Lévi-Strauss and the Structure of Myth and Ritual: La Pensée Sauvage (1962)
Lévi-Strauss’ earliest monograph on the structure of myth and ritual was La Pensée Sauvage (1962), translated as The Savage Mind (1966). In this work, Lévi-Strauss develops Durkheim and Mauss’ insights found in Primitive Classification and in Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life.
Two Foundational Observations
Lévi-Strauss begins from two core observations:
- Small-scale cultures appear to draw on the natural world in an apparently random or arbitrary way for symbols which represent ideas, values, or fears characteristic of that community.
- There is nonetheless an apparently universal desire to impose order on the world through schemes of classification.
Ethno-Taxonomies and Classification Schemes
The characteristic form of such classificatory schemes is illustrated in the Navaho example below. Lévi-Strauss outlines numerous examples of what have become known as ethno-taxonomies from traditional societies in Africa, South America, and elsewhere.
Navaho Classification of the Natural World:
Living Things are divided into two broad categories — Those with Speech and Those without Speech — further cross-cut by a second axis of classification which draws correspondences between living beings and natural entities:
- The sky is associated with the crane
- The sun is associated with a songbird
- The mountains are associated with the eagle
- Water is associated with the heron
He notes these classifications are often botanically or zoologically accurate or, as one might prefer to state, accord with Western taxonomies. The Navaho classification differs significantly from Western taxonomies, however, in the existence of another order (or axis) of classification, by means of which the Navaho draw equations or correspondences between living beings such as animals and plants, and natural entities such as sky, sun, mountains and water. It is on the basis of such correspondences that plants and animals are used in ritual.
The Arbitrariness of Symbolic Associations
Different cultures construct different sets of correspondences, and each particular set appears arbitrary. Consider the following examples:
The Iban of South Borneo contend that the cry of the crested jay sounds like the crackling of burning wood and so, if it is heard, is taken to signal success in clearing forest for swidden cultivation. The alarm cry of the trogon, another bird, is said to sound like a dying animal, and therefore to signal good hunting.
The Osage of North America associate the eagle with the land rather than the air — because eagles are associated with lightning (a form of fire), fire is associated with coal, and coal comes from the ground.
As Lévi-Strauss observes, many other systems of the same type would have been equally coherent, and no single system of divination from bird calls could be chosen by all cultures. Only the history of the culture can explain why certain associations have been chosen over time.
“It is not the elements themselves but only the relations between them (i.e. the structures) which are constant.” — Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (1966: 53)
There are no archetypal, universal symbols. If the same symbols appear among different cultures, it is either through diffusion, or because the intrinsic properties of the symbolic objects have suggested the same associations to members of different historical traditions. Lévi-Strauss concludes, following Durkheim, that the place in which objects are put within any system of significance is more important than their intrinsic properties. The same object may be used in very different ways.
The Universal Desire for Order: Cognitive Classification
Somewhat contentiously, Lévi-Strauss concludes that ‘primitive’ people are driven by an insatiable desire to impose order on the world — an argument subsequently developed by Mary Douglas in her book Purity and Danger (1966), and to a lesser extent by Sahlins in Culture and Practical Reason (1976).
Any disruption to their system of classification will cause the system to be readjusted, in order to avert the primeval cognitive chaos which threatens to overwhelm them.
Hypothetical Example: Suppose there were a totemic society with two clans called the Bears and the Turtles. If the Bear clan died out and the Turtle clan increased in size, in order to restore the two-part structure, the Turtle clan would split into two, known by two different species of turtle (perhaps as freshwater and saltwater turtles).
Totemic classifications are, as Durkheim realised, codes for conveying messages in which social groups can be represented in terms of their animal emblems (Lévi-Strauss 1966: 76).
Totemic Operators: Maintaining Symbolic Equations
Ethnography shows that such symbolic associations can be expressed in a number of ways:
- In native North America, clanspeople may be said to be like their totem in behaviour (the Fox clan is cunning, the Moose clan timid).
- In Australia, clanspeople may be forbidden from eating their totem, since that would be tantamount to eating their own kin.
Lévi-Strauss termed such rules ‘totemic operators’ — they function to maintain the significance of the symbolic equations. It is the ‘operators’ which turn the cognitive structures into structured interaction.
