Myth and Meaning

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Myth and Meaning. London: Routledge, 1978.

The real gap, the real separation between science and what we might as well call mythical thought for the sake of finding a convenient name, although it is not exactly that—the real separation occurred in the seventeenth and the eighteenth century. At that time, with Bacon, Descartes, Newton, and the others, it was necessary for science to build itself up against the old generations of mythical and mystical thought, and it was thought that science could only exist by turning its back upon the world of the senses, the world we see, smell, taste, and perceive; the sensory was a delusive world, whereas the real world was a world of mathematical properties which could only be grasped by the intellect and which was entirely at odds with the false testimony of the senses. This was probably a necessary move, for experience shows us that thanks to this separation—this schism if you like—scientific thought was able to constitute itself.

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.

…even in the field of the humanities, it is not new at all; we can follow very well this trend of thought from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century and to the present time…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,’ as I think you call them in English, have been doing all the time.

…to nature…what we witness a the level of culture are phenomena of the same kind from a formal point of view…much more complicated…

…anthropologist, as a matter of fact not because I was interested in anthropology, but because I was trying to get out of philosophy.

…there were lots of rules of marriage all over the world which looked absolutely meaningless, and it was all the more irritating because, if they were meaningless, then there should be different rules for each people, though nevertheless the number of rules could be more or less finite. So, if the same absurdity was found to reappear over and over again, and another kind of absurdity also to reappear, then this was something which was not absolutely absurd; otherwise it would not reappear.…mythology, the problem was exactly the same.

… I do not claim that there are conclusions to be drawn.

…the word ‘meaning’ is probably, in the whole language, the word the meaning of which is the most difficult to find. What does ‘to mean’ mean? It seems to me that the only answer we can give is that ‘to mean’ means the ability of any kind of data to be translated in a different language. I do not mean a different language like French or German, but different words on a different level. After all, this translation is what a dictionary is expected to give you—the meaning of the word in different words, which on a slightly different level are isomorphic to the word or expression you are trying to understand. Now, what would a translation be without rules? It would be absolutely impossible to understand. Because you cannot replace any word by any other word or any sentence by any other sentence, you have to have rules of translation. To speak of rules and to speak of meaning is to speak of the same thing: and if we look at all the intellectual undertakings of mankind, as far as they have been recorded all over the world, the common denominator is always to introduce some kind of order. If this represents a basic need for order in the human mind and since, after all, the human mind is only part of the universe, the need probably exists because there is some order in the universe and the universe is not a chaos.

The problem is: where does mythology end and where does history start? In the case, entirely new to us, of a history without archives, there being of course no written documents, there is only a verbal tradition, which is claimed to be history at the same time. Now, if we compare these two histories, the one obtained on the middle Skeena from Chief Wright, and the one written and published by Chief Harris from a family up Skeena in the Hazelton area, we find similarities and we find differences. In the account of Chief Wright, we have what I would call the genesis of a disorder: the entire story aims at explaining why after their first beginning, a given clan or lineage or group of lineages have overcome a great many ordeals, know periods of success and periods of failures, and have been progressively led towards a disastrous ending. It is an extremely pessimistic story, really the history of a downfall. In the case of Chief Harris, there is a quite different outlook, because the book appears principally geared at explaining the origin of a social order which was the social order in the historical period, and which is still embedded, if I may say so, in the several names, titles, and privileges which a given individual, occupying a prominent place in his family and clan, ahs collected by inheritance around himself. So it is as if a diachronic succession of events was simultaneously projected on the screen of the present in order to reconstitute piece by piece a synchronic order which exists an d which is illustrated by the roster of names and privileges of a given individual.

What we discover by reading these books is that the opposition—the simple opposition between mythology and history which we are accustomed to make—is not at all a clear-cut one, and that there is an intermediary level. Mythology is static, we find the same mythical elements combined over and over again, but they are in a closed system, let us say, in contradistinction with history, which is, of course, an open system.

But nevertheless the gap which exists in our mind to some extent between mythology and history can probably be breached by studying histories which are conceived as not at all separated from but as a continuation of mythology.