Lévi-Strauss expanded his search for structure by turning to the
study of myth because “the elements of mythical thought . . . lie
half-way between precepts and concepts” (1966:18), relying on
both concrete situations and the notions to which they refer.
Mythical thought “builds up structured sets, not directly with
other structured sets,” but by using the odds and ends of experience, building “ideological castles out of the debris of what
once was a social discourse” (Lévi-Strauss 1966:21–22). Thus,
“the myth is certainly related to given facts, but not as a representation of them. The relationship is of a dialectic kind, and the
[social] institutions described in the myths can be the very opposite of the real institutions” (Lévi-Strauss 1976:172). It is, therefore, incorrect to see myths as reflections of social reality; rather,
they are created transformations of social existence. “The conception of the relation of myth to reality,” Lévi-Strauss writes,
“no doubt limits the use of the former as a documentary source.
But it opens the way for other possibilities; for, in abandoning
the search for a constantly accurate picture of ethnographic reality in the myth, we gain, on occasions, a means of unconscious
categories” (1976:173).
In The Raw and the Cooked, Lévi-Strauss lays out his hypothesis explicitly:
Mythology has no obvious practical function: unlike the phenomena previously studied, it is not directly linked with a different kind of reality, which is endowed with a higher degree
of objectivity than its own and whose injunctions it might
therefore transmit to minds that seem perfectly free to indulge
their creative spontaneity. And so, if it were possible to prove
in this instance too [as in the case with kinship classifications]
that the apparent arbitrariness of the mind, its supposedly
spontaneous flow of inspiration, and its seemingly uncontrolled inventiveness imply the existence of laws operating at
a deeper level, we would inevitably be forced to conclude that
when the mind is left to commune with itself and no longer has
to come to term with objects, it is in a sense reduced to imitating
itself as an object. (1969b:10, emphasis added)
If basic unconscious structures were found in myth, then that
might reflect the existence of fundamental mental structures that
provide the organizing categories of cultural phenomena.
Mythology was the subject of four volumes in his series of
Mythologiques (literally “logics of myth”): The Raw and the
Cooked, From Honey to Ashes, The Origin of Table Manners, and The
Naked Man. The series, as Lévi-Strauss points out, progressively
expands its geographic focus, beginning with myths from central and eastern Brazil and then expanding to much of South
America and moving north to focus on North America. In a parallel manner, the studies treat progressively more complex problems considered by different myths (Lévi-Strauss and Eribon
1991:135). Lévi-Strauss also addressed the complex problems reflected by myth throughout his writings.
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, published in the second volume of
Structural Anthropology (1976) and in several edited collections
(Bohannan and Glazer 1988; Dundes 1984; Leach 1967). 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 1976:149–152)
Lévi-Strauss identifies four levels of representations within
this myth: geographic, techno-economic, sociological, and cos-
mological. The myth describes rivers, place-names, famines,
postmarital residence patterns, and relationships between affinal
kin; these descriptions are not distorted reflections of reality, but
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 (1976:161–165). 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:
Asdiwal’s two journeys—from east to west and from west to
east—were correlated with types of residence, matrilocal and
patrilocal, respectively. But in fact the Tsimshian have patrilocal residence, and from this we can . . . draw the conclusion
that one of the orientations corresponds to the direction implicit in a real-life “reading” of their institutions, the other to
the opposite direction. (Lévi-Strauss 1976:173)
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
1976:173). Yet, these different considerations all reflect a similar
underlying structure that shapes the substratum of consciousness.