Now is an opportune time to return
to the idea of our toolbox. You recall a few lectures ago,
we introduced the idea of functionalism. And I told you that we'd use that as
a tool, pick it up out of our box, tinker with myths when we ran into
something that we needed some help with, and see how that worked and
put it back in our box, and eventually, we'd start
to fill that box up. Although, I want to add another tool
to our toolbox with this lecture, and that's the tool of structuralism. Structuralism. It comes to us from a man
named Claude Levi-Strauss. His dates are 1908 to 2009,
a towering figure in the last century. Of pivotal importance in
the field of anthropology, also important in lots of other fields,
psychology, sociology, literary studies, and
surely also in the study of myth. What the structuralists
are interested in is, as you would guess from the name,
structures of things. And sometimes people will immediately
start thinking about the structure of cultural forms or the structure of
narratives, that kind of thing. But we need to start with the first
structure in order to get a grip on what they're telling us, and that's the
structure of this thing, the human mind. Structuralist noticed that all of human
culture is the product of this thing, and therefore, it should reflect the
structure of the thing that produced it. How then does the human mind work? Well, Levi-Strauss, in an incredibly
prescient kind of observation, said that the most salient characteristic
of how we process information as human beings with this amazing organ that
we have, the mode by which this organ works the way it does at its most core
elementary level is a mode of binaries. It works according to on, off, yes,
no, pairs of opposites that we use to structure our basic
understanding of the world. All the other more complex forms
of understanding that we have are the result of extra binaries
layered on top of binaries. So, for example, some folks will say
not everything is black and white. Yeah, indeed,
there's lots of shades of grey. But every single shade of grey is made
up of certain amounts of black and certain amounts of white. And as if we needed anymore proof that
a binary language can encode lots of cultural information, well, my goodness, look at the format
we're working in right now. It would be impossible to do
what we're doing right now if a binary language wasn't capable
of carrying very subtle messages. In this case, we've got a lot
of information that's coming through the sounds that's being encoded
into binary language sent out over wires through the internet
to your speakers. The light that's being
emitted from our studio here going into the camera lens made
into a binary code and sent out to you. So we,
living in the computer age that we do, have seen this very pressing
observation of Claude Levi-Strauss in the middle of the last century
proved absolutely true. That binary languages are indeed capable
of very subtle kinds of expressions. So, Levi-Strauss was really
interested in this, what he said was the moment of binary origination
of information in the human mind. Now let's take a thought experiment, one
that Levi-Strauss himself did not do, but might be electritive. Think of a human infant, its world is
probably a pretty rudimentary one. We'll let our colleagues out there in
infant psychology make this picture much more complex. But imagine the infant's world,
that is at some point in its life, notices that there's this creature
out there that seems to have eyes, and has emotional responses,
and engages with the infant, and brings food, and brings the sounds and
all kinds of fascinating things. And when that figure is around, the
infant's life seems to be enriched, and wonderful, and quite exciting,
and interesting. And then sometimes, that figure's gone. My goodness, what just happened? The world is now all of a sudden
a completely different place. That figure that was there
is now all of a sudden gone. Well, what have we just experienced? Well, Levi-Strauss and
the structuralists would tell us we have here hit on a core anchoring
binary of an infinite experience, that is sometimes there is mommy and
sometimes there is not mommy. That core binary is in experiential
moment that lies at the center of an expression of an obviously very
rich and complex set of ideas. But it starts its origination and its expression in that
kind of rudimentary form. Now all of cultural stuff,
according to the structuralists, is going to be expressed, and at its core,
it's going to have some binary opposition that is coming through
no matter how complex, and elegant, and rich, and strange, and subtle,
and nuanced the story might be. Our myths at their core, all of them are going to have some binary
opposition that's driving them forward. And if you'll have a look at our friend
over here, you'll realize that yes, indeed, we have already snuck in
a structuralist reading in our class. When we had a look at books 9 through 12
and claimed that what we saw was a set of myths, anchored around a pair of opposite
ideas between what counts as food and what counts as not being food, we were
