3 Claude Lévi-Strauss on Myth and Structuralism

Reading: Lévi-Strauss, Claude. “The Structural Study of Myth.” Journal of American Folklore vol. 68, no. 270, Myth a Symposium, Oct.-Dec. 1955, pp. 428-444. https://people.ucsc.edu/~ktellez/levi-strauss.pdf

Terms to Know

Structuralism: an anthropological movement associated especially with Claude Lévi-Strauss that seeks to analyze social relationships in terms of highly abstract relational structures often expressed in a logical symbolism;  a method of analysis (as of a literary text or a political system) that is related to cultural anthropology and that focuses on recurring patterns of thought and behavior

Phoneme: any of the abstract units of the phonetic system of a language that correspond to a set of similar speech sounds (such as the velar \k\ of cool and the palatal \k\ of keel) which are perceived to be a single distinctive sound in the language

Autochthonous: indigenous, native: an autochthonous people autochthonous plants. Ancient Athenians considered their ancestors the primordial inhabitants of their land, as if sprung from the very soil of the region they inhabited. Their word for any true-born Athenian, “autochthōn,” itself springs from auto-, meaning “self,” and chthōn, meaning “earth.” Nowadays, the English adjective “autochthonous” is often used in somewhat meaty scientific or anthropological writing (as in “several autochthonous cases of fever broke out in the region”).

Parole: language viewed as a specific individual usage : performance; a linguistic act (think “speech”)

Langue: language viewed abstractly as a system of forms and conventions used for communication in a community (think “language”—like grammar, spelling, syntax, etc.)

Source: Merriam Webster Dictionary

Background

The French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009) was one of the leading proponents of structuralism, a method of cultural and literary analysis that examines the role of individual elements in a larger structural system. Levi-Strauss applied the linguistic theories of Ferdinand de Saussure, extending the linguistic concept of the phoneme (a unit of sound) to create a mytheme, or unit of story. Just as phonemes signify meaning in language, mythemes signify meaning in stories of various cultures.

With respect to mythology, structuralists look for universals across stories and cultures. While psychologist Carl Jung used archetypes to convey universal meaning, Lévi-Strauss looked for universal laws based on binary opposites (e.g., raw and cooked, male and female). The function of myth is to reconcile or “mediate” these oppositions. Because binary opposites exist across cultures, many myths bear striking similarities to each other.

Summary of “The Structural Study of Myth”

In the article “The Structural Study of Myth,” included in his seminal book, Structural Anthropology (1958, translated into English 1963), Levi-Strauss proposes a new method for comparative mythology, one that moves beyond “reducing mythology either to idle play or to a crude kind of philosophical speculation.” In fact, he sees myth as a third dimension to the existing linguistic forms of langue and parole. He believes that the universal aspects of myth are timeless and translate into new forms of expression such as politics (for example, the French Revolution). He notes that “Whatever our ignorance of the language and the culture of the people where it originated, a myth is still felt as a myth by any reader throughout the world. Its substance does not lie in its style, its original music, or its syntax, but in the story which it tells” (210).

Meaning in mythology then depends on the structural relationship of the parts to the whole:

1. If there is a meaning to be found in mythology, this cannot reside in the isolated elements which enter into the composition of a myth, but only in the way those elements are combined.
2. Although myth belongs to the same category as language, being, as a matter of fact, only part of it, language in myth unveils specific properties.
3. Those properties are only to be found above the ordinary linguistic level; that is, they exhibit more complex features beside those which are to be found in any kind of linguistic expression (210).

Lévi-Strauss then hypothesizes that these properties lead to groupings based on relationships (described by later scholars as “mythemes”). To analyze a myth using the mytheme structure, Lévi-Strauss breaks each myth down to the sentence level, writing a single sentence on a card, and numbering the cards. Then he groups the sentence-cards by common themes. The mytheme itself is reflected as a “bundle of relations.” These bundles can then be sequenced to compare the underlying structure of different myths. For example, in analyzing the myth of Oedipus, Lévi-Strauss creates four groups from sentence-level analysis (read left to right across columns):

The meaning of the myth is thus revealed in its structure. As Lévi-Strauss interprets the myth of Oedipus, its over-arching role is to prove the truth of Greek cosmology’s assertion that the people of Greece were its autochthonous or primordial residents. In other words, the myth seeks to reconcile the conflict between the cosmological belief that people emerged from the earth and the observed phenomenon that people are born from two biological parents (213-216).

Lévi-Strauss stresses the importance of including all variants of a myth when analyzing its structure. He uses an analysis of the creation myth from the Zuni Plains people to demonstrate how variants provide a rich analysis (218-223).

He explores the mediating role of tricksters (such as the raven or coyote) in working with binary opposites in myth (see image from p. 224 at right). He then compares the Cinderella story from Europe and the Ash Boy story from America as examples of how this mediation works across cultures. Finally, he proposes the type of “mytheme” analysis that we see in d’Huy’s analysis of the Cosmic Hunt, noting that such analysis was beyond the capabilities of researchers at that time (224-230).

In conclusion, Lévi-Strauss notes that myths are much more than fanciful stories: “If our interpretation is correct, we are led toward a completely different view, namely, that the kind of logic which is used by mythical thought is as rigorous as that of modern science, and that the difference lies not in the quality of the intellectual process, but in the nature of the things to which it is applied” (230).

” Claude Lévi-Strauss on Myth and Structuralism” by Liza Long is licensed CC BY 4.0