Since †Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890), mythology has been viewed as the repository of central *cosmological formulae and explanations of origin. Writers such as *Malinowski (1954) felt that myth and social reality were functionally interrelated. Myth confirmed, supported and maintained the social state of affairs. It provided an account of origins—of the world, of people and of their conventions. The *structuralists, who succeeded Malinowski, while discarding such overt *function-alism, nevertheless retained a somewhat more abstract version of it: they maintained that myth provided the conceptual rather than normative supports for a social world. If the members of a society were seen to be in possession of something as coherent as a cosmology, this was largely an effect of the anthropologist’s search for a stable or ordered cultural world in which to place them. Accordingly, myth and ritual came to stand to semantic structures much as *joking and avoidance relations and †‘rituals of rebellion’ (for the last three generations of British social anthropologists) stood to social convention, and both were said to function in the same paradoxical manner: to preserve the integrity of society by subverting its conventional premises in other worldly, supernatural terms, and thereby focusing people’s attention on them.
But there is an alternative way in which we can view myth that avoids this paradox, or, at the very least, allows the articulation of the paradox to be part of its methodology. We can assume that nothing so substantial as *culture or *language or convention exists except as it is tacitly revealed by the continuously innovative, extemporized, and experimental behaviour of people in interaction with each other (see Weiner 1992). We can view culture, convention, the utterances that defer to it and invoke it, and the body of rules by which we codify it, as things that emerge post facto, varieties of retrospective judgement on the part of actors, singly and collectively, as to the appropriateness, creativeness, felicity, infelicity, etc. of particular actions (including speech actions, that is, the utterances themselves).
This view would not encourage us to draw a sharp divide between language and the world, or between myth and language. It would see all actions and utterances as potentially subversive, introducing distinctions (temporarily, for the most part) in an otherwise undifferentiated world, drawing boundaries between words, people, and objects so as to release a flow of meaningful relations between them. Myth in such a world does not concern itself with origins as such. An origin story asks the listener to consider the kinds of things that cannot possibly have origins -language, *gender, †clan organization, humanity—and the myths that tell these stories produce an allegorical effect on language itself, a recognition of its contingency and the contingency of the conventional representations established through it. Each story provides an insight, an oblique and novel perspective that disabuses us from the normal, everyday habit of taking our world, our descriptions of it, our way of acting in it, and our beliefs as true, natural and self—evident.
The possibility of such an anti-charterist view of myth was first recognized by *Lévi-Strauss in his classic article, ‘The Story of Asdiwal’ (1976) where he began by commenting on the mythographic work of *Franz Boas. In the early years of this century, Boas, together with his Native American assistant George Hunt, undertook to record, as fully as possible, the myths of the Tshimshian, a people of the Pacific coast of Northwest America. His goal, in analysing this corpus of material, was to arrive at ‘a description of the life, social organisation and religious ideas and practices of a people…as it appears in their mythology’ (Boas and Hunt 1916:320). Yet Lévi-Strauss, in his reinterpretation of one of the myths that Boas collected—the story of Asdiwal—argues that in the formulation of his programme, Boas failed to stipulate a relationship between myth and other social phenomena:
The myth is certainly related to given facts, but not as a representation of them. The relationship is of a dialectic kind, and the institutions described in the myths can be the very opposite of the real institutions. This conception of the relation of the myth to reality no doubt limits the use of the former as a documentary source. But it opens the way for other possibilities; for in abandoning the search for a constantly accurate picture of ethnographic reality in the myth, we gain, on occasions, a means of reaching unconscious categories.
(Lévi-Strauss 1976:172–3)
With this aim in mind, Lévi-Strauss goes on to analyse myths only in relation to other myths—his intent in the four volumes of Mythologiques, his comprehensive survey of Native American mythology. Since their relationship to social organization is at best problematic, myths afford no more than a partial window on ethnographic reality. Myths provide a guide or template, sure enough, but only to other myths, only to other forms of *classification.
Lévi-Strauss approached the question about the relationship between language and world correctly: by rephrasing it as a problem of the relationship between one kind of language and another. He therefore forced us to consider the broader analytic problem of representation itself, and of how anthropologists construe the relationship between myth and the rest of social *discourse, and more generally, between vehicles of representation and that which is represented. Lévi-Strauss sees myth as similar to *music: it shares superficial syntactic and contrapuntal similarities with language but is essentially non-linguistic in form and effect. It could then be said that a myth must stand outside language if it is to represent something other than itself. We would then have to agree, as did Lévi-Strauss, with Richard Wagner, who thought that music and myth have the power to convey messages that ordinary language cannot. But both Richard Wagner and Lévi-Strauss felt that these extra-linguistic forms ultimately functioned to unify and coordinate the †worldview and morality of a community. In other words, though the forms of myth and music are not conventional, their effects are. And this is just another version of the functionalist paradox.
We could say, on the other hand, that myth must stand outside convention by proposing meanings that are interstitial or tangential to it. We would then be taking the position of Roy Wagner who holds that myth does not express conventional significances, it only makes the latter visible by way of its innovative impingements upon them. Thus he says, ‘A myth, a metaphor, or any sort of tropic usage is…an event—a dislocation, if you will—within a realm of conventional orientations’ (1978:255), a formulation that shares much in common with †Clifford Geertz’s notion of the dialectical relationship between the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’, and with †Gregory Bateson’s theories of rules and communication. A similar view has been propounded by Burridge in his landmark study of the narrative of the Tangu people of Papua New Guinea (1959). Myth ‘juxtaposes [images], it does not classify’ according to †Maurice Leenhardt (Clifford 1982:181); it interprets rather than squarely represents, and from this point of view, its role in maintaining some represented social order is more ambiguous and complex than a functionalist or charterist theory would have us believe. Lévi-Strauss himself says, at the end of the last volume of Mythologiques that contre (to tell a story) is always conte redire (to retell a story) which can also be written contredire (to contradict) (1981:644).
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