Lévi-Strauss - Myth and Meaning

Ever since the advent of science in the seventeenth century, we have rejected mythology as a product of superstitious and primitive minds. Only now are we coming to a fuller appreciation of the nature and role of myth in human history. In these five lectures, the distinguished social anthropologist, Claude Lvi-Strauss, offers the insights of a lifetime spent interpreting myths and trying to discover their significance for human understanding.

Entitled Myth and Meaning, the talks were broadcast on the CBC Radio series, Ideas , in December 1977. They were assembled from a series of lengthy conversations between Professor Lvi-Strauss and Carole Orr Jerome, producer in the Paris bureau of the CBC. The programs were organized by Geraldine Sherman, executive producer of Ideas , and produced by Bernie Lucht.

The lectures have been expanded for publication to include some material which, for reasons of time, could not be used in the original broadcasts. The spoken words have been minimally edited to make them conform to the more rigid conventions of print. Carole Orr Jeromes main questions to Professor Lvi-Strauss, which helped shape the course of the lectures, were as follows:

CHAPTER ONE

Many of your readers think that you are trying to bring us back to mythical thought, that we have lost something very precious and that we must try to gain it back. Does this mean that science and modern thought must go out the window and that we must go back to mythical thought?

What is structuralism? How did you arrive at the idea that structural thought was a possibility?

Is it necessary to have order and rules to have meaning? Can you have meaning in chaos? What do you mean that order is preferable to disorder?

CHAPTERS TWO AND THREE

There are those who say that the thinking of so-called primitive people is inferior to scientific thinking. They say that it is inferior, not because of a matter of style, but because, scientifically speaking, it is wrong. How would you compare primitive thought with scientific thought?

Aldous Huxley, in his discussion in Tbe Doors of Perception , said that most of us use only a certain amount of our mental powers and the rest of them are completely shut away. Do you feel that in the kind of lives we lead today, we are using less of our mental capacities than the people you write of who thought in a mythical fashion?

Nature shows us a variegated world, and weve tended to pick up on the differences between us rather than the similarities in the development of our cultures. Do you think we are developing to a point where we can start closing many of the divisions that exist between us?

CHAPTER FOUR

There is the old problem of the investigator who changes the subject of his investigation by simply being there. In looking at our collections of mythological stories, do they have meaning and order of their own, or has order been imposed by the anthropologists who have collected the stories?

What is the difference between the conceptual organization of mythological thinking and that of history? Does the mythological telling of a story deal with historical facts, then transform them and use them in another way?

CHAPTER FIVE

Could you talk in general about the relationship between myth and music?

You have said that both myth and music stem from language but evolve in different directions. What do you mean by this?