Claude Levi-Strauss

"The Structural Study of Myth" and Other Structuralist Ideas

Claude Levi-Strauss' article "The Structural Study of Myth" is long and complicated, and
contains a lot more information than we need to know for the purposes of this class. What I want
to do today is go over some of Levi-Strauss' most important ideas, some of which are explained
in his article, and others of which are better covered in the chapter on Levi-Strauss
in Structuralism and Poststructuralism for Beginners (abbreviated here as SPSB).

Let's start with some ideas from Saussure that are basic to any structural analysis. Saussure
examined language as a structure, as langue, and his ideas about the basic structures of language
apply to any kind of system of making meaning, whether it's an official "language," like English
or Spanish or Arabic, or just a set of signals or codes, like football referee signals. Such a system
is called a signifying system, and can include any structure or system of organization that creates
meaning out of cultural signs. For example, a work of literature, such as a poem, constitutes a
signifying system; so does any tribal or community ritual (a wedding, a rain dance, a graduation
ceremony), so does any kind of "fashion" (in clothes, food, cars, etc.) and any kind of
advertisement. In fact, just about any part of a culture constitutes a signifying system, as long as
that system contains signs that can be "read" and interpreted, along the lines Saussure laid out: by
determining signification (seeing how signifiers are connected to signifieds) and by determining
value (seeing how a sign differs from all the other signs in the system).

This idea is at the heart of any kind of structuralist analysis. Saussure applies it to language;
Levi-Strauss applies it as an anthropologist, to kinship systems, cultural organizations, and to
myth; Roland Barthes (who is discussed in SPSB) applies this system to a wide variety of
contemporary Western (mostly French) cultural "signs," including food, advertising, and
clothing.

For Levi Strauss and for Saussure, structuralist analysis offers a chance to discover the "timeless
universal human truths" so beloved of the humanist perspective, but using a methodology that
seems much more "objective" and "scientific." For Levi-Strauss in particular, such universal
human truths--what all humans share by virtue of being human--exists at the level of structure.
All signifying systems, all systems of cultural organization, share the same fundamental
structures, regardless of their particular content. So the motive for using structuralist analysis is,
in this sense, the same as the motive for using a humanist perspective: to find out what we all
have in common, or what is (as many of you have asked) "the human condition."
Poststructuralists, by contrast, reject the whole idea of anything being universal or timeless or
essentially "human"--but we'll talk about that more next week.
One of the basic structures that all human societies share, according to Levi-Strauss, is kinship:
every society that has ever existed anywhere has had some system for deciding who can marry
whom, who inherits what from whom, and how all of these relationships are named. Such a
kinship system is a structure that operates like Saussure's langue, containing units (in this case,
men and women, who are labelled as fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, uncles and aunts,
etc.) and rules for connecting those units. Levi-Strauss' analysis of kinship systems (in his
book The Elementary Structures of Kinship) points out two important things. The first, which
we'll come back to in later lectures, is that kinship systems structure how goods, ideas, and
people are "exchanged" within a culture. He specifically notes that kinship systems explain what
he calls "the exchange of women," wherein family groups "give" women to another family to be
a wife, and receive in exchange something of value (a dowry, for example).

More important to us right now is Levi-Strauss' insistence that the relations among units within
the structure occur in binary pairs, which are either similar to each other or different from each
other; this corresponds to Saussure's idea of paradigms, where one thing can be exchanged for
something similar, and syntagms, where one thing is exchanged for something different. This
also corresponds to the idea of metaphor and metonomy: metaphor is establishing a relationship
of similarity between two things (A is like B, or A is B), while metonomy is substituting one
thing for something close to it, related to it, but not it (saying "crown" instead of "king," e.g.).
The main point here is that relations between units of a system can only be analyzed in pairs: you
know A is A because it's not B, and A is not Q, and A is not %, but you can only examine what
A is in a binary pair: A:B, A:Q, A:%. In other words, what's important to Levi-Strauss is not the
identity of any individual unit--he doesn't care what "A" is--but the relation between any two
units compared in a binary pair.

Levi-Strauss' analyses, in his writings on kinship, culture, and myth, often start to look like
algebraic equations because his focus is on relations. SPSB gives the example of clans and
totems, which Levi-Strauss says are only understandable in structural relations to each other
within a signifying system. A tribe may distinguish between an eagle clan and a bear clan, but
the practices of each clan are not related to the animal they're named after, but rather to the
structural relationship between all the possible clan animals. In SPSB, the example is eagle and
bear: what's important is not how eagle people are like real eagles, but how the difference
between real eagles and real bears is reproduced in the differences between eagle people and
bear people. In algebraic terms, Levi-Strauss says, you look not at why A is A, but how A is to B
as C is to D-- units within the system only have meaning in relation to other units, and can only
be analyzed in binary pairs.