indeed doing a structuralist reading. Now, let's go back and reverse
engineer that just a little bit and try to figure out how it is that
structuralism goes about its work. First of all, a structuralist is not
going to be interested in the temporal diachronic dimensions of a myth. The way a narrative unfolds, the back and
forth of the time as it goes forward, the diachronic dimension of things,
is not of interest to them. Instead, they're interested
in the structural pieces, the atoms that make up
the molecule of the narrative. They break them apart and say, okay, which of these is a representation
of one side of a binary and which of these is a representation
of another side of the binary? The order in which they come,
the sequence of events in an area, that's not something that a structuralist
really necessarily cares about. Instead, it's just which aspects,
which parts of the narrative reflect one theme and which parts of the narrative
reflect the opposite theme, okay. Secondly, a structuralist
is interested in the myth, and makes the claim that
a myth will have a meaning, not in so
far as its particular details give us some complex expression of some cultural forum,
but instead, in the relationships
among these details. So, we're not going to look at how it is
that the voyage of Odysseus moves from one kind of culture to a different kind
of culture to another kind of culture. Or how he gets involved in
the relationships that he does with the different kind of people and creatures that he runs across
as he's making his voyage. But instead, we're going to look at
the relationships among those features. How does the one feature over here
relate to the other feature over there? And you can see as we've done in the
reading of food and not food, it's not so much what is being eaten or not eaten
in one spot and what is being eaten or not eaten in another spot. It's that, that of that distinction
between something that's okay to eat and something that's not, that's the one
that's the most important thing. So the relationship among the items in
the story is the most important thing, not the details of any
particular element in the story. Now, there's going to be, for a structuralist, a certain kind of
universality that's reflected in myth. But the universality is not going to
have to do with the specific details of the themes that are talked about. So, some people when they look for
universalities will say, oh, yes, all human beings
think of water in x way or all human beings code the sun as
being a certain kind of symbol. The structuralist, when the structuralist
goes through a process of pressing toward universals, what we always do is,
and not with that sort of looking at a single item and talking about it
as having some specific meaning, as if there's like a dictionary of
symbols or something like that. Instead, what they claim is that human
beings tend to put the same pairs in opposition from culture
to culture to culture. And that's where we're going to look
to find the universality of them. What kinds of pairs of opposition
are we going to find in this? Well, according to the structuralists, we're going to find some that are
consistent across many different cultures. This leads us to our next point. What counts as
a structuralist binary pair? Well, what a structuralist winds up doing,
almost always, is hunting for
some pair of opposition that is anchored in some biological part of our
experience of being human. It's not going to be a structuralist
pair based on a complex cultural form, something that resides in the very
specific nuances of how one culture negotiates its way through
the question of being human. It's going to be a binary that's
anchored in basic fundamental human experience at a level
of our biological cells. So for example,
things like food and not food. That's a kind of example of the binary
pair that a structuralist goes to, has a biological dimension to it. Questions about habitat. What kind of environment do
people live in and thrive in? Questions about reproduction,
a basic biological process. These are going to be fertile ground,
pardon the pun with reproduction, fertile ground for finding binary pairs of oppositions
that structuralists are interested in. Things like kinship relationships. So, as human beings, we come from
somewhere, and we have mothers, and we have fathers. And, we try to find relationships
among all those groups. There are also things like siblings and
cousins, aunts, and uncles. These kinship relationships get expressed
in universally across human cultures. And, this is the point at which
the structuralist is going to start to get interested in them. So biological pairs of oppositions are the
pairs of oppositions that we're going to be most interested in, as structuralist
are going to be anchored in some biological aspects of
what it is to be a human. Final point about our oppositions,
for structuralist, the opposition between the two things
that we're looking at does not reconcile. It's not as though the myth was made in
order to happily bring these two binary pairs of opposites together. Well, gosh, no. Remember what happened in our previous
