Now, get excited -- we're about to talk about a couple of theorists who are (to me) two of the most interesting of the bunch. That's because Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes both talk about mythology, though in two rather different ways.
As I have said, Lévi-Strauss was a pioneer in structural anthropology. This means that he more or less did to human culture what we have seen Saussure and Jakobson do for human language. But in language the structural units are things like words, phonemes, morphemes, syntagms, and other things with strange names. What are the structural units in human culture?
One answer to this question is another word no one ever uses unless they're talking structuralist theory: the mytheme. That sounds a little like phoneme (which is a discrete unit of sound in language), only with myth- as the prefix. So it must be a discrete unit of.. myth? Now what would that be?
Think of mythology as a kind of language. In language, you combine the discrete units (words, etc.) together, and only in doing this choosing and combining of units can you create meaning. Similarly, with myth, you combine the discrete units of a myth (specific characters, settings, "plot" devices) together to create meaning. Great.
At this point, this might not sound all that exciting to you, because it sounds an awful lot like what we've been talking about for this whole section on structuralist theory. And that's because it is an awful lot like it. But there are some interesting points here that may not be immediately obvious to you...
Decentering the Subject
First, Lévi-Strauss argued that basically all myths and mythologies consist of the same few stories over and over again, just in different forms. With all the surface-level differences of myths between cultures, they are all essentially the same at their core. Also, he argued that by structurally analyzing culture and myth, you can look behind the surface phenomena and see the "universal mental operations" that created them. In other words, the human psyche. That's kind of neat to think about, right?
Well, for this theorist, there were other implications to this idea that you might be less thrilled about. For Lévi-Strauss, humans don't create myth; it's not a creative human process. Instead, myth creates itself through humans. The myth is already there, just waiting for humans to pick up on it. This is what allows it to be universal in the first place, because all human beings are equally capable of accessing this predetermined wellspring of mythology.
Okay, maybe that doesn't sound so great. We are not the source of meaning in mythology. Hmm.. This is what a lot of theorists have referred to as "decentering the subject," and a lot of noise has been made over this issue in the past century. The focus of all this theory is not on the individual, the human subject. This "decentering" involves a move away from individualism and toward an idea of the social construction of the subject -- how the structures of human organization determine who or what you are. The focus here is on some sort of objective, collective mythology that has a logic all its own, without regard to human creativity or thought. Wow.
This "decentering the subject" business will be referred back to more than once through this guide. But for now, let's move on to our final point for the man of the hour, Lévi-Strauss.
Binary Oppositions
Here's where that idea of difference so important in structuralism comes most into play, and sadly, what also got structuralism into so much trouble with later theorists.
Lévi-Strauss argues that the structure of mythology, as well as culture in its entirety, is built upon a structure of binary oppositions. Again, here's a fancy term for something that's actually not that difficult to grasp. Every sign, mytheme, whatever, has to be understood in terms of how it's different from all other signs -- but also, it has a sign, mytheme, or whatever that is its exact opposite. This is how humans classify and organize their experience. So, to give a few examples:
life light order presence
death darkness chaos absence
In myth, you have the hero and the villain. The good guys and the bad guys. [Flash forward: This is where the structuralists slipped up. Good vs. bad, us vs. them thinking can lead down a slippery slope, as we will see later with post-structuralism.]
So, we've talked a little about human culture, and about mythology. Our next stop is Roland Barthes, who also dealt with mythology, but with a semiological approach instead of an anthropological one. But before that, as always, let's recap the new terminology.
Review Your Terms:
structural anthropology mytheme decentering the subject binary oppositions
References
Collins, Sue. "Structuralism." Michigan Technological University. Course on Popular Culture. Houghton, MI. March 2011. Lecture.
Eagleton, Terry. "Chapter 3, Structuralism and Semiotics." Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. 79-109. Print.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Structural Anthropology. New York: Basic Books, 1963. Print.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. "From Tristes Tropiques." Trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman. Norton Anthology of Theory & Criticism (1st Edition). Eds. Vincent B. Leitch, et. al. New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 2001. 1419-1427. Print.