Structural Analysis

(Tina)Theresa Hannah-Munns
Book Review
Leona Anderson
July 24, 2006

In the book, Myth and Meaning, Claude Lévi-Strauss imposes theoretical interdisciplinary structure onto a hodge podge of academic fields in order to support his theory of structuralism as it pertains to “cracking the code of culture” as seen through the selection and orchestration of the mythic narratives that he chooses to introduce, mostly all from indigenous cultures as polarized against academic culture. This book itself is a melting pot of theory boiled down into a structure fit for a Canadian radio audience originally, now adapted into a book that summarizes Lévi-Strauss’ long career as a structural anthropologist. The key to recognizing his form of structuralism is in the appropriating of theoretical devices from other disciplinary fields in order to analyze borrowed elements, what he calls mythemes or “explanatory cells” (39). These explanatory cells, only a small detail or image from within diversely varied myths, are pulled from their context (along with their action or mini-plotline, thus his label of “mini-myth”) and applied ahistorically within his interpretive models of data.

These models of data, structured to look like he is actually structuring cross-cultural data, are layered to always return to his deeper form of argument – supporting the anthropological center of the academic universe by rotating diversely different scholarly fields into a packaged whole. Thus while classifying crosscultural images and meaning lifted from various cultural myths he is orchestrating a theoretical classification order onto the academic disciplines of religious studies, anthropology, sociology, various fields of psychology, the hard sciences, art, music and linguistics. Interestingly, all this is done in less than 60 pages and with few mythic narrative examples supplied, with most of these contained within chapter three.

Each of the chapters, being originally cast as a radio series, are cast around a set of questions. While the superficial casting of his work is to appear as if crosscultural understanding is his purpose, his deeper purpose seems to be in imposing interdisciplinary order at the theoretical level, with theory being the preferential deeper level that then universalizes his very specific form of structuralism. Within this net of support for academic intellectualization, he thus supports (and counters previous critiques against) functionalism, the ahistorical use of materials, salvage anthropology, and much more.

The pillars of support are within his specific arguments against polar extremes, setting complimentary structure between what has previously been seen as opposite extremes without overlap in the continuum between positions. It is at this level of work that his analysis has done the most benefit for future anthropologists and other crosscultural scholarship. Lévi-Strauss brought forward the continuum of relationships between the dialectic paradoxes, as Wendy Doniger points out in her foreword, of the civilized and primitive savage; myth and science (as well as art); of particularism and universalism (localized and crosscultural); of mind and body, reason and senses; of myth and music; of myth and history; of similarities and differences in patterns; as well as synchronic and diachronic time. While he posits a mediating point between these two poles of relationships, he tends to localize only one concrete position, a third that is imposed onto the negative pole within the interpretation. To concretize this point, Lévi-Strauss only applies the third point of mediation onto the “primitive” within the dyadic relationship between the civilized and the savage rather than find examples of mediation within the “civilized,” or more specifically, within the scholars field of imagination.

This has his form of structural crossculturalism always benefiting the scholar over the subject, anchoring the didactics that he is trying to nuance into further polarization. Wendy Doniger points to his tendency to be a “closet universalist” (xi). I agree in that all the mythic material is from older indigenous cultures that are generalized rather than seen as specific in both time and place (except within his examples supporting his argument for the meeting of myth and history in chapter four) and are held against the one social body of the civilized, which of course is best represented by the position of the scholar.

So Claude Lévi-Strauss has his thesis and antithesis in the social bodies of the indigenous versus the civilized set as two separate entities ahistorically and ageographically universalized. His answer to this dilemma is to then show how “civilized” the indigenous culture is, but not to show how “savage” civilization is. While the “primitives” seem to be given agency within the relationship of theoretical positioning, especially in recognizing indigenous myths that also contain historical renditions, they are still to be studied by the civilized scholar to see if they meet the requirements of academic regulation and are not to be classified on their own agency.

This small book is only a summary of a larger body of previous scholarship that has infused much of the academic interpretive relationship to crosscultural information entering the institution. Like most postmodernists, I see the need to reanalyze and deconstruct the content, sources, assumptions, and conclusions found within the scholarship of Lévi-Strauss while retaining and building on what is truly illuminating from this founder of structural anthropology so that crosscultural understanding can truly be forwarded within the academy.

Structural Charts

Primitive Civilized

-difference maintained

Savage Scientist

Artist

Concrete Scientific

-difference maintained

Illiterate Literate

-difference maintained (any literacy produced by scholars with Indian collaboration)

Totalitarian Particularism

-blatantly wrong -almost always correct (see contradiction in specific/general)

Myth History

-still have to be academically analyzed

Specific General

-his argument not very structured; waves back and forth with context

Nature/Essence Structure

-preferred

Chaos Order

-preferred

Senses Mental

Differently equal explanatory functionings

Myth Music

Language

Science

Reductionist Structuralist

Language

Myth Music

Scholarship Novel Classical Popular

Serial Music