Totemism and the Indian Caste System: A Structural Comparison
Perhaps the most interesting chapter of The Savage Mind is that in which Lévi-Strauss shows that totemism and the Indian caste system, despite their association with very different social systems, have logical structures which are similar in their organisation. They differ in that one is the mirror image, or converse of the other.
Both the exchange of women and the exchange of food between groups can be seen as logical ‘operators’ which maintain the distinctiveness yet interdependence of the groups.
Totemic Clan System:
- Marriage rule: Exogamous — each clan exchanges marriage partners with other clans
- Emblem: The totemic animal species (clan guardian or transformation of founding ancestor)
- Exchange medium: Women (in marriage alliances)
- Ritual function: ‘Increase rites’ — supposed to increase the totemic species for the benefit of other clans
- Status: All clans are equal
Indian Caste System:
- Marriage rule: Endogamous — marriages take place within the caste
- Emblem: Occupation (farming, pottery, weaving, etc.)
- Exchange medium: Products of labour (inter-caste exchange)
- Ritual function: Pollution taboos — artificially creates a system of occupational interdependence between castes
- Status: Castes are ranked hierarchically
Through ritual, rather than practical work, the totemic clan exploits its special relationship with its totem to perform ‘increase rites’ which its members (mistakenly, from a Western perspective) suppose will increase numbers of the totemic species to benefit other clans. In a contrary fashion, by supposing that higher castes will be polluted by contact with the occupations of lower ones, the Indian culture artificially creates a system of occupational interdependence between the castes present in a local community.
Both cognitive systems postulate that the division of society into groups is paralleled by a division of the non-human world into species or the products of work. Yet in one case the species are natural, and wrongly thought to be subject to increase through ritual, whereas in the other the artefacts are genuinely human-made. In one case, women provide the means of linking groups in alliance; in the other they are kept within the group. In one, all clans are equal in status; in the other castes are ranked.
Broader Transformations of the Same Logical Thought
The comparison of caste and totemism shows that the same type of logical thought or modus operandi can be found behind social structures traditionally regarded as totally dissimilar.
- European folk tales portraying animals as individuals with the characters of humans (the wise owl, the timid rabbit) can be seen as yet another variation or transformation of this type of thought.
- Other cultures use the parts of the human body to represent aspects of the environment, such as the points of the compass, or kinship relationships.
In all these cases, it is the relational structure — not the content — that remains constant across cultural variation.
Key Concepts at a Glance
Ethno-taxonomy: Indigenous systems of classifying the natural world
Totemic operators: Rules such as food taboos or behavioural mimicry that maintain symbolic equations
Structural constant: Relations between elements remain fixed even as specific elements vary across cultures
Cognitive order: The universal human drive to classify and impose structure on the world
Converse structures: Totemism and caste are mirror images — same logical structure, opposite operators
Levi-Strauss’analysis of South American mythology
Lévi-Strauss: Later Work on South American Mythology and Structural Analysis
In his later work on South American mythology, Lévi-Strauss looked in considerable detail at the myths of neighbouring peoples across the Amazon Basin. The parallels that he found between such myths convinced him that the symbolic systems they revealed were not, as he had earlier thought, completely arbitrary but ‘motivated’ by their natural properties or the way they were commonly used by the peoples of the Amazon.
Animals eat raw food, but people cook it. The invention of cooking thus becomes a metonym (i.e. a part exemplifying the whole) for the origin of culture. Animals mate at random (Lévi-Strauss believes) but people construct marriage alliances; thus the first men to exchange their sisters also originate culture. Marriage exchange also becomes a metonym for culture.
Lévi-Strauss did not suppose that such myths had any historical validity. It was, indeed, irrelevant to a myth’s cognitive value whether it related a genuine historical event or an imaginary one. In this, Lévi-Strauss agreed with the Functionalist rejection of history.
Recurring Mythical Themes: Honey, Tobacco and the Raw-Cooked Opposition
Lévi-Strauss identified a number of mythical themes which recurred throughout lowland South America, each culture having a distinct variant.
Some South American bees make deliciously sweet honey, “so much so that the eater of honey wonders if he is savouring a delicacy or burning with the fire of love. These erotic overtones do not go unnoticed in myth” (Lévi-Strauss 1973: 52). Honey has another property: it is eaten raw. To cook honey would be to mistreat it. Cooking honey is therefore sometimes equated in myth with incest. Equally, refusing to give honey to someone else is associated with incestuous behaviour. The exchange of food parallels the exchange of marriage partners (Lévi-Strauss 1973: 27, 43).
