Материал: Nigel Rapport, Joanna Overing, Social and Cultural Anthropology - The Key Concepts (2000)

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story was the vision that separated ‘civilized Europeans’, the upholders of truth and reason, from ‘ignorant pagans’, who became a generalized superstitious ‘other’, whether from India, Africa, or ancient China. All such peoples did not have knowledge because they did not understand the rational laws of the universe (cf. Fabian 1983). Instead they defined themselves, and their relation to the cosmos, on the basis of false religions.

Enlightenment thinkers were not atheists, for the idea was that God had created the world as a perfect, rational machine that then required no further interference from Him. The Bible remained an important authoritative source from which could be derived the universal rules of knowledge. Humans, who also partake of this rationality, could perfect themselves insofar as they progressed in the knowledge of God’s rational design. In other words, since God’s laws of nature are rational, it is through reason that human beings can discover them (cf. Fabian ibid.), as Newton had done through his discovery of the mechanical laws of the universe. The global effort of the Enlightenment was to explain the postulates of other religions as false explanations. Other peoples’ religious texts shed no light upon the causal laws of the world.Thus, this homologized (myth-ridden) ‘other’ took the form of a primitive, unenlightened, and thus backward mentality (cf. McGrane 1989; Fabian 1983). In earlier ages and other places, rationality was but imperfectly realized.The blame for other peoples’ ignorance and defective rationality lay with their religious beliefs (i.e. their myths about reality).

It was this image of difference in mentalities that played a considerable part in the development of modern Europe’s self-image, and at the same time proved to be central to its emerging intellectual and political hegemonic status in the world. By the nineteenth century, God’s design tended to drop by the wayside in accordance with a secularized scientific explanation of the course of the progressive social development of humankind. All religious thought became slowly categorized as mythology. Difference between peoples became a lineal, historical difference, the basic assumption being that the human race is advancing toward a greater perfection, epitomized by Western civilization and its secularized science. In the grand evolutionary schemes of the nineteenth century, human history became transformed into laws of historical development and progress, a classification that fed into all areas of life, morality, politics, arts, technology. All existence got better over time. At the same time the key relation between development and reason was retained. Although there was no God in these schemes, they were just as certain as any religious doctrine of the great chain of being equated with the unfolding of God’s reason. As

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Fabian notes (1983), the nineteenth-century concept of natural law was very similar to the earlier Christian version—and just as value-laden. This myth of modern progress, which told of the West’s achievements through its own rational efforts, called for an end to all mythology, a battle cry, so to speak, for all humankind to achieve a similar mature rationality, and through it an end to history.The bequest to us from the nineteenth century was the idea that modern man, through the realization of perfection and release from myth, could end a historical process that humankind had been undergoing through time.

An anthropological debate: myth, rationality and the savage mind

‘Myth’ as a term has usually been used anthropologically to refer to the narrations told by indigenous peoples about the origins of the world, and all the beings and elements that populate it. Mythic narrations are said to present a totally ‘miraculous world’, a ‘nonsensical anti-world’, the world ‘as it is not’, where identity is fragile and ephemeral, causality perverse, and time erased or distorted. Nonetheless, the amazing events of these narrations also tell of the circumstances in which all features of the world and forms of life came to be, especially human beings, and those agents and elements salient to them. It is through myths that cosmogonic events are unfolded and explored, and thus they relate to a people’s particular metaphysical understanding of why things are as they are.

It might be thought that such a notion of myth would accord positively with an anthropological relativism because of the discipline’s strong perspectival approach. However, anthropology, itself a child of the wedding of Enlightenment with nineteenth-century evolutionist thought, could hardly escape its own parents’ ambitions for domination in matters of reason, truth and scientific respectability. It has also not been immune to the parental paradigms of rationality that sharply distinguished a healthy, adult reality from the dangerous or childish land of fantasy. Anthropologists can believe that powerful shamans are highly intelligent, but not that the shamans’ stories about cosmic rays of paranoia and spirit ogres of the forest are true, or even rational. From its inception, much anthropological debate has been an attempt to deal with the dilemma of how to interpret other peoples’ insistence that gods, demons and spirits exist.

Many anthropologists continue to view mythology as one of those falsities of other cultures that we anthropologists study: myths pertain to the domain of the ‘fantasmogorical’; they are narratives that express the fantasy origins of a people; they contrast with history, which details

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‘truthfully’ the real events of a people’s past. This is a tradition that we have inherited from the rationalists of Classical Greece, further embellished by Enlightenment and nineteenth-century elaborations. It is unsettling that similar arguments over the respective worth of the participatory and the disengaged, the fantastical and the logical, the affective and the intellectual, the contextual and the universal, are alive and well today.

Anthropology’s problem has been that it has found it difficult to shed the Enlightenment project and its specific vision of rationality. Anthropology’s chosen project has been the study of the ‘other’, which by definition became the analysis of the mental aberrations of the ‘primitive mind’. The idea of a ‘primitive rationality’ entails a theory of mind, and presupposes a theory of rational progress through history, within and by reason. Myths, magic and religion all provided testimony to the ways in which the ‘primitive mind’ was unsound in intellect, or at the least lacking in knowledge. With respect to anthropological uses of the term ‘myth’, it is important to note that anthropology had its beginnings not long after the word entered the English language. From the start, what anthropologists have labelled as ‘myth’ or ‘magic’—all those irrational explanations, beliefs and practices of ‘primitive’ folk— have been understood as ‘a problem of rationality’ that must be explained.The general stance has been that while the scientist tells us of reality, the content of myths belongs to the domain of illusions.