reading of the myths and books, stories and
books 9 through 12 of the Odyssey? We're not talking about making it okay for
food and not food to kind of blend together. No, the whole point for the structuralist
is the anxiety that the possibility of these two things coming together
creates these binary pairs of oppositions are things that you and I, as humans,
declare and insist are true. Sometimes, we were into experiences
where that existence of truth is of rounds up against a question mark. And we say, wait a minute, maybe these two opposite things
are actually not entirely opposite. Maybe they come together. Maybe there's some gray
area in between them. Maybe it's not black and white. When the binary pair is threatened, and there is some reconciliation between the
two, that's just when the anxiety comes. And the anxiety for
the the structuralist is behind the myth. It's like an oyster being
bothered by a grain of sand, and when that oyster is bothered by a grain
of sand, that's when you get the pearl. A structuralist says, when a human being
walks through its life with a very stable pair of oppositions anchored
to its biological self, that it thinks are a core piece
of what it is to be human. And then all of a sudden there's some
piece of its reality that says that you know that binary pair of opposition that
you think is very firm, strong, hard, and fast distinction? Well, here's some examples, or
it seems a little funny, or it's a little bit strange. That causes anxiety. And then anxiety is then filled in,
it's not really papered over and it doesn't disappear, but
it's filled in by a story. When people get nervous, they talk. Same thing is happening according to
a structuralist when myths are being created. When we're getting nervous about whether
the distinction between food and not food could really actually be one
where there's a lot of gray area, we start telling stories about places
where that gray area is being exhibited, and that, yes, indeed,
it gets overcome, and we get reminded of the importance of
keeping these two things separate. So the structuralist is not going to go
about trying to reconcile the opposites. So, how to be a structuralist,
what are you going to do? Well, there's a basic thing that you want
to do which is we go binary hunting. You head out and you try to read
a myth that's in front of you. First of all, get rid of that narrative
part, toss out the logic of the story, look at all of the features
that are in the story. What are the elements that make it up? Break them apart, try to find columns in
which they line up, and find columns that have opposite dimensions into which we
can pair all the pieces of the myth. The best structuralist reading is the one
that provides two opposite categories into which the largest number
of features in the myth can fit, and that does so
in a way that leaves no remainder. So, we explain all the important
pieces of the myth, all the most important piece in
the myth through our two categories. We find places for
all the features of the story. These are anchored in opposite pieces of
what it is to be human from a biological inflection. And then,
we claim that we have found the myth. There's a kind of ta-da moment when
your structuralist says, yeah, I've figured it out. This is what's making this myth tick. Unlike a functionalist,
for a structuralist, there is a kind of secret
key at the core of any myth. And that key is a binary
pair of oppositions. And to read the myth, to interpret
it properly is to find the key. The key is going to be in the form
of the right pair of binaries. Now, some people are going to say,
wait a minute, does that mean that there's one single pair of binary oppositions
at the core of any given myth? Well, for a structuralist,
the answer is pretty much yes. There is going to be a single pair. It could be that there
are several different kinds of pairs that work pretty well, but the
structuralists will claim that there is some core anchoring one at
the base of all of them. And when one person proposes
one pair of oppositions, another person proposes a different one,
they start, and they have a conversation. And they say, okay,
you think it's this, well, this other thing seems
to work pretty well. And then there's a conversation
where they say, actually, what we realize is that there's some
further anchoring pair of binaries at the very core of both of
these statements of ours. A conversation about which binary is
the most fundamental is the way we evaluate how a structuralist
reading works. Okay, so all of this, according to this structuralist reading is
going to reflect this kind of opposition. This opposition is traced back to the most
important structure that structuralism is interested in, that's what's up here. And myths, as products of what's up here, are going to reflect how
what's up here works. So go off, be structuralists. Go binary hunting. When that tool is useful to you, and
when it isn't put it back in the box and pull out another one, maybe it's
going to be functionalism, and maybe, one of the other ones we introduce
as the course goes along.