Structure and Process in the Interpretation of South American Myth:
The Arawak Dog Spirit People
(Originally published in American Anthropologist, edited and revised)
Lee Drummond
Center for Peripheral Studies
www.peripheralstudies.org
Abstract
Recent work on oral narrative has emphasized differences in textual and performative approaches, which in turn has tended to widen the distinction between two fundamental categories of anthropological thought: structure and process. This essay argues that, at least for the interpretation of South American myth, an integrated approach is essential. After reviewing the epistemological basis of current problems in myth studies, the essay attempts a structural analysis of myths with the theme of a metamorphic conjugal union between human and nonhuman. Processual considerations are introduced in the form of syncretic myth, and the argument is advanced that there exist syncretic transformations of a structural nature. Identifying these provides the beginnings of a bridge between structure and process, and leads to an examination of the performative context of the subject myth. Other narrative genres, dealing with explicitly ethnic concepts, are implicated in the processual sequence of the telling and interpretation of the tale. The attempted synthesis of structure and process in narrative analysis leads to an engagement with two difficult problems: the relationship between ethnicity and kinship; and the transition from myth to history.
Introduction
The subject of this essay is a syncretic myth of clan origin collected by the author from an Arawak Amerindian of the upper Pomeroon River, Guyana. In the process of interpreting the myth, I explore certain complementarities and contradictions in two major approaches to the study of symbolic systems. These approaches are structural analysis and, less readily labeled, an approach that I will call processual, but that has also been called by various writers contextual, performative, or interpretive.1 My purpose here is not to use one approach as whipping post for the other, but to demonstrate in the course of the topical analysis of the Arawak syncretic myth some of the possibilities and impossibilities of bringing both approaches to bear on what seem to be fundamental issues at the present state of myth studies. In the order they are discussed here, these issues are: (1) the problem of meaning: the analysis of myth as “ideal language” vs. “meaning as use”; (2) the use of the concept of “transformation” in the analysis of oral narrative; (3) the articulation of myth and social structure, and in particular here the place of myth in sociocultural change; (4) the relation between myth and history; how myths and other genres of oral narrative fit into performative and historical sequences.
The Problem Of Meaning:
The Analysis Of Myth As “Ideal Language” vs. “Meaning-As-Use”
As Boon and Schneider (1974) have observed, the growth of a large secondary literature on the works of Lévi-Strauss makes it difficult to view his work as a corpus in terms of its internal consistency and major premises (and the difficulty is made the more acute since we are here confronting a hermeneutical elaboration of a dialectical system). I do not propose to add to that hermeneutical literature here by summarizing poorly what has already been stated in detail elsewhere. My purpose in this section is rather to identify an epistemological postulate that seems to underlie structural analysis taken as a genre of anthropological thought, a postulate that is fundamental to the arguments developed by Lévi-Strauss in Mythologiques and by others who have applied his work in later structural studies of oral narrative. It is a postulate, I believe, that is recognized or intuited by anthropologists who, while impressed (if not awed) by the analytical power of structuralism, nevertheless feel a sense of unease upon completing their reading of an elegant structuralist analysis, a feeling, to borrow a culinary metaphor, that dinner is over but the meal remains uneaten. If my identification of the postulate is correct, it follows that we are dealing with a paradox: the strength of structural analysis is also its greatest weakness.
To expound the paradox it is necessary to look first at the strengths of the approach and then attempt to discern in them the origins of our suspicions. Probably the most profound contribution structural analysis has made to the study of oral narrative, developed systematically in Mythologiques and begun in the works of Propp (1968) and de Saussure (1959) is the elucidation of an incredibly rich semantic universe, a world of meaning, previously hidden in what were rather condescendingly regarded as fantastic tales (Frazer 1911), inept attempts to explain the nature of the world and human existence (Tylor 1958; Müller 1881), outpourings of a repressed Id (Freud and Oppenheim 1958; Roheim 1951), or rationalizations of custom (Durkheim 1961; Malinowski 1948; Radcliffe-Brown 1964). By establishing, in intricate detail, the semantic content of myth, Lévi-Strauss has rescued mythology from the dustbin of anthropology and helped to propel the nearly moribund subject of comparative religion (lamented as late as 1966 by Geertz) to the forefront of anthropological debate. By insisting upon the prominence of classificatory thought and analogical reasoning in mythic conceptualization, Lévi-Strauss makes the relations and operations of metaphor, metonymy, conjunction, disjunction, and transformation (formerly the specialized tools of the literary critic or the logician) the bases of a theory of a rational unconsciousness.2
. . . thanks to the myths, we discover that metaphors are based on an intuitive sense of the logical relations between one realm and other realms; metaphor reintegrates the first realm with the totality of the others, in spite of the fact that reflective thought struggles to separate them. Metaphor, far from being a decoration that is added to language, purifies it and restores it to its original nature, through momentarily obliterating one of the innumerable synecdoches that make up speech. [1969:339]
Whether one chooses to view the relentless classificatory force of the human intelligence as an innate feature of the mind3 or as the generative code of a public, accessible symbol system (which I happen to prefer), it is clear that the compelling beauty of Lévi-Strauss’ structural analysis consists in its affirmation that the bewildering corpus of Amerindian mythology is, at bottom, an eminently rational, meaningful integrality.
Yet it is precisely this affirmation of meaningfulness in myth that introduces the question leading to the identification of structuralism’s epistemological postulate: In what does the meaning of myth consist? I believe it is the answer to this question, or the failure to provide what could be accepted as an answer, that creates the disquiet felt by critics of structural analysis. And this is the paradox, that a theory celebrating meaning should stumble on the problem of meaning.