Tobacco is another unusual substance. It has to be burnt to be consumed. In one sense, then, honey and tobacco are conceptually opposed: one is untreated by culture, the other is over-processed.
A three-part cognitive structure can thus be imagined, in which honey, cooked food and tobacco each stand for more general ideas:
Lévi-Strauss’ Model for the Symbolism of Food:
- Honey — Nature / Incest / Promiscuity
- Cooked Food — Culture / Cross-cousin marriage (culturally regulated exchange)
- Tobacco — Spirits / Over-processed / Beyond culture
Key Myths and Their Structural Logic
One myth recounted by Lévi-Strauss depicts the jaguar as the giver of a wife to the first men. He behaves courteously, protects his brother-in-law and allows men to steal his fire; whereas the men keep all the meat they have hunted for their own use and indulge in unrestrained intercourse with the wives they have been given. The animal behaves like a cultured human; the humans behave savagely. By inverting normal behaviour, cultural categories are thrown into relief.
Another myth describes how honey was acquired while people were still animals — which is what one might anticipate, as honey does not have to be cooked. The myth extols hunting and gathering. While cooking meat epitomises the origin of culture, people who exceed the bounds of culturally accepted behaviour are burnt alive.
One myth describes how the villains are burnt alive in a prison into which tobacco smoke is injected. In another, tobacco originates from the ashes of a hero burnt on a funeral pyre. Inhaling tobacco instead of exhaling it for the spirits causes people to be turned into animals.
The Scope and Reach of Structural Oppositions
There is no doubt Lévi-Strauss was able to show striking parallels between the symbolic oppositions found in different cultures. In fact, he appears to have a Midas touch, so that whatever he reads falls into a universal scheme of oppositions and equivalences. Leach pointed out that the history of the kings and queens of England can be retold in the form of Lévi-Straussian structural oppositions. Henry VIII was a strong man who had many wives, while Elizabeth I was a strong woman but celibate. Elizabeth was succeeded by James, a weak man with one wife.
A fieldwork example from Australia further illustrates the reach of these patterns. Sam Woolagudja, a Worora man of the Western Kimberleys, told the following myth accounting for moiety exogamy:
“There were two men called Wodoy and Djunggun. They agreed to give each other their sisters in marriage. Wodoy started ceremonial exchange by giving Djunggun a sacred object he had made, and telling Djunggun he must fetch him honey in return. But Djunggun was lazy, and immediately reciprocated with another sacred object to discharge the debt. Then Djunggun started cooking wild honey to eat himself. Wodoy said, ‘that’s not the way… you’re spoiling good tucker’. Wodoy took a stick and killed Djunggun, and they were both transformed into birds (Owlet and Spotted Nightjar).”
Although Lévi-Strauss’ structural oppositions sometimes appear artificial or strained, he has undeniably drawn attention to widespread patterns in culture.
Criticisms of Lévi-Strauss’ Theory of Myth
- How Significant is Variation in the Telling of Myth?
Lévi-Strauss’ data suffer from the same weakness as Radcliffe-Brown’s. Just as Radcliffe-Brown failed to observe the minutiae of daily life in the field, so the South American myths Lévi-Strauss analyses are derived almost entirely from secondary sources, often from missionaries who may not have been good anthropologists.
Lévi-Strauss tends to assume each culture consists of a Durkheimian ‘collective consciousness’ such that any member can be asked for the ‘myth of X’ and will give the same account. Where variants occur, he treats them as irrelevant because the same structure is represented.
Detailed ethnographic studies have invariably shown the situation to be more complex. Biebuyck’s account of the ritual expert among the Lega of the Congo gives outstanding examples. The expert dazzles his audience by showing how many different interpretations he can derive from one object handled during ritual:
- The beak of the hornbill may be used to evoke the proverb ‘the chick, the tender care of both mother and father’, telling people that even bad children should not be neglected.
- Or it may evoke the proverb ‘Hornbill, the miserable one, has tried to imitate the call of animals’, ridiculing a man aspiring to join the Bwami ritual association who has failed to accumulate sufficient wealth.
- The spotted hide of the genet may evoke ‘bad kinship, here light coloured, here dark coloured’, or remind people that as the genet’s coat is stained by spots, so living people are affected by the deeds of their ancestors (Biebuyck 1973).
