Reading myths as variations on limited themes governed by an underlying grammar, comparable to language, that classifies experience and eases social contradictions.
In lecture order, as Marci Shore presents each view. The time opens that minute of the lecture on YouTube.
Across human cultures, including oral and indigenous ones without large written literatures, myths rework a limited stock of themes and share constant structures that operate like a language.
Put simply Lévi-Strauss: across human cultures, including those that pass stories on by word of mouth, myths rework a limited set of themes. They share constant patterns that work like a language.
Myth has a grammar: its smallest units combine by rules analogous to those of language, and that grammar is built into the human mind itself.
Put simply Lévi-Strauss: myths have a grammar. Their smallest parts combine by rules, as sounds combine into words, and that grammar is built into the human mind.
Myths are instruments by which a culture sorts and orders its reality.
Put simply Lévi-Strauss: myths are tools a culture uses to sort and organize its world.
A myth works as an imaginary resolution of a contradiction that is real in social life.
Put simply Lévi-Strauss: a myth settles, in imagination, a conflict that is real in a society's life.
In the text The phrase "imaginary resolution of a real contradiction" is Fredric Jameson's (The Political Unconscious, 1981, ch. 1), developed from Lévi-Strauss's reading of Caduveo face painting in Tristes Tropiques.
The crisis that opens many myths is one of too little difference, not too much: boundaries blur, distinctions collapse.
Put simply Lévi-Strauss: many myths open with a crisis of too little difference, not too much. The lines that keep things distinct blur and break down.
In the text In "The Structural Study of Myth" (1955), Lévi-Strauss writes that "mythical thought always progresses from the awareness of oppositions toward their resolution"; "a crisis of distinctions" is Girard's phrase in Violence and the Sacred.
Lévi-Strauss is captivated by man in the abstract while caring little for actual, particular men.
Put simply Geertz's criticism: Lévi-Strauss is fascinated by humanity in general but cares little for actual, individual people.
1 link between claims that both use the term. Each shows the earlier claim, then the later one that answers it. “Our inference” marks a link Shore does not state outright.
Lévi-StraussMyth has a grammar: its smallest units combine by rules analogous to those of language, and that grammar is built into the human mind itself. L19 · 45:18
GeertzLévi-Strauss is captivated by man in the abstract while caring little for actual, particular men. L19 · 50:45
Geertz charges that Lévi-Strauss's universal structures of mind seek abstract Man, not actual people.
Terms that appear in the same claims.