Assignment Paper 8 Cultural Studies

Name : Ruchita Kankrecha A.

Roll no. : 29

Paper no. : cultural studies

Class : sem 2

Topic : myth and Meaning by Levi – Strauss, chapter no 1. The Meeting of Myth and Science

Enrolment no. : 20691084190024

Email Id : ruchikankrecha06@gmail.com

College : Department of English

Submitted to : Department of English M. K Bhavnagar University.

About Author :

CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS was a leading social anthropologist. He was Born in 1908 and he was revered as the father of modern anthropology.

He was author of Myth and Meaning. He died in Paris in 2009.He held the chair of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France. He received numerous honors from universities and institutions throughout the world and has been called, alongside James George Frazer and Franz Boas, the "father of modern anthropology".Lévi-Strauss has identified the historiographical problems that are encountered when attempting to study mythology and oral cultures.

About his book :

Myth and Meaning is very interesting book. In this book we can find five main chapters.

1. The meeting of myth and science

2. 'primitive' thinking and the 'Civilized' mind

3. Harelips and twin : the splitting of myth

4. When myth become history

5. Myth and music.

In this book he Cracking the Code of Culture, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, Tristes Tropiques, Totemism, The Savage Mind, The Raw and the Cooked, From Honey to Ashes, and Structural Anthropology. The author explicates a little of his notion of science and its relationship to anthropological and structural analysis of myth. Ever since the rise of science and the scientific method in the seventeenth century, we have rejected mythology as the product of superstitious and primitive minds. Only now are we coming to a fuller appreciation of the nature and role of myth in human history. In these five lectures originally prepared for Canadian radio, Claude Lévi-Strauss offers, in brief summations, the insights of a lifetime spent interpreting myths and trying to discover their significance for human understanding. The first chapter begins with the discussion of the historical split between Mythology and Science. In his book, Myth and Meaning Lévi-Strauss presents a personalized narrative from his anthropological perspective of how and why humanity uses mythology to not only gain understandings about themselves and the world, but also to maintain an understanding of their history both as individuals and as members of a larger social network. Myth and Meaning consists of Lévi-Strauss personally responding to questions asked by an interviewer on topics ranging from The Meeting of Myth and Science to Primitive Thinking and the Civilized Mind to When Myth Becomes History. In this work Lévi-Strauss draws a much needed distinction between historical events, events that have happened in the past, and the meaning that these historical events possess. So, Lévi-Strauss presents,

 “A new understanding of mythology by arguing that myth is a language used by individuals in order to understand themselves and their place in the world.”

 In this assignment, I would like to talk about his first and very interesting chapter, “The Meeting of Myth and Science”.

-     The Meeting of Myth and Science :

What is Myth?

First of all what is myth? So myth is a traditional story, especially one concerning the early history of a people or explaining a natural or social phenomenon, and typically involving supernatural beings or events. The word myth derives from the Greek mythos which has a range of meanings from “word,” through “saying” and “story,” to “fiction”. The unquestioned validity of mythos can be contrasted with logos, the word whose validity or truth can be argued and demonstrated. Because myths narrate fantastic events with no attempt at proof, it is sometimes assumed that they are simply stories with no factual basis, and the word has become a synonym for falsehood or, at best, misconception. In the study of religion it is important to distinguish between myths and stories that are merely untrue.

Meeting between myth and Science :

The gap between science and mythical thought for the sake of finding a convenient name. With Bacon, Descartes, Newton, and the others, it was necessary for science to build itself up against the old generation of mythical and mystical thought. It was thought that science could only exist by turning its back the world of the senses. The sensory was a delusive world whereas the real world was a world of mathematical properties which could only be grasped by the intellect and which was entirely at odds with the false testimony of the senses. Now, he said that contemporary science is tending to overcome this gap and that more and more the sense data are being reintegrated into scientific exploration as something which has a meeting, which has truth and which can be explained.

For example, there was in philosophy from the time of the Greeks to the Eighteenth and even the nineteenth century and there still is to some extent, a treman, the idea of the time, the ideas of the circle. There were two classical theories :

1.      As a tabula rasa with nothing in it in the beginning. Everything comes from experience. It is from seeing a lot of round objects.

2.      Classical theory goes back to plato, whi claimed that such ideas of the circle are perfect.

Science has only two ways of proceeding :

1.      It is either reductionist

2.      Or structuralist

It is reductionist when it is possible to find out that very complex phenomenon on one level can be reduced to simpler phenomenon on other levels. For instance there is a lot in life which can be reduced to physicochemical processes which explain a part but not all.

Mythical stories are seem, arbitrary, meaningless, absurd, yet nevertheless they seem to reappear all over the world. A ‘fanciful’ creation of the mind in one place would be unique. You would not find the same creation in a completely different place. There is something very curious in semantics, that the word ‘meaning’ is probably in the whole language. What does ‘to mean’ mean?. He try to say that there has been a divorce, a necessary between scientific thought and what He called the logic of the concrete that is the respect for and the use of the data of the sense. We are witnessing the movement when this divorce will perhaps be overcome or reversed because modern science seems to be able to make progress not only in its own traditional line but still within the same narrow channel.

In this chapter, he may be subjected to the criticism of being called ‘Scientific’ or kind of blind believer in science who holds that science is able to solve absolutely all problems well. He certainly don’t believe that because he cannot conceive that a day will come when science will be complete and achieved. There will always be new problems and the exactly at the same pace as science is able to solve problems which were deemed philosophical a dozen years or a century ago. So there will appear new problems which had not hitherto been not perceived as such. There will always be a gap between the answer science is able to give us and the new question which this answer will raise. Science will never gives us all the answers.

The relevance of this chapter and its argument in cultural studies is something to be taken note of. Cultural studies, time and again has aimed at bringing the marginalized and mass cultures to the forefront. This particular chapter and its ending argument i.e science cannot give all the answers, can be well understood when we take into consideration those cultures and people who in Strauss in words are 'without writing'.