Of Myths and Men

...he does not claim to be adhering to our standard conception of science, with its one right answer available to anyone who carefully follows certain well-established procedures...

...One day when the honey gatherers were working a short distance from the village, [Takjuaj] deliberately hurt his foot on a thorn and asked Sun's daughter to carry him to the village on her back...

...Since myths are highly complex, with many odd elements, they rarely operate independently in the giant myth...

...Where myth and social organization share the same structures, it is not because the former reflects the latter, but because both are products of mind...

...Levi-Strauss considers all myths that address themselves to the same underlying problems as "transformations" of one another (though this is not how linguists use the term...

...Hence the entire corpus of 353 myths covered in the two volumes of the Mythologiques translated so far form a transformation set that can be treated as one giant myth...

...incarnate gods: half-human, half-divine...

...This ability to account satisfactorily for detail is surely highly impressive...

...Insofar as myths reveal a logical structure, he maintains, it is purely the product of the structure of the mind itself...

...We have no idea, they say, where his thought ends and the realities of the material begin...

...As a result, Woodpecker was made into a bird, and mankind lost its ability to collect honey as easily as woodpeckers...

...She threw him off angrily and went back to her father, the Sun...

...Linguists are generally scornful of his adaptation of their concepts and methods...

...Perhaps the most troublesome criticism of Levi-Strauss springs from the politics, in the broadest sense of the word, implicit in structuralism...

...This holds that mythic forms deal with relatively abstract concepts through a vocabulary of concrete objects, rather than through the Ps and Qs of symbolic logic...

...But since these contradictions are ultimately insoluble, they continually stimulate the creation of additional myths, each of which attempts to paper over an old problem in a slightly new way...

...Nonetheless, in virtually every academic field one comes upon structuralists who are busily translating thejr works into the tell-tale idiom of oppositions, mediations and transformations...

...It is charged that his work is not replicable by others, nor verifiable by any sort of controls-And this is probably true as well...

...These are the false yet partially satisfying symbolic reconciliations, or "mediations," devised to resolve contradictions, he contends, thereby systematically accounting for their existence where no ordinary social science approach could...

...One is drawn along the interpretive process, as each clever solution to a problem creates new dangling elements that drive toward the next resolution, and so on...

...Take, for example, the myth told by the Mataco tribe of South America about the loss of easy access to honey: It is set in the primeval past, a never-never time when "animals were men and fed exclusively on bees' honey...

...Takjuaj, the fox protagonist, came to Woodpecker's village, "ostensibly to take part in the honey festival...

...Although Levi-Strauss' method may not be scientific in the strict sense, it is a powerful explanatory tool capable of producing breathtaking feats of understanding...

...Nature-culture, life-death, male-female are examples, says Levi-Strauss, of how the human mind polarizes the world and sets it at odds with itself...

...The reading public, by and large, finds him unreadable, although many people feel slightly guilty about this because various critics have touted his structuralism as one of the intellectual breakthroughs of the age that should be part of every thinking person's repertoire...

...Similarly, neither academic philosophers nor hard scientists find him rigorous enough, to say the least, and nonacademic philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre strongly object to the view of human nature implicit in his work...

...As Levi-Strauss says in The Raw and the Cooked, "in seeking to imitate the spontaneous movement of mythological thought, this essay . . . [has] to conform to the requirements of that thought and to respect its rhythm...

...Since the new combinations are constrained by the relatively narrow rules (as he defines them) of the mental process, and since there is no way to break out of or transcend those rules, the whole enterprise of structuralism runs headlong into the problem of free will...

...Yet we can see from the passage quoted above that in some respects this is precisely what he intends...

...Another tenet of structuralism (one that, like all the others, is not always abided by) states that nothing-or very little-has any intrinsic meaning, but only takes on meaning in relation to something else...

...Woodpecker was the best of all the honey gatherers, and Sun's daughter had married him for that reason...

...For this denouement English readers must await the translations of the last two volumes of Mythologiques...

...But each might have residual elements, too, standing in no logical relationship to elements in the other and leaving both myths "open" to interlocking with other myths through logical interrelation of the dangling parts...

...Thus almost anything may play a mediating role by virtue of its contextual position-e.g., a tree might be the mediator between the sky and the ground-in a myth...

...It follows that this book on myths is itself a kind of myth...

...and the sheer complexity of the whole myth system ultimately obscures or blurs the underlying contradiction, rendering it less sharp as a contrast...

...anthropology and the other social sciences will never be the same...

...Yet the North American version seems to adhere so closely to the affinity between the two themes that it uses one metaphorically to describe the other: Coyote, the liberator of the game, opens wide the prison door and 'out swarmed the deer and other game animals, as pour forth the bees from a newly opened hive.'" By pairing the two myths on the basis of their symbolic parallels, Levi-Strauss is able to account for the occurrence of an analogy in one tiny and seemingly random element...

...Many critics object strongly that Levi-Strauss' analysis is not analysis in any scientific sense, but rather the projection of his own thought...