Giddens argued that structure and performance interact (Giddens 1979). Speech and the performance of rituals are real; language and the structure of the ritual system are inferred. It is through novel performances that culture is changed — each new reading of the hornbill beak or the genet’s coat will change the way in which Lega participants at an initiation understand future occasions when such objects are produced. Giddens calls this process ‘structuration’.
Each time a legend is told it takes a particular form which depends on the speaker’s interests and the level at which he or she wants the anthropologist to understand its references to initiation, ceremonial exchange, clans’ title to land, and so forth. Members of the community share ideas about what is an acceptable performance of the legend, but there is no standard ‘text’ against which other performances are judged.
Even in the 1950s, Kaberry and Leach showed how different parties to a political dispute in Cameroon or Burma may tell a myth of origin in different ways so as to justify their claim and dispute that of their rivals (Kaberry 1957; Leach 1954).
- Structuralism as ‘Code Breaking’
A more serious criticism of Structuralism is that it attempts to decode exotic cultures — to show that familiar messages can be found behind unfamiliar signifiers. Lévi-Strauss believed that, by sitting in his study in Paris and reading books about South America, he could penetrate the symbolism of exotic myths. This was because he believed the myths embodied structures that were a direct product of universal cognitive structures, by which the human mind made sense of the world — a belief taken from Durkheim and Mauss’ work on primitive classification.
“Myths operate in men’s minds without their being aware of the fact.” (Lévi-Strauss 1970: 12)
The same themes appearing in the myths of different people can be analysed as variants of a single myth.
However, suppose that Amazonian people make sense of the world in a wholly unfamiliar way — what they read into the myth will be very different. This is illustrated by the following anecdote: during the mid-1970s, the Australian government decided that the national anthem would no longer be ‘God Save the Queen’. Many argued the new anthem should be sung to the tune of ‘Waltzing Matilda’. Reporting the debate, a left-wing paper (The Melbourne Age) summarised it as ‘a song about the eternal struggle of the common man against the forces of property and power’, whereas a right-wing paper (The Australian), on the same day, characterised it as ‘a song describing how a sheep thief is brought to justice by the forces of law and order’. This kind of interpretive variation has also been shown to be characteristic of Aboriginal Australian culture (Morphy 1984; Keen 1994).
The Structuralist Critique of Marxism
Structuralists have convincingly shown that human social action is meaningful because it is expressive of cognitive structures. Weber took issue with Marx on this point in his foundational study in interpretative sociology, asking whether people’s consciousness was, as Marx claimed, wholly determined by their place in society, or whether beliefs existed independently of social interaction.
Weber asked why a devout commitment to Protestant Christianity had become associated with the growth of capitalism in Western Europe. He argued that Protestant beliefs — and the practices they advocated, such as condemnation of indulgence in the arts and self-denial for future gain — already existed in the teaching of Calvin (1509–64). These were taken up by the emerging middle class during the Industrial Revolution because they could be used to validate the ethic of hard work and investment in the future. What was, in Weber’s assessment, a chance coincidence of an existing set of beliefs and new economic practices led to the paradox that a class of people engaged in intense material economic activity also became deeply religious.
Sahlins: From Marxism to Structuralism
Despite having published a Marxist analysis of social processes in Stone Age Economics (1974), Sahlins turned to a Structuralist analysis two years later in Culture and Practical Reason (1976). Marvin Harris traces Sahlins’ interest in Structuralism to the time he spent with Lévi-Strauss in Paris between 1967 and 1969 (Harris 1979: 233).
Sahlins contends that individuals and social groups, in struggling against one another, transforming nature, or organising their life in common, bring into play a system of concepts which is never the only possible one and which nonetheless defines the very form of their action (Sahlins 1976a: 20). The environment or subsistence economy can never wholly determine the form of a people’s beliefs and values, and yet the way in which they interact will be determined by their values and beliefs.
Sahlins considers that non-Western societies pose this problem for analysis in particularly acute terms. In contrast to Western society, ‘Archaic’ societies appear relatively unchanging, or impervious to history. He takes the example of the culture of island communities in eastern Fiji, where he had himself conducted fieldwork.
Sahlins found the structure of eastern Fijian culture to be characterised by pairs of opposed concepts:
- Chief versus Commoner: commoners own the land, but the chief protects it and is given tribute.
- Sea versus Land: chiefs are associated with the sea, commoners with the land.
