Mythologiques
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Mythologiques was written by French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss.
These works are considered more controversial than his previous work, in part because they impinge on the subject matter of other scholars. He believed that modern life and all history was founded on the same categories and transformations that he had discovered in the Brazilian back country – The Raw and the Cooked, From Honey to Ashes, The Naked Man (to borrow some titles from the Mythologiques). For instance he compares anthropology to musical serialism and defends his "philosophical" approach. He also pointed out that the modern view of primitive cultures was simplistic in denying them a history. The categories of myth did not persist among them because nothing had happened – it was easy to find the evidence of defeat, migration, exile, repeated displacements of all the kinds known to recorded history. Instead, the mythic categories had encompassed these changes.
He argued for a view of human life as existing in two timelines simultaneously, the eventful one of history and the long cycles in which one set of fundamental mythic patterns dominates and then perhaps another. In this respect, his work resembles that of Fernand Braudel, the historian of the Mediterranean and 'la longue durée,' the cultural outlook and forms of social organization that persisted for centuries around that sea.
Bibliographical details
- Mythologiques I-IV (trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman
- Le Cru et le cuit, 1964, The Raw and the Cooked, 1969
- Du meil aux cendres, 1966, From Honey to Ashes, 1973
- L'Origine des manières de table, 1968, The Origin of Table Manners, 1978
- L'Homme nu, 1971, The Naked Man, 1981)
