[Glorantha] Levi-Strauss?

From: John Hughes <nysalor>
Date: Mon Jan 9 02:00:21 2006

Bright Blessings for Sacred Time folks...

We're just back from our summer road trip up the eastern coast. Zoo Meerkats and ocean breakers, the studied silence of trees breathing and a flock of a hundred thousand fruit bats in flight over the ocean at dusk.

[Stumbles into darkness of study, blinks. Turns on poota. Monitor immediately dies - *phht*. Has it been the long break since it was last used, or was it just the recent spell of really hot weather?

(New Years Day was ***47 degrees C*** - the hottest day of my life!)

Drags in alternate monitor, thinks briefly of answering some of several hundred more pressing emails. Nawww... later.]

Jane:

| I've tried Googling Levi-Strauss, and found information overload and a lot
| of ambiguity.

This is the Digest? Ah, good...

Uncle Claude is a revered ancestor, even though no one (outside France) actually writes ethnography or research in his style any more. Our collective debt is massive: the tradition of structuralism transformed and challenged our understanding of culture, in particular kinship and mythology, by teasing out the way the 'savage mind' (not perjorative, its all of us as universal human myth-makers) use cultural symbols to intellectually divide the universe. L-S demonstrated the way that ('lived-in') social systems such as kinship create a mythic ('thought-of') order that reflect the social universe and provide an intellectual vocabulary to structure it and think about it. He also investigated the way they transform over time, and the way that certain core mythic ideas are 'good to think', an intellectual puzzle with a built-in solution.

L-S completed his massive structuralist 'Mythologiques' (remind you of anyone's web domain?) series in the early seventies - a series of books (The Raw and The Cooked, Honey and Ashes, The Origin of Table Manners) that investigated cultures as ideational systems for communicating and constraining meaning. By the end of the decade most western anthropology was calling itself 'post-structuralist'. We'd moved on, but the legacy was enormous. L-S is still used by advertisers in coming up with ad concepts, and its a wonderful game for creating and understanding myths.

Info overload? The basic idea is binary opposition: myths present culturally-determined oppositions and then mediate ('solve) them:

Man :: Woman
Raw :: Cooked
Light:: Dark
Land : Sea

Up : Down

are all pretty universal, but

Maccaw : Ape
City : United
Rough : Smooth
Storm : Moon
Imperialist : Democrat
English : French
Nomad : City-dweller

can also structure the way a person thinks about her world. Basically, myths get into these concepts, set up a series of oppositions, repeat them to emphasise the categories, and then 'mediate' a solution by bringing them into a relationship.

Moon is opposed to Storm as Good is to Evil? A myth might give us examples of Good Moons and Evil Storms, then mediate by presenting a (lesser) Good Storm or a defeated Evil Storm

The analysis works best when dealing with specific cultures and specific stories: the more universal you get the more banal it becomes, one of the reasons for structuralism's short intellectual reign. It's a bit like Joseph Campbell's work: limited real world utility because the theory drowns out the facts, and you can push a lot of square blocks into round holes if you have the inclination. However both are *great* tools for creating games and stories.

For a long time I've been meaning to do a structural analysis of some of the KOS myths to demonstrate how it all works. But not today.

Cheers

John

---

nysalor_at_mythologic.info                  John Hughes

Questlines: http://mythologic.info/questlines/

  May God us keep
  From Single vision and Newton's sleep!

• William Blake, Letter to Thomas Butts, 22 November 1802.

Received on Sun 08 Jan 2006 - 23:04:35 EET