Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture
Claude Levi-Strauss
Language: English
Pages: 80
ISBN: 0805210385
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Ever since the rise of science and the scientific method in the seventeenth century, we have rejected mythology as the product of superstitious and primitive minds. Only now are we coming to a fuller appreciation of the nature and role of myth in human history. In these five lectures originally prepared for Canadian radio, Claude Lévi-Strauss offers, in brief summations, the insights of a lifetime spent interpreting myths and trying to discover their significance for human understanding.
The lectures begin with a discussion of the historical split between mythology and science and the evidence that mythic levels of understanding are being reintegrated in our approach to knowledge. In an extension of this theme, Professor Lévi-Strauss analyzes what we have called “primitive thinking” and discusses some universal features of human mythology. The final two lectures outline the functional relationship between mythology and history and the structural relationship between mythology and music.
a literate Tsimshian. So native cooperation was secured from the beginning, but nevertheless the fact is that Hunt, Tate, or Benyon worked under the guidance of the anthropologists, that is, they were turned into anthropologists themselves. Of course, they knew the best legends, the traditions belonging to their own clan, their own lineage, but nevertheless they were equally interested in collecting data from other families, other clans, and the like. When we look at this enormous corpus of
offered by a conjugation of the two principles which had been opposed all along during the myth. It could be a conflict between the powers above and the powers below, the sky and the earth, or the sun and subterranean powers, or the like. The mythic solution of conjugation is very similar in structure to the chords which resolve and end the musical piece, for they offer also a conjugation of extremes which, for once and at last, are being reunited. It could be shown also that there are myths, or
similar, from a graphic point of view, in the writing could not mean anything other than ‘bou,’ the same first syllable of boucher and boulanger. Probably there is nothing more than that in the structuralist approach; it is the quest for the invariant, or for the invariant elements among superficial differences. Throughout my life, this search was probably a predominant interest of mine. When I was a child, for a while my main interest was geology. The problem in geology is also to try to
‘fanciful’ creation of the mind in one place would be unique—you would not find the same creation in a completely different place. My problem was trying to find out if there was some kind of order behind this apparent disorder—that’s all. And I do not claim that there are conclusions to be drawn. Myth and meaning 4 It is, I think, absolutely impossible to conceive of meaning without order. There is something very curious in semantics, that the word ‘meaning’ is probably, in the whole language,
can only find scattered elements of what was, earlier, a meaningful whole. Or we could hypothesize that the disconnected state was the archaic one, and that the myths were put together in an order by native wise men and philosophers who do not exist everywhere, but only in some societies of a given type. We have exactly the same problem, for instance, with the Bible, because it seems that its raw material was disconnected elements and that learned philosophers put them together in order to make a