The problem of meaning arises for structural analysis in the statement of its epistemological postulate: recombination is the essence of the intelligibility of myth. A corpus of myth acquires semantic properties by virtue of the several narrative sequences it contains being in relationships of opposition (conjunctive or disjunctive) to one another. For any set of myths, their intelligibility thus depends on their having both similarities and differences in their narrative elements or sequences. This is why the concept of transformation is the vital core of structural analysis: absolute uniformity and non-repetitive variation are equally antithetical to the transformation principle, which posits repetitive variation in a closed system (Piaget 1970:10-13). If a set of myths made the same points over and over,
(a, b, c, d,) . . . (a, b, c, d) . . . (a ,b, c, d),
there would be no semantic process that formed the set into a system.4 At the other extreme, a set of myths that contained no repetitive element or sequence,
(a, b, c, d) . . . (w, x, y, z) . . . (h, i, j, k),
would be a totally arbitrary collection, and hence unintelligible as a system.5
A transformational system falls between these extremes of uniformity and uniqueness, since its internal differentiation is a result of the recombination of a limited number of elements,
(a, b, c, d,) . . . (w, x, y, z) . . . (a, x, y, d).
Although the importance of the transformation principle for the structural analysis of myth has been noted by others (see, for example, Leach 1970 and Maranda and Maranda 1971: xxiii-xxiv), the point needs underscoring in the present discussion. For it is the transformational properties of oral narrative sequences that allow the mythologist to pass from a treatment of them as a series, or syntagmatic chain, to a concept of myth based on the internal paradigmatic order of the sequences. And it is this conceptual leap, foreshadowed by Propp (1972) and made explicit by Lévi-Strauss, that makes it possible to identify the source of the meaning that myth possesses.
Two syntagmatic sequences, or fragments of the same sequence, which, considered in isolation, contain no definite meaning, acquire a meaning simply from the fact that they are polar opposites. And since the meaning becomes clear at the precise moment when the couple is constituted, it did not exist previously, hidden but present, like some inert residue in each myth or fragment of myth considered separately. The meaning is entirely in the dynamic relation which simultaneously creates several myths or parts of the same myth, and as a result of which these myths, or parts of myths, acquire a rational existence and achieve fulfillment together as opposable pairs of one and the same set of transformations. [Lévi-Strauss 1969:307]
The “dynamic relation” that is the key to the meaning of myth is the principle of transformation or operation as employed in the logician’s treatment of the generative principle of relationship (Langer 1953: 195, 202, 268).
Tracing the source of myth’s semantic properties to a concept of logical operation accounts for Lévi-Strauss’ insistence that he is not concerned with cognition, and for his rejection of the thinking subject in favor of a mathematical model of myth as code:
Mythological analysis has not, and cannot have, as its aim to show how men think . . . I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men’s minds without their being aware of the fact. . . . it would perhaps be better to go still further and, disregarding the thinking subject completely, proceed as if the thinking process were taking place in the myths, in their reflection upon themselves and their interrelation. For what I am concerned to clarify is not so much what there is in myths (without, incidentally, being in man’s consciousness) as the system of axioms and postulates defining the best possible code, capable of conferring a common significance on unconscious formulations which are the work of minds, societies, and civilization . . . [1969: 12]
Suspicions of Chomskyan or biocultural innateness are put to rest here; the human mind is known through its symbolic products, and these comprise a code which the mythologist understands by erecting a “denotative semiology” (Hjelmslev 1961), a metalanguage of myth.
The metalinguistic aspects of Lévi-Strauss’ structural analysis of myth are amplified by his choice of a logico-mathematical style of presentation. The selection accords with his view of myth as a code consisting of axioms and postulates. While he acknowledges at the outset of Mythologiques that his use of mathematical symbols is more convenient than rigorous, he couches his disclaimer in terms that recommend continued use and refinement of the logico-mathematical model.
Above all, the rough classifications (mathematical symbols) that I have used because they were the instruments that came to hand must be refined by analysis into more subtle categories and applied methodically. Only then will it be possible to subject myth to a genuine logico-mathematical analysis; and in the light of this profession of humility, I may perhaps be excused for having thus naively attempted to sketch the outlines of such an analysis [1969:31].
We are left with the impression that Lévi-Strauss feels his logico-mathematical analogy will, by a refinement of methodology and extension of research areas, become a systematic theory of mythological semantics.
At this point I would like to draw the reader’s attention to parallels between Lévi-Strauss’ nascent logico-mathematical model of myth and the ideal language philosophy of Whitehead and Russell in Principia Mathematica (1955) and the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1923). Despite obvious differences in subject matter,6 Mythologiques, the Principia, and the Tractatus are brilliant examples of the metalinguistic, or ideal language, approach which seeks to dispel the inherent ambiguity of natural (ordinary) languages by creating a set of unambiguous, “ideal” propositions based entirely on logical relations and operations. Hence the “transformations” and “binary operators” of Mythologiques, the “elementary propositions” of the Principia, and the notion of proposition as “what is the case” in Tractatus. The ideal language approach conceives meaning as a logical property contained in ordinary language but obscured by its unsystematic nature, so that the true meaning of utterances in ordinary language can be determined only by translating, or reformulating, them in a logical and precise code about language, or, a metalanguage. The problem of meaning is then solved in ideal language philosophy by identifying the unit of meaning — the minimal requirement necessary for an utterance or expression to have meaning — as the relation. The simplest relation, identity (A is A), may be used as the basis for positing other relations or operations of conjunction, disjunction, and transformation, expressed as propositions in an unambiguous metalinguistic code. The postulate of recombination rests on the identification of meaning as relation, and in turn forms the basis for the semantic edifices of Mythologiques.