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[ 9 ] Folkloristic Myth in Social Anthropology I: Malinowski, Boas, and Their Spheres of Influence In the four preceding chapters we have observed transcendentalist constructors of myth quick to buttress their theories with the authority of ethnographic evidence. But the decades of sedentary speculation based upon the likes of Frazer and the Cambridge Ritualists are also those of the rise of modern social anthropology, characterized by its own rite of initiation—systematic fieldwork. This activity goes its own way, developing a wealth of observation and hypothesis that seriously challenges, when it does not undermine altogether, the pretensions of much of the theorizing about myth represented in the last three chapters. Anthropological fieldworkers find the sort of storytelling they label “myth” to be far too deeply expressive of the interrelated social phenomena of given cultures to permit of its communicating a universal significance that transcends history. Even these observers do not escape unscathed from the consequences of applying to certain indigenous oral narratives the term “myth,” with all its romantic freight upon its back. But they profit immensely from the fact that their “myth” denotes actual performances in concrete social contexts. The following two chapters supply particulars of these very broad assertions. They focus especially upon three central theorists—Bronislaw Malinowski, Franz Boas, and Claude Lévi-Strauss—and to a lesser degree upon some of their predecessors and successors who have contributed to the construction of “myth” in twentiethcentury anthropology, especially English and American. This attention excludes a Folkloristic Myth in Social Anthropology I 203 number of distinguished contributors, Continental anthropologists in particular, who seem relatively dispensable here because their assumptions and conclusions reflect by now familiar thinking, especially of transcendentalist varieties. I have in mind, for instance, the quondam Freudian Géza Róheim; Wilhelm Schmidt, organizerandchieftheoristofthequestfor“highgods”behind“primitive”mythologies ; and Leo Frobenius, the inventor of an essentialized black African consciousness. The list might well include Frobenius’s student Adolph Jensen, whose work in New Guinea, like that of the French missionary and ethnographer Maurice Leenhardt in New Caledonia, is deeply affected by phenomenology of religion. It should also include Marcel Griaule and his co-workers, whose inductions by the Dogon of Nigeria into their intricate levels of symbolic thought return us to Frobenius’s essentializing. The most truly innovative theorizing about myth is the work of the more positivistic and pragmatic investigators in the English and American traditions, the latter including (as I will argue) Claude Lévi-Strauss. The two ethnographies commonly considered the foundation of modern social anthropology in England, Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific and RadcliffeBrown ’s Andaman Islanders, appeared in 1922, the year of Ulysses and The Waste Land. Interesting work has begun to appear in the last ten years exploring the historical and intellectual connections between literary modernism and the new anthropology.1 Both tend to foreground experimental design and valorize structural analysis, laying themselves open, consequently, to later generations’ accusations that they attempt to evade history. The two movements differ sharply, however, in their views of the ethnological evidence about the nature of myth. This divergence may be illustrated in many ways, but one particularly significant expression of it lies in their contrasting responses to Durkheim’s work. The literary modernists tend to read The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life as they do The Golden Bough. They envision a condition of group-think, sharers of an organically unified society celebrating this unity in a holistic, communal state of religious belief and practice. This is how Jane Harrison, T. S. Eliot, and D. H. Lawrence take Durkheim’s work on religion, and it is a reading (or misreading) they share with various social thinkers of the early century whose work provides some of the theoretical underpinnings of fascism. Meanwhile, the pioneers of social anthropology are inspired by a different Durkheim, one whose early and late work appears continuous in its advocacy of the interrelatedness of all cultural phenomena and of the need for sociological method that could isolate and analyze the functioning of the variables.2 As we’ve seen, Durkheim himself finds little place for myth among the “elementary forms” of religion. Onto this nearly blank slate, Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, and others project, in contradistinction to the “savage source within” conjured up by the creative artists, a Durkheimian conception of myth as one of the integral social functions of societies without writing. W. H. R. Rivers, to take a significant transitional example, publishes in Folk-Lore in 1912 an...

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