, to westernmusic as it developed during the recent centuries. Butnow we are witnessing something which, from a logi-cal point of view, is very similar to what took placewhen myth disappeared as a literary genre and was re-placed by the novel. We are witnessing the disappear-ance of the novel itself. And it is quite possible thatwhat took place in the eighteenth century when musictook over the structure and function of mythology isnow taking place again, in that the so-called serial musichas taken over the novel as a genre at the momentwhen it is disappearing from the literary scene.

Select Bibliography

A. Basic Works by Claude Levi-Strauss, in EnglishTranslationMythologiques (Introduction to a Science of Mythology).

4 vols. Trans. John and Doreen Weightman.New York, 1969-1982.

Structural Anthropology. Trans. Claire Jacobson andBrooke Grundfest Schoepf. Harmondsworth,1963.

Tristes Tropiques. Trans. John and DoreenWeightman. London, 1973.

B. Collections of Essays with Some Structuralist EssaysBonnefoy, Yves. Dictionnaire des Mythologies et des

Religions des Sodetes Traditionnelles et du Monde

Antique. 2 vols. Paris, 1981. English edition:Mythologies. Ed. Wendy Doniger. Chicago, 1991.

Dundes, Alan. Sacred Narrative. Berkeley, 1984.Leach, Edmund. The Structural Study of Myth and

Totemism. London, 1967.Lessa, William A., and Evon Z. Vogt. Reader in

Comparative Religion. 4th ed. New York, 1979.

56 Select Bibliography

Middleton, John. Myth and Cosmos: Readings inMythology and Symbolism. Austin, 1967.

C. Works About or Inspired by Claude Levi-StraussBurridge, Kenelm. "Levi-Strauss and Myth." In

Edmund Leach, The Structural Study of Myth andTotemism. London, 1967.

Doniger, Wendy. "Structuralist Universals andFreudian Universals." History of Religions 28:3(February 1989), pp. 267-81.

Douglas, Mary. Implicit Meanings. London, 1975.(Especially: "Do Dogs Laugh?", "Deciphering aMeal," and "Animals in Lele ReligiousThought."

. "The Meaning of Myth, with SpecialReference to 'La geste d'Asdiwal.' " In Leach, TheStructural Study of Myth and Totemism.

. Natural Symbols. London, 1980.

. Purity and Danger. London, 1966.Dundes, Alan. Analytic Essays in Folklore. Mouton,

1975.. "Structuralism and Folklore." In Alan

Dundes, ed., Essays in Folkloristics, pp. 178-206.Meerut: Folklore Institute, 1980.

Hammel, E. A. "The Myth of Structural Analysis:Levi-Strauss and the Three Bears." AddisonWesley Modules 25 (1981).

Hawkes, Terence. Structuralism and Semiotics.Berkeley, 1977.

Jorn, Asger, and Noel Arnaud. La langue verte et lacuite. Paris, 1968.


Leach, Edmund. "Anthropological Aspects ofLanguage: Animal Categories and Verbal Abuse."In Lessa and Vogt, Reader in Comparative Religion,pp.153-66.

. Genesis as Myth, and Other Essays. London,1969.

. "Levi-Strauss in the Garden of Eden."Transactions of the New York Academy of Science 23(1979).

-. "Two Essays Concerning the SymbolicRepresentation of Time." In Lessa and Vogt,Reader in Comparative Religion, pp. 221—28.

• and Alan D. Aycock. StructuralistInterpretations of Biblical Myth. Cambridge, 1983.

Needham, Rodney. "Blood, Thunder, and Mockeryof Animals." In Middleton, Myth and Cosmos:Readings in Mythology and Symbolism.

. Right and Left. Chicago, 1973.O'Flaherty, Wendy Doniger. "Introduction: The

Interpretation of Hindu Mythology." InO'Flaherty, Asceticism and Eroticism in theMythology of Siva, pp. 1-39. London, 1973; NewYork, 1981.

Ortner, Sherry. "Is Female to Male as Nature Is toCulture?" In M. Rosaldo and L. Lamphere, eds.,Women, Culture, and Society. Stanford, 1974.

Patte, Daniel. What Is Structural Exegesis?Philadelphia, 1976.

Propp, Vladimir. The Morphology of the Folktale. 2nded. Introduction by Alan Dundes. Austin, 1968.

Sahlins, Marshall. "Raw Women and Cooked Men


and Other 'Great Things' of the Fiji Islands." InPaula Brown and D. Tuzin, eds., The Ethnographyof Cannibalism. Society of PsychologicalAnthropology, 1983.

Thomas, L. L., and J. J. Kronenfeld. "AsdiwalCrumbles: A Critique of Levi-Straussian MythAnalysis." American Ethnologist 3 (1976), pp.147-73.

Vogt, Evan Z., and Catherine C. Vogt,"Levi-Strauss Among the Maya." In Lessa andVogt, Reader in Comparative Religion, pp. 176—85.

Willis, R. G. "The Head and the Loins:Levi-Strauss and Beyond." In Lessa and Vogt,Reader in Comparative Religion, pp. 197-206.

Yalman, Nur. " 'The Raw: the Cooked::Nature:Culture'—Observations on Le cru et le cuit." InLeach, The Structural Study of Myth and Totemism,pp.71-90.

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"If someone who had just heard Levi-Strauss's name for the first time asked

me to explain . . . what he was all about, I would pick up Myth and Meaning

and start reading it out loud. . . . Only here does one have a lucid, candid,

personal exposition of the major ideas that have driven him all his life."

—FROM THE FOREWORD BY W E N D Y DONIGER, University of Chicago

"There is no easier or quicker way than through this book into that heart of

darkness Levi-Strauss calls the 'totalitarian ambition of the savage mind' as it

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"'If in the end you cannot tell everyone what you have been up to, your life's

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If every major thinker could summarize his or her conclusions this clearly, the

fragmentation that threatens to reduce understanding to incoherence would

be tempered considerably."

—HUSTON SMITH, University of California, Berkeley,

and author of Forgotten Truth and Beyond the Post-Modern Mind

CLAUDE LEVI-STRAUSS is a leading social anthropologist and the author of

The Elementary Structures of Kinship, Tristes Tropiques, Totemism, The Savage

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MEANING - DESIGN ANTHROPOLOGYClaude Levi-Strauss called mythemes, in response to what his colleague,...

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