[Glorantha] Levi-Strauss?

[John Hughes]

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.