Mythology

Myth and Meaning (2009, originally published 1978) by Claude Lévi-Strauss, London & New York: Routledge - A Review.

I have been interested in mythology since my school days.  This classic, which runs to a total of 48 pages only, is the transcript of the 1977 MASSEY LECTURES. Entitled as above, these talks were broadcast on the CBC Radio series, IDEAS, in December 1977.  They were assembled from a series of lengthy conversations between Professor Lévi-Strauss and Carole R. Jerome, producer in the Paris bureau of the CBC.  The lectures were expanded for publication.

Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908 – 2009) was a French anthropologist and ethnologist (ethnology is that branch of anthropology which studies peoples and tribes), and has been called, along with James George Frazer, the "father of modern anthropology". He argued that the "savage" mind had the same structures as the "civilized" mind and that human characteristics are the same everywhere. He belonged to a school of thought called structuralist, and indeed in this gem of a book he defines what he means by structuralism very succinctly thus:   "Probably there is nothing more than seeing patterns in the shapes of words say, or in any of our perceptions, in the structuralist approach; it is the quest for the invariant elements among superficial differences. " (p. 6.)

 

Structuralism, Lévi-Strauss argues, in these easily and readily understandable lectures, is in fact nothing new.  Such an approach, he insists, has been going on in the hard or natural sciences all along: "What we call structuralism in the field of linguistics, or anthropology, or the like, is nothing other than a very pale and faint imitation of what the 'hard sciences'... have been doing all the time." (p. 6-7).
 

Again and again, he tells us that what motivated him to become an anthropologist was a conviction to search out the order behind the apparent disorder in the human world, to find something which was "invariant" to all cultures and all times. 

Moreover, he is extremely interesting on the the differences between primitive and scientific thinking.  Here he insists that:

Primitive thinking aims at a general understanding of the universe – and not only a general but a total understanding... This is entirely in contradiction to what scientific thinking does, which is to proceed step by step, trying to give explanations for very limited phenomena, and then going on to other kinds of phenomena, and so on.  As Descartes had already said, scientific thinking aimed to divide the difficulty into as many parts as were necessary in order to solve it.  So this totalitarian ambition of the savage mind is quite different from the procedures of scientific thinking. (p. 13)

 

 

The primitive mind, therefore, seeks to grasp or apprehend the whole or the totality of what it experiences.   It seeks to come up with a general and overarching meaning to what life confronts it with.  It is in this sense, then, that mythologies came about as a way of furnishing such a general meaning.  I would argue that it was in like manner that religions came about. Indeed all religions have many mythic or mythological elements.  Further, in a certain sense, religions could be argued to have grown out of mythologies. 

Of course, Lévi-Strauss argues, this ambition of primitive thinking to explain everything satisfactorily does not succeed entirely: 

That is, myth is unsuccessful in giving man more material power over the environment.  Science on the other hand helps man to achieve mastery over nature... However, myth gives man the illusion that he can understand the universe and that he does understand the universe.  It is, of course, only an illusion. (p. 13) 

However, there may be times when we humans need some elements of such illusions.  I have not fully thought this out, but not everything about us is reducible to rationality or logic.  After all, the great myths do, no matter what their provenance, seek to explain the non-rational and irrational aspect to the human mind. (Freud located such irrationality in the personal unconscious, while Jung agreed with him but went further in suggesting a greater and more comprehensive collective unconscious where our non-rational nature could be said to reside.) 

 

Lévi-Strauss is also interesting on the distinction between myth and history and asks us to ponder the question as to whether or when does myth become history.  As he succinctly puts it: "The problem is where does mythology end and history start?" (p. 32).  Then he goes on to inform us that he is not far from believing that in our own societies "history has replaced mythology and fulfils the same function, that for societies without writing and without archives the aim of mythology is to ensure that as closely as possible... the future will remain faithful to the present and to the past." (p. 36)

 

In other words, mythology has handed on to history the task of ensuring that our identity as a people or as a nation endures. 

 

Lévi-Strauss is also very insightful as to the similarity between the functions of mythology and music.  Sadly,  this reviewer is considerably ignorant of many areas of music but is, fortunately an avid listener.  Be that as it may, I was struck by the following contention by our author:

Therefore, we have to read the myth more or less as we would read an orchestral score, not stave after stave, but understanding that we should apprehend the whole page and understand that something, which was written on the first stave at the top of the page acquires meaning only if one considers that it is part and parcel of what is written below on the second stave, the third stave, and so on.  That is, we have to read, not only from left to right, but at the same time vertically, from top to bottom.  We have to understand that each page is a totality.  And it is only by treating the myth as if it were an orchestral score, written stave after stave, that we can understand it as a totality, that we can extract the meaning of a myth. (p. 40)

 

All in all, it is an easy read and an excellent introduction to anthropology, and to the thought of one of its great founders, Claude Lévi-Strauss.  You will read this short classic in a few hours, and it is a stimulating and thought-provoking read.