Myths and folktales are the oral literature of nonliterate societies. Levi-Strauss used structuralism to analyze the these cultural creations of such societies, including their myths. Structuralism rests on Levi Strauss’s belief that human minds have certain characteristics which originate in features of the Homo sapiens brain. These common mental structures lead people everywhere to think similarly regardless of their society or cultural background. The universal mental characteristics are are evolved for the need to classify: to impose order on aspects of nature , on peoples relation to nature , and on relations between people.
According to Levi-Strauss, a universal aspect of classification is opposition, or contrast i.e using binary opposition. Good and evil, white and black, old and young, high and low are oppositions , that, according to Levi-Strauss, reflect the human need to convert differences of degree into differences of kind.
Levi-Strauss has applied his assumptions about classification and binary opposition to myths and folk tales. He has shown that these narratives(myths) have simple building blocks – elementary structures of “mythemes”. He also influenced by Saussure linguistic concept langue and parole structural analysis
Examining the myths of different cultures, Levi-Strauss shows that one tale can be converted into another through a series of simple operations, for example, by doing the following:
1. Converting positive element of a myth into its negative
2. Reversing the order of the elements
3. Replacing a male hero with a female hero
4. Preserving or repeating certain key element
One example is his analysis of the story of Asdiwal, a myth Boas had recorded among the Tsimshian of British Columbia. “The Story of Asdiwal” is Lévi-Strauss’s most commonly reprinted analysis of myth in his Structural Anthropology (1976) . It is a complex story, and the reader is urged to examine the detailed synopsis that Lévi-Strauss provides in his article. Doing little justice to the myth, it can be summarized in the following schematic form:
- (1) During the famine of winter, a mother and daughter, both widowed, leave their respective villages and meet on the banks of the Skeena River where they suffer, finding only a single rotten berry to eat.
- (2) The women are visited by a mysterious stranger, Hatsenas, the bird of good omen. They begin to find food, Hatsenas sires a son with the younger woman, and the culture hero Asdiwal is born.
- (3) After Hastenas’s disappearance and the older woman’s death, Asdiwal and his mother head west to the mother’s native village. There Asdiwal hunts a white she-bear that leads him up a ladder into the heavens where the she-bear is transformed into the beautiful girl Evening-Star, who successfully lures Asdiwal to the house of her father, the Sun. Asdiwal and Evening-Star marry, but only after a series of trials does Asdiwal win the Sun’s approval.
- (4) Asdiwal longs to see his mother and to return to earth, which he does with four inexhaustible baskets of food. Asdiwal commits adultery with a woman from his home village, the marriage with Evening-Star ends, and Asdiwal’s mother dies. Loose of all social bonds, he sets off downstream.
- (5) Asdiwal arrives at a downstream village, marries a woman there, then antagonizes his new wife’s brothers who break camp, taking Asdiwal’s wife with them. Asdiwal meets another band, marries a woman from that band, enjoys fortune, but then, bragging that he can hunt sea lions better than his newest set of brothers-in-law, Asdiwal is stranded on a reef as a large storm occurs. Fortunately, Hastenas appears and Asdiwal is transformed into a bird that can hover above the waves.
- (6) Asdiwal falls asleep exhausted when the storm finally ends, but a mouse wakes him and leads him to the subterranean lair of the sea lion that Asdiwal has wounded. Since Asdiwal’s arrows are magic and invisible, the sea lions think they are dying from an epidemic and are grateful to Asdiwal when he cures them by extracting the arrows. In repayment, the king of the sea lions helps Asdiwal reach land. There Asdiwal carves wooden killer whales that come to life and attack the boats of his brothers-in-law, avenging Asdiwal for their treachery.
- (7) After a long and eventful life, Asdiwal goes on a winter hunting trip when he becomes lost. Asdiwal is transformed into stone where he may be seen on a peak on the Skeena River.
Lévi-Strauss identifies four levels of representations within this myth: geographic, techno-economic, sociological, and cosmological. The myth describes rivers, place-names, famines, postmarital residence patterns, and relationships between affinal kin; these descriptions are arranged a multilayered model of structural relationships.
Lévi-Strauss proposes that there are two aspects in the construction of the myth: the sequence of events that form the apparent content of what happened and the schemata of the myth, which represent the different planes of abstraction on which the sequence is organized .
On the geographic level, there is the basic opposition between east and west, while on the cosmological level, there are oppositions of the highest heaven and the subterranean world. There are integration schema such as water/land and sea hunting/land hunting that cross geographic and cosmological schema. There are sociological schema, such as the changes in postmarital residence patterns from patrilocal to neolocal to matrilocal (for example, Asdiwal’s mother and grandmother leave their husbands’ villages and establish a new settlement, and then in the next generation Asdiwal settles in Evening-Star’s village).
Structural analysis clarifies the multiple levels of meanings in the story of Asdiwal: Lévi-Strauss views the east-west axis as the structural parallel between imaginary and real, and therefore Imaginary/Real, Matrilocal/Patrilocal, Journey West/Journey East, Sea/Land, and Sea Hunting/Land Hunting form parallel oppositions on the different schematic planes of the story of Asdiwal.
The oppositions do not exist in Tsimshian society, “but rather with its inherent possibilities and its latent potentialities. Such speculations . . . do not seek to depict what is real, but to justify the shortcomings of reality, since the extreme positions are only imagined in order to show that they are untenable” (Lévi-Strauss . Yet, these different considerations all reflect a similar underlying structure that shapes the substratum of consciousness