Anthropology of Religion: The study of Myths based on Alan Dunde's and Lévi-Strauss's articles

Résumé du document

This essay is based on Alan Dundes's article Earth-Diver: Creation of the Mythopoeic Male and Claude Lévi-Strauss one The Structural Study of Myth. With Levi Strauss and Alan Dundes's works we have two examples of different approaches to study myths in anthropology. Both of them seem to have in mind the same definition of myth as a 'sacred story', definition that is commonly shared between anthropologists. They both use a different anthropological approach: Levi Strauss represents a structuralist approach whereas Alan Dunde represents a psychoanalytical one. I will try to highlight the differences between their respective methods but first of all we can underline that they share some common points.

Extraits

[...] Anthropology of Religion: The study of Myths based on Alan Dunde's and Lévi-Strauss's articles This essay is based on Alan Dundes's article Earth-Diver: Creation of the Mythopoeic Male and Claude Lévi-Strauss one The Structural Study of Myth. With Levi Strauss and Alan Dundes's work we have two examples of different ways to study myths in anthropology. Both of them seem to have in mind the same definition of myth as a sacred story'', definition that is commonly shared between anthropologists. [...]

[...] Then why do myths would only come from deviant feeling or bad aspects of human minds? Levi Strauss opposes the psychoanalytical theory by saying that it leads to too easy analysis of dreams. According to Levi Strauss, whatever the myths the psychoanalytical explication would be that the mythology reflects the social structure and the relationship. If the experimental facts are not reflecting that means that the feelings are repressed. Here we can oppose Aland Dundes that in some ways he finds the meanings to be found in myths even before the investigation. [...]

[...] Once the anthropologists have succeeded to find the gross constituent units'', he has to put them in columns according to their main themes. By this way he will be able to define the bundles of relations inside the columns and between the different columns (chronological and diachronic reading). That's the core of the Levi's Strauss theory that the meaning of myths comes from the combination of the different elements. So here Levi Strauss succeeds to avoid the kind of mistake done by Alan Dunde which is to find a single meaning to a myth and to justify it only thanks to symbols. [...]

[...] First of all, the psychoanalytical approach focuses on the symbolic aspects of a myth and not on its historical or cultural aspects. The idea is that all human beings share unconscious biological attributes which are opposed to the social constraints and are expressed in myths. Myths are the products of the human mind and then can express directly the universal characteristics of the invariants and universal mechanisms of human minds and not only symbols: Recurrent myths have similar meanings irrespective of specific cultural context To justify this approach, Alan Dundes uses a precise example with a theory on the Earth-diver myth. [...]

[...] An other evidence of the universality of myths would be that they are easily understandable by other cultures even with a bad translation. To explain the myth and those similarities anthropological studies have focus not on the content but on the underlying structure of the myths. The aim of Levi Strauss is to give a method to do so. According to Levi Strauss the anthropologists have to decode the myths, to find out the essential elements that constitute a myth and then to analyze the relations between the different elements underlined. [...]