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Rationality and the Structural Analysis of Myth
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2009
Extract
These comments are intended not as criticism of Steven Lukes' conclusions, with which I mainly agree, but to raise some questions about their further implications and suggest some answers to these questions (1).
The questions arise when we stand back and look at the entire set of positions on the matter of rationality represented by Lukes' five paradigms and his own argument. They fall easily into two groups, composed of the first four and the last two, counting Lukes' position as the sixth. The first group consists of the views of practising anthropologists primarily concerned with understanding and explaining certain quite specific sorts of peculiar beliefs. In approaching their task they make various assumptions about rationality, about the relation of modern scientific thought to primitive magico-religious thought, and about the type of attitude towards these alien forms of mentality which is appropriate to the scientific endeavour. The second group contains the views of philosophers reflecting on the methods and theories of anthropologists, emphasising the philosophical character of the problems they take up out of this reading, and which they treat with the techniques of linguistic or logical analysis. They are less interested in the specific peculiarities of certain primitive beliefs than with the formal criteria by which any different sets of beliefs can be logically classified and compared. And they are less concerned with understanding and explanation than with the assumptions made about the philosophical status of, and typical relations between, different sets and sorts of beliefs when understanding and explanation are seen as problematic. Thus the second group concentrates more exclusively on a higher-order inquiry than that with which the first group was centrally concerned (despite the fact that Lukes has successfully isolated this level of inquiry out of the less focussed methodological reflections of the anthropologists). The question can therefore be raised, how far the positions on rationality are detachable from the various explanatory methods and theories which are associated with them in the first group, and what implications for understanding and explanation, if any, follow from the positions on rationality adopted by the second group.
- Type
- Sympathy for Alien Concepts
- Information
- European Journal of Sociology / Archives Européennes de Sociologie , Volume 8 , Issue 2 , November 1967 , pp. 272 - 281
- Copyright
- Copyright © Archives Européenes de Sociology 1967
References
(1) S. Lukes, Some Problems about Rationality, supra.
(2) Lukes, , Op. cit. p. 264.Google Scholar
(3) Lévi-Strauss, C., “La Geste d'Asdiwal” (École Pratique des Hautes Études, Section des Sciences Religieuses, Extr. Annuaire 1958–1959, pp. 3–43)Google Scholar. Reprinted in Les Temps Modernes, in (1961)Google Scholar, translated by Mann, N.in Leach, E. (ed.); The Structural Study of Myth and Totemism (A.S.A. Monograph No. 5) (London, Tavistock Publications, 1967).Google Scholar
(4) Lévi-Strauss, , op.cit. (E.P.H.E.).p. 13.Google Scholar
(5) Ibid. pp. 13–14.
(6) Ibid. p. 21.
(7) Ibid. p. 29.
(8) Ibid. pp. 27–28.
(9) Lévi-Strauss, , op. cit. p. 30.Google Scholar
(10) Ibid. p. 31.
(11) Ibid. p. 32. The exact theoretical relationship between the sociological and techno-economic levels of existence as determinants of social being and consciousness is no clearer in The Story of Asdiwal than in Lévi-Strauss' other writings. Nevertheless the interpretation given here seems to be the message delivered by the convergence between the obvious analysis and its latent content, otherwise what is the relevance of section vii? That the economic level of analysis is less detailed than the sociological I take to be due to the author's primary aim of relating the myth to the findings of Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté (Paris, P.U.F., 1949).Google Scholar
(12) Are these contextually-given criteria of rationality an example of Lukes' rationality (2)? The mythic events depend for their sense on these criteria, which in turn depend on the particular context of the myth and its associated beliefs. But they also contain a universal component, and this is apparently the source of the myth's structural logic. The residue of non-rational assumptions is context-dependent only in a causal, sociological sense, and there seems little justification for calling this ‘rationality (2)’. May not rationality (2) turn out to be a useful provisional category, representing a last resort for native thought and a first approximation for anthropological analysis?