...In his vast multidimensional scheme, obscure and often mutilated pieces of mythic puzzle suddenly acquire meaning, and give meaning to the elements in relation to which they are placed...

...So it is not surprising that in every culture we find certain hybrid symbols-hermaphroditic beings: half-male, half-female...

...Nor do they appear to be explainable by any other method...

...Like Marx, Freud or Darwin, he stands as testimony to that which he tries to deny...

...But if Levi-Strauss allows too little for the genuine creativity of the human mind and its potential for arriving at true novelty, he makes a vital contribution by reminding us of the hidden constraints that often divert our thought and action so far from our conscious intentions...

...Two myths might contain logically opposed elements, and to that extent they would stand in binary opposition to one another...

...The myths cited in The Raw and the Cooked seem to reflect a perception of nature as something that all human cultures unambiguously try to transcend, while in From Honey to Ashes the conceivable seductiveness of nature and destructiveness of culture are brought into the argument, rendering the interpretation of the myths more complex and interesting...

...one waits for and delights in each new display of his method and his imagination at work...

...This has been the focus of the debate between Levi-Strauss and Sartre...

...In short, Levi-Strauss is in the idealist tradition of philosophy so antithetical to modern positivism...

...Probably the best place to begin is with what Levi-Strauss, in The Savage Mind, calls "the science of the concrete...

...The structure of myth and society in his scheme is relatively static, endlessly breaking down and reforming in new combinations, yet essentially going nowhere...

...It is, in fact, ironic that he attributes less creative potential to the human mind than he himself achieves...

...Local or tribal differences, he insists, can account for differences in the surface language of myths (if a tribe is not acquainted with honey, it will scarcely use honey language to make its mythic points), but not for real structural variation...

...he took advantage of the situation to copulate with her from behind...

...For one of his premises is that myths attempt, at a symbolic level, to resolve certain contradictions of thought and experience...

...This notion justifies using elements of one myth to interpret a puzzling element in another, no matter how widely separated their sources...

...Meanwhile, on the basis of Levi-Strauss' original article, "The Structural Study of Myth," in his collection Structural Anthropology, we can predict that the final mediation will be accomplished by a sort of logical trick, in which certain contradictions mutually undermine and cancel each other out...

...Some scholars have attempted to make structuralism more scientific by correlating what happens in myths with the social and historical realities of the tribes in which the myths occur...

...Sitting astride her in this way, he tried to copulate with the young woman from behind...

...One more or less has to be Levi-Strauss to do what he does, or at least one must strongly internalize and identify with his modes of thinking...

...Accordingly, the contrast between raw and cooked foods was used in the first volume of this four-part work (already published in French under the overall title Mythologiques) to express the opposition of nature and culture, and that between honey and ashes is here invoked to indicate further and more subtle issues inherent in the nature-culture relationship...

...He is accused of being cavalier with his data-And he often is...

...Whatever its faults, therefore, his work remains a watershed of 20th-century thought...

...For others, his influence has been more insidious-They argued, they resisted, and still it infiltrated their thinking and writing, until they were forced to admit to having become part of the structuralist "movement...

...Levi-Strauss goes to great lengths to divorce himself from such endeavors...

...The explication of the giant myth is thus a matter of revealing the jigsaw-like interrelationships between the various member myths, and then articulating how the whole serves to mediate the fundamental contradiction with which it deals...

...The vast majority of his fellow anthropologists, I can attest without breaching the ranks too much, range from hostile through critical to indifferent...

...Reviewed by Sherry B. Ortner Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Sarah Lawrence College Who are Claude Levi-Strauss' constituents...

...What is more important, nobody who sits down and seriously studies his books can doubt that Levi-Strauss explains things no one has ever explained (or tried to explain) before...

...If it is difficult to start reading Levi-Strauss, it becomes even harder to put his books down...

...Further, much of the process of mediation is effected by all the in-terlockings and overlappings...

...For some of them, the master's teachings have been a revelation-A blinding flash that produced an instant conversion...

...If it has any unity, that unity will appear only behind or beyond the text and, in the best hypothesis, will become a reality in the mind of the reader...

...This offensive behavior led to the imprisonment of all the animals: that is, game was lost instead of honey being lost as in South America...

...Indeed, a major complaint leveled against Levi-Strauss is that he is too imaginative...

...centaurs and mermaids: half-human, half-animal...

...its structure is analogous to the structure of myth...

...He shows that the likening of the game being released from prison to the exodus of bees from a broken hive is not merely a stylistic flourish or literary embellishment, but has a meaningful place in the Pima myth by virtue of its structural relationship with the South American myth...

...Levi-Strauss compares this myth with one from the Pima Indians of Arizona: "Coyote pretended to be wounded and insisted that his sister-in-law should carry him on her back...

...And the same can be said of his books...

...Hybrids, however, are merely the most obvious kinds of mediators...

...The entire development of the analysis in the Mythologiques explicitly duplicates the mythic process...

...At the opening of The Raw and the Cooked, he specifically says he chose to work with mythology because "it has no obvious practical function...

...Reviewing Levi-Strauss is itself a bit like taking part in the structuralist investigation of the process of myth...