- Patrilineal descent versus Matrilateral kinship: secular authority is transmitted in the male line, but ritual authority is held by the children of women born into the group.
When a Fijian house is built, its form reproduces the structure of the culture in microcosm. It has a ‘chiefly side’ facing the sea and a ‘commoner side’ facing the land. Representatives of the chiefly category build the noble side; representatives of the commoner category build the landward side. If only members of one settlement are involved, a subdivision of the moiety comes into effect. “The house functions as the medium by which a system of culture is realised as an order of action.” (Sahlins 1976a: 36)
The same is true of economic exchange. Goods are classed into spheres of exchange according to whether they are considered chiefly or common, sea or land, male or female. The economic basis of society is therefore not determinative of the social order but becomes the realisation of a given meaningful order. “Any cultural ordering produced by the material forces presupposes a cultural ordering of these forces.” (Sahlins 1976a: 39)
When a new village was created in the late nineteenth century, founded exclusively by master fishers attached to a chief — all ‘sea/chiefly’ people — the villagers achieved reproduction of the dual structures by deeming the first arrivals more landward, and therefore tantamount to commoner, than those who came later.
Structural Marxism: Reconciling Marx and Lévi-Strauss
The approach of Structural Marxism attempts to reconcile Marxism and Structuralism. Sahlins claims that in his earlier writing, Marx would not have wholly disagreed with the Structuralist argument. A mode of production includes concepts of exchange and property rights. Marx considered that becoming a slave, or using machinery as capital equipment, is only possible within certain social formations (Sahlins 1976a: 133).
In Sahlins’ assessment, Marx’s material determinism grew as he became increasingly committed to bringing about a transformation of society. However, Sahlins’ reading of Marx is an unlikely one. Marx’s early writing was explicitly directed against Hegel’s theory that social change is driven by transformations in human ideology. Marx’s argument was that one can only experience the condition of being a slave or a factory owner where the material conditions of society allow (see Marx 1973 [1857–8]: 156; Marx and Engels 1970 [1845–6]: 42).
Sahlins on Hawaii: Structure, History and Colonial Encounter
Although Sahlins contended in 1976 that the structure of culture defuses or emasculates the impact of historical change, his later analysis of the colonisation of Hawaii takes a position closer to that of Giddens, conceding that Hawaiian cultural structures entered into a dialectic with the economic and political exigencies of colonial conquest.
“Culture is a gamble played with nature.” (Sahlins 1985: ix)
Sahlins argues that Captain Cook’s first two visits to Hawaii coincided with the feast of the god Lono, which celebrated the regeneration of nature. The Hawaiians’ reaction to Cook and his crew, which appeared bizarre from a Western perspective, was entirely comprehensible when interpreted in the light of Hawaiian belief. The outcome of their behaviour — in particular the spread of venereal disease and the influx of anxious Protestant missionaries who sought to eradicate what they regarded as twenty forms of illicit intercourse — was entirely beyond the Hawaiians’ control and ultimately compelled a radical restructuring of Hawaiian culture.
The Arbitrary Dimension of Culture: Mary Douglas
The Structuralists are undoubtedly right in claiming there is an essentially arbitrary dimension to human culture. In the course of human social evolution, patterns of social interaction have been extended well beyond the limits of biological kinship, and languages have developed as elaborate but arbitrary codes for transmitting information.
Mary Douglas has applied Structuralist theory to an understanding of economic behaviour in the West. She argues that all advances in social anthropological theory have come about through cutting interpretation free from the material and biological level of existence (Douglas and Isherwood 1979: 59):
“Forget that commodities are good for eating, clothing, and shelter; forget their usefulness and try instead the idea that commodities are good for thinking; treat them as a non-verbal medium for the human creative faculty.” (Douglas and Isherwood 1979: 62)
Cultures have come into being because different communities within the same species have, by consent or negotiation, accumulated distinctive sets of conventional strategies in the organisation of behaviour and the attribution of meaning to actions. This, in Douglas’ view, is the proper level for social anthropological analysis:
“Instead of supposing that goods are primarily needed for subsistence… let us assume that they are needed for making visible and stable the categories of culture.” (Douglas and Isherwood 1979: 59)
Sahlins argued that North Americans avoid eating horse and dog because they are classed as almost human — named and loved by their owners — and not because it is uneconomic to eat them. It is, however, questionable whether the freedom to use goods to think with is absolute, and the limits which may be imposed upon it remain a subject for further analysis.