In his book The Raw and the Cooked, Levi-Strauss goes further to discuss how binary pairs,
particularly binary opposites, form the basic structure of all human cultures, all human ways of
thought, and all human signifying systems. If there is a common "human nature" or "human
condition," from this perspective, it's that everyone everywhere thinks--and structures their
worlds--in terms of binary pairs of opposites, like "raw and cooked." Even more importantly, in
every binary pair, one term is favored and the other disfavored: cooked is better than raw, good
is better than evil, light is better than dark, etc. Remember this idea for next week when we start
talking about Derrida and deconstruction.

And now for today's reading. In "The Structural Study of Myth," Levi-Strauss is interested in
explaining why myths from different cultures from all over the world seem so similar. Given that
myths could contain anything--they aren't bound by rules of accuracy, or probability--why is
there an astounding similarity among so many myths from so many widely separated cultures?

He answers this question by looking at the structure of myths, rather than at their content. While
the content, the specific characters and events of myths may differ widely, Levi-Strauss argues
that their similarities are based on their structural sameness. To make this argument about the
structure of myth, Levi-Strauss insists that myth is language, because myth has to be told in order
to exist. It is also a language, with the same structures that Saussure described belonging to any
language.

Myth, as language, consists of both "langue" and "parole," both the synchronic, ahistorical
structure and the specific diachronic details within the structure. Levi-Strauss adds a new
element to Saussure's langue and parole, pointing out that langue belongs to what he calls
"reversible time," and parole to "non-reversible time." He means that parole, as a specific
instance or example or event, can only exist in linear time, which is unidirectional--you can't turn
the clock back; langue, on the other hand, since it is simply the structure itself, can exist in the
past, present, or future. Think of this sentence again: "The adjectival noun verbed the direct
object adverbially." If you read the sentence, you read from left to right, one word at a time, and
it takes time to read the whole sentence--that's non-reversible time. If you don't' read the
sentence, but rather think of it as being the structure of English, it exists in a single moment,
every moment--yesterday as well as today as well as tomorrow. That's reversible time.

A myth, according to Levi-Strauss, is both historically specific--it's almost always set in some
time long ago--and ahistorical, meaning that its story is timeless. As history, myth is parole; as
timeless, it's langue.

Levi-Strauss says that myth also exists on a third level, in addition to langue and parole, which
also proves that myth is a language of its own, and not just a subset of language. He explains that
level in terms of the story that myth tells. That story is special, because it survives any and all
translations. While poetry is that which can't be translated, or paraphrased, Levi-Strauss says that
myth can be translated, paraphrased, reduced, expanded, and otherwise manipulated--without
losing its basic shape or structure. He doesn't use this term, but we might call that third aspect
"malleability."
He thus argues that, while myth as structure looks like language as structure, it's actually
something different from language per se--he says it operates on a higher, or more complex
level. Myth shares with language the following characteristics:

1. It's made of units that are put together according to certain rules.

2. These units form relations with each other, based on binary pairs or opposites, which provide
the basis of the structure.

Myth differs from language (as Saussure describes it) because the basic units of myth are not
phonemes (the smallest unit of speech that distinguishes one utterance from another, like a
letter), morphemes (the smallest unit of relatively stable meaning that can't be subdivided, like a
non-compound word), or sememes (the meaning expressed by a morpheme), or even signifiers
and signifieds, but rather are what Levi-Strauss calls "mythemes." His process of analysis differs
from Saussure's because Saussure was interested in studying the relations between signs (or
signifiers) in the structure of language, whereas Levi-Strauss concentrates on sets of relations,
rather than individual relations--or what he calls "bundles of relations."

His example for this is a musical score, consisting of both treble and bass clefs. You can read the
music diachronically, left to right, page by page, and you can read it synchronically, looking at
the notes in the treble clef and their relation to the bass clef. The connection between the treble
and bass clef notes--the "harmony" produced--is what Levi-Strauss calls a "bundle of relations."

Basically, Levi-Strauss' method is this. Take a myth. Reduce it to its smallest component parts--
its "mythemes." (Each mytheme is usually one event or position in the story, the narrative, of the
myth). Then lay these mythemes out so that they can be read both diachronically and
synchronically. The story, or narrative, of the myth exists on the diachronic (left-to-right) axis, in
non-reversible time; the structure of the myth exists on the synchronic (up-and-down) axis, in
reversible time.

Here's an example of how mythemes work. Let's take a standard structure of a myth: there's a
hero faces an obstacle, overcomes the obstacle, and has some (positive) result. Now everybody
write down your own details for this myth. We then list on the board all the variations we've
made of this myth: who's the hero, what's the obstacle, how is it overcome, and what's the result.
The structure of each version is identical, but each variant is unique.

Levi-Strauss would then look at the vertical columns of variants, and try to find some logic that
connects all of the variations. In class, for example, we came up with obstacles like wanting to
make chicken soup but having no chickens, being hungry, being in love with someone
unavailable, and having a class of ignorant students. In each case, there's something incomplete,
some part that's missing that has to be supplied when/as the hero overcomes the obstacle. The
contradiction between "incomplete" and "complete," according to Levi-Strauss, is the cultural
dilemma each version of our myth is trying to solve.

