Chapter 4 - Myths without meaning?

Summary

I…claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact and, as I have already suggested, it would perhaps be better to go still further and, disregarding the thinking subject completely, proceed as if the thinking process were taking place in the myths, in their reflection upon themselves and their interrelation.

(Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked)

In this chapter we will focus on a small number of Lévi-Strauss’ key essays and texts rather than trying to offer an overview of everything he has written on the subject. As such, we will concentrate on the essays “The Structural Study of Myth” (1993g); “The Story of Asdiwal” (1994e); the first and fourth volumes on myth namely The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of Mythology I (1992b) and The Naked Man: Introduction to a Science of Mythology IV (1981) as well as Myth and Meaning (2001). It is in these texts that Lévi-Strauss outlines a structuralist approach to myth, engages in an impassioned defence of that approach, suggests certain affinities between language, myth and music and offers a number of rather cryptic statements about the meaning of myth. However, we will defer any analysis of myth and history to chapter six where we will examine Lévi-Strauss’ handling of the question of temporality in terms of his contrast between “hot” and “cold” or “modern” and “primitive” societies.