Some twentieth-century approaches to myth

In the twentieth century, with the reappraisal of the excesses of evolutionary generalizing, myth was no longer denounced as an absurd and logical scandal. Instead its mysteries and richness became a challenge for science to unravel (cf.Vernant 1996 235). On the other hand, in this anthropological search for the logic of the myth, reason has tended to be found elsewhere—in the reality of the social or political structure, in psychological health, or in thought itself. The idea of the metaphysical paucity of myth itself has continued to hold sway throughout much of the century, and thus mythic statements as such have still been viewed as irrational. (On the ‘rationality debate’ within anthropology in respect of this assumption cf. Wilson 1970; Horton and Finnegan 1973; Overing 1985a; Hollis and Lukes 1982.)

A usual way of categorizing modern anthropological approaches to myth is to distinguish between the functionalist, symbolist and structuralist modes of analysis. Their boundaries are in fact blurred, for functionalists may speak of symbols, and we find structuralists today

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labelling themselves as ‘symbolists’. I shall distinguish instead two broad schools of thought, those forthcoming from Durkheim, and those attached to the structuralism of Lévi-Strauss. This distinction is not wholly satisfactory because of the influence of Durkheim upon the work of Lévi-Strauss. It nevertheless pays tribute to the two powerful thinkers most responsible for the two substantial revolutions in the development of modern anthropology, that is, functionalism in its various colours and formal structural analysis.

Anthropology has been strongly affected by Durkheimian thinking about the role of myth in society. In this view, the stress is placed upon the value of myths to society. The function of myth is not to deliver ‘metaphysical truth’, because, while based on the reality of society itself, its content is irrational and untrue. Rather, it serves to reinforce social cohesion and unity by presenting and justifying traditional order. Mythic discourse reminds a community of its own identity through the public process of specifying and defining its distinctive social norms. Whether or not people believe the irrational content of myth is irrelevant, for its symbols have served a crucial social function in the maintenance of the given social order. The emphasis of Malinowski (1948:84) in his discussion of the role of myth is upon its pragmatic value in enforcing belief.The narratives of myth have the function of legitimating the social structure, providing it with a charter. They especially come into play when the social or moral rule demands justification and sanctity. His stress is upon the social power of myth, and the potency of its use in matters of political concern that have to do with the legitimation of the inequities of privilege and status (ibid.).

The strength of the functionalist framing of myth is that it contextualizes myth within the daily social and political life of the community. Thus myth is seen as one aspect of a wider social framework. However the functionalists also insist that the meaning of myth has only to do with the arena of pragmatic socio-cultural interaction. Malinowski is very firm about the intellectual deficiency of myth: ‘myth is not a savage speculation about origins of things born out of philosophic interest’ (ibid.: 83). In other words, the ‘savage’s’ interests are not philosophical or intellectual, but psychological and affective. In stressing the practical social use of myth, the functionalists have been able to ignore the problem of knowledge and belief, and the ‘illogical’, ‘contradictory’ material faithfully transcribed, but often hidden, in their fieldnotes. Especially in British anthropology, although the social use of myth has been given full attention, the value of its contents has tended to be denied or ignored (contrast, for example, Witherspoon 1977).

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Lévi-Strauss has followed a different route from the Durkheimian one, in that he denies a one-to-one relationship of myth to a specific social world. Myth does not serve to reflect the social structure; its value instead is a cognitive one. His aim in analysing a vast corpus of native American mythology (Lévi-Strauss 1969b, 1973, 1978, 1981) was to disclose myth’s own specific features by treating the entire body of myths as one ‘objective world’ that could be studied in and of itself. In developing his methodology, he drew upon structural linguistics, the allure of which was that its own methodology was acclaimed as the most ‘scientific’, the most akin to the natural sciences, of all the social sciences. Lévi-Strauss distinguished for myth, as the linguists did for language, its surface and underlying structures; and as did the linguists, he also privileged the latter. The meaning of myth is not then to be found on the surface level of speech, understanding and performance, but in the relationships between the myth’s elements that together form an underlying structural system.

For Lévi-Strauss, mythic narrative, as narrative, provides little of value, for as illusion, or mere speech, it is not where meaning should be found. The intentional agent, as myth-teller and creator of metaphor, has no place within his structural analysis. Rather, the meaning of metaphor rests on the level of the unconscious, with metaphor being read as an unconscious, analogical process of classification. Underlying the content of myth there exists an abstract and unconscious cognitive ordering that endows the myth with rationality. The reality to which myth speaks is a universal mode of thought, and not all those stories about creation times and the origin of the world. The story that myth narrates is untrue.

In contrast to the functionalist approach, the major problem in LéviStraussian structural analysis is that myth and its meaning become decontextualized from everyday life. What myth in reality means becomes a topic for scientific specialist knowledge alone. The performative role and dialogics of myth narration are neglected, as are its aspects that pertain to social value, the political, the life of affect, and the (indigenous) philosophical. Because of Lévi-Strauss’s particular scientific project, truth equates with the physical scientist’s postulates of material reality. It also recognizes the objective reality of cognition, but not of speech, the emotions, or the world of values, which he states to be beyond the ken of scientific analysis (Lévi-Strauss 1981); contrast Overing 1985a; Leavitt 1996.

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