In his example of laying out the Oedipus myth this way, he begins to see, in the synchronic
bundles of relations, certain patterns developing, which we might call "themes." One such theme
is the idea of having some problem walking upright. Levi-Strauss then takes that theme and runs
with it, seeing it as an expression of a tension between the idea of chthonic (literally, from the
underground gods, but here meaning an origin from something else) and autochthonic (meaning
indigenous or native; here, meaning self-generated) creation. He then sees that tension--or
structural binary opposition--as present in myths from other cultures. This, to Levi-Strauss, is the
significance of the myth: it presents certain structural relations, in the form of binary oppositions,
that are universal concerns in all cultures.

This is the subjective part of Levi-Strauss' analysis. We might come up with different
interpretations for what he sees in the bundles of relations. For example, we might notice that, in
one column are different ideas about walking upright; we might interpret that as an anxiety about
physical ability and disability, which is an expression about fitness for survival versus needing
charity and kindness, and then read that tension (between selfishness and altruism) as the
fundamental structure the myth is articulating.

And here's where you can start to see how this structuralist reading might actually apply to
literary interpretation as we know it. Once you've found the mythemes, the constituent units, of a
myth or story, and laid them out in Levi-Strauss' pattern, you can interpret them in an almost
infinite number of ways. (And that, of course, raises the idea that what you choose as mythemes,
or units, and how you lay them out might well vary from person to person, depending on how
you read a story. And this raises the idea that structuralism maybe isn't so "objective" and
"scientific" as it hopes to be, since its basic units aren't self-evident. But Levi-Strauss, like
Saussure, doesn't admit that).

After laying out this basic method, Levi-Strauss goes on to talk about perfecting his system to
make it useful to anthropologists. We don't have to worry too much about this section (pp.815b-
818b) because the details he discusses aren't as relevant to the analysis of literature as they are to
anthropology. In these pages he talks about doing a structural analysis of all possible variations
of a myth. This would be desirable because it would prove that all variants really do have the
same structure, which goes back to Levi-Strauss' initial point that myth is a language, and that
structural analysis can account for any version of a particular myth. To prove his point, he goes
into a rather lengthy analysis of a Zuni myth; this uses the same methods as his analysis of the
Oedipus myth; he also analyzes a Pueblo myth with a similar structure.

He concludes that the structural method of myth analysis brings order out of chaos, as it provides
a means to account for widespread variations on a basic myth structure, and it "enables us to
perceive some basic logical processes which are at the root of mythical thought." This is
important to Levi-Strauss because he wants to make the study of myth logical and "scientific" in
all its aspects, and not to have to rely on any subjective interpretive factors.

On pages 819-820 Levi-Strauss does a structural reading of a Native American myth and
compares it to the story of Cinderella. You might want to think of other myths, or stories, which
would lend themselves to similar structural analyses.

So here, in sum, is what you need to remember from Levi-Strauss:

1. the idea of analyzing units in a structure in binary pairs.

2. the idea that what's important in analyzing these binary pairs is

3. the idea of reversible and non-reversible time, and the idea of reading a
narrative structure (like a myth) as a two-dimensional structure (rather
than simply as linear, as Saussure says).

Do pay attention also to his three final comments on p. 821b. He says that repetition, in myth as
in oral literature, is necessary to reveal the structure of the myth. Because of this need for
repetition, the myth is "slated," meaning it tells its story in layer after layer (see the diagram on p.
815).

However, the layers, or "slates," aren't identical, even though they repeat key elements in the
structure. Because of this, the myth "grows spiralwise," meaning the story it tells unfolds as the
myth goes on. In other words, the myth "grows" as it is told; Levi-Strauss points out that this
growth is continuous, while the structure of the myth, which doesn't grow, is discontinuous. This
is a version of the synchronic-diachronic split mentioned earlier, and of the langue-parole
distinction. Levi-Strauss compares this aspect of myth, that it both grows and remains static, to
molecules (again enhancing the "scientific" nature of his method).

He also says that myths function in cultures to "provide a logical model capable of overcoming a
contradiction." Such a contradiction might consist of believing in two precisely opposite things,
such as chthonous and autochthonous origins, or selfishness and altruism. The important thing
for Levi-Strauss is that every culture has these contradictions, because every culture organizes
knowledge into binary opposite pairs of things, and that these contradictions have to be
reconciled logically (and again, he wants everything to be explainable through logic and
"science).

This is echoed in his third point, on p. 822, that the "logic" of myth is just as rigorous and
"logical" as the logic of science. It's not that science is somehow smarter or more evolved than
myth, but rather that the two modes of understanding and interpreting the world share the same
basic structure (that of logic) applied to different things.

And yes, one might critique this view of Levi-Strauss' by pointing out that his own explanations
favor science over "myth," as he insists that his method of myth analysis is scientific, and
therefore better than other methods. But that's a deconstructive reading, and we'll get to that with
Derrida.

All page numbers in this lecture refer to Claude Levi-Strauss, "The Structural Study of
Myth," in Adams and Searle, ed., Critical Theory Since 1965

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