THEORIES OF MYTH

Theories of Myth

Theories of Myth

Introduction

An explanation that encompassed all myths had to concentrate on what made all myths alike and to ignore, though not to deny, what made individual myths distinctive. The term 'comparative method' was taken to refer to accounts of only the similarities among myths. Comparison has been crucial to the study of myth since the nineteenth century, when evolutionism and diffusionism, and, in reaction to them, functionalism and structuralism, generated the 'grand narratives' of human development.

Discussion

The focus was on the similarities among myths worldwide. Theories, which came above all from the newly emerged social sciences, sought to explain why myths were present all over the world. One operated comparatively not to learn how one myth or set of myths were unique but to learn how they were the same (Cohen 1999). That human beings, and therefore their artefacts, have much in common is undeniable. Any aspect of a culture, not just its myths, is a specific, local form of something found in other cultures as well. What was long ago called 'the psychic unity of mankind' doubtless still holds.

The question is whether differences still deserve a place. At one extreme stand cognitive scientists, who maintain that differences are overridden in importance by common mental processes. A pivotal element of the cognitive view is the emphasis on universal and 'pancultural' processes that underlie human behaviour (Pinker 2005). At the other extreme stand postmodernists, who maintain that cross-cultural comparisons and the search for general principles should not override the actor's point of view in narrating myths or the researcher's own point of view in analyzing myths.

If it was already clear long before postmodernism that myths, along with artistry, had to do with authority and power, it is now even clearer that the silenced voices in or behind myths must be identified. Moreover, the researcher does not work with a distant abstraction but invariably brings to bear the researcher's own experience and culture. We tend to explore the unexplored in terms of what we know. 

Classical mythology, together with Christian concepts of religion and with modern Western concepts of history and science, has provided the framework within which mythology has been analyzed. Narratives were considered myths if the stories were deemed true by those who narrated them and were about gods and other supernatural beings. In other words, myths had to mean 'sacred narratives.' It is easy, too easy, to lodge accusations of ethnocentrism, colonialism, and prejudice in the study of myth. But does it make sense to adopt would-be universal definitions and theories that in fact stem from local contexts? This ...