7 - From myth to music

Summary

In the preceding chapters, I have shown that although Lévi-Strauss's aesthetic reflections may appear to belong to digressions, to the margins of his anthropological work, in reality they often continue to preoccupy Lévi-Strauss even when this is not manifest at the surface of what he writes. They provide a hidden connecting thread to the various questions that are at the core of structuralism. The very concept of structure was in part inspired by Lévi-Strauss's contemplation of a dandelion. The event is said to have taken place in 1940 when, as a young soldier, he was posted on the Luxemburg border. That a concept seemingly as technical as that of structure should be linked to this moment of symbiosis with nature is symptomatic of the way in which Lévi-Strauss's writings intertwine multiple and seemingly divergent sources of inspiration (I have discussed the naturalist derivation of the notion of transformation in chapter 5).

In this chapter and the next, I will focus on Lévi-Strauss's writings on Amerindian myths, in particular the four-volume series of the Mythologiques (1970, 1973b, 1978c, 1981; 1964a, 1966a, 1968, 1971a). In this work, Lévi-Strauss formulates one of the key twentieth-century theories of ‘primitive’ myth, providing new hypotheses about the nature of mythical discourse, the processes of creation behind it, and its place and function in human society. The new ideas that he has proposed, which I will outline below, have had a profound impact on anthropology and contemporary thought in general. Yet, in many ways, they remain misunderstood.