(Tina)Theresa Hannah-Munns
Book Review
Leona Anderson
July 23, 2006
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. (1995). Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture.
This booklet of only 70 pages, including a new foreword by Wendy Doniger, is packed with the mature thought of Claude Lévi-Strauss. In a simple and straightforward format that reads like a travel map because of its original delivery as a Canadian radio series, he talks the reader through his career as an anthropologist who became known as the father of a method of analysis known as structuralism. Lévi-Strauss uses music, linguistics, historiography, the scientific paradigm, and literary narrative to provide translational lenses through which to reinterpret myths and their components based on common deep structure, weaving together diverse fields of study and borrowing analytic tools from each as metaphors on how to view mythic elements that appear crossculturally. Throughout his essays, he also provides autobiographical information as to how he began his career as a leading figure in anthropology and his interest in finding order within the depth of chaos.
The search for commonalities within disorder (without disregarding difference) is a major theme throughout both his personal and professional life and Lévi-Strauss seeks out paradoxes in which to apply his theory of structuralism that includes thesis, antithesis, and synthesis (as he terms, conjugation) in a never ending movement of deeper reinterpretation. Using “explanatory cells” as a reduced “mini-myth” or “mytheme,” Lévi-Strauss creatively interprets one myth by using another, while also setting the stage, or should I say the framework for structuralism, to creatively interpret the act of mythological scholarship with another form of scholarship. Chapter One and Two summarize much of his work through his publications “Totemism” and “The Savage Mind.” Here he focuses on the relationship of myth to science and the dialectics of “primitive” and “civilized” thought. His conjugation of these pairs are parallel, with science equating with “civilization” and mythology with the “primitive,” showing how both of these processes of intellectualization are valid and necessary components to explain the diversity of our multicultural world. On a more humane level of interpretation, the mythmaker as bricoleur (thesis) meets the scientist (antithesis) and the artist (synthesis or conjugationist).
This is structuralism in action: layers of interpretative comparisons, bringing chaos into the scholarly imagination in which to then structure order, especially on the abstract theoretical level of interpretation. Within this small book, very few narrative examples are shared with the audience while theoretical examples of different disciplinary approaches are cross-examined using the subject of how to study mythology. It is the third chapter that is the most grounded in narrative using a wide array of “primitive” myths, mainly, but not exclusively, Canadian in their specifics since this discourse was delivered for a Canadian audience. Here stories concerning twins are brought together with stories about people with harelips (which he connects with feet-first births), and rabbits become the synthesis within the storytelling layer. This is occurring at the same time as he theoretically countering previous criticism of the ahistorical use of the
History and myth are then contrasted with the synthesis of recognizing history within careful examination of indigenous mythological collections, by and for their own lineages preferably. It is by comparing very specific clan and/or lineage spiritual history that Lévi-Strauss then recognizes the synthesis of the two binaries of history and myth, but only from the continued analysis that make up the academic narrative weaving these myths into history.
The last chapter starts by following this same pattern but towards the end becomes inverted: within “Western” societies (17-19th centuries), language divided into music (the sound aspect) and myth (the sense aspect), thus being the metaphor of twins that was the subject of Chapter Three. Historically, I wonder about his dates; to my understanding, mythology as a narrative category is well over 400 years old, especially the Greek and Celtic mythology. Maybe he delves into this aspect within his “The Raw and the Cooked”, but within this book, he never illuminates the history of European lineage that anchors the collection and study of crosscultural mythology. Instead, Lévi-Strauss concludes that myth as an intellectual process was further divided by the novel and now the novel is being displaced by serial music, which I assume is pop music. On that conclusive note, all I could do was sit with one more question among the many that were aroused: what does academic structuralism replace?
