Page 76 - Decoding Culture

E N TER STRUCTURALISM 69

of works, he sought to uncover the elements out of which all myths
were constructed.
Leavening Saussurian structuralism with a focus on universal,
unconscious structures and a method grounded in basic binary
distinctions leads Levi-Strauss to a series of esoteric, complex, and
sometimes all but impenetrable works of detailed analysis. At its
simplest, this involves taking diverse myths, breaking them into
their constituent units - in the early stages he called them
'mythemes' - and trying to show how their combinations and per­
mutations, their inversions and transformations, can be understood
in terms of fundamental binary oppositions such as those between
Life and Death, Nature and Culture, Raw and Cooked. But as he
progresses from the basic argument of his famous 1955 essay The
Structural Study of Myth' (1972: 206-231) through the four vol­
umes of M y thologiques (1970, 1973, 1978, 1990) , it becomes
increasingly difficult to accept his ingenious interpretative
accounts at face value. As Culler (1975: 47) observes, in the context
of a broadly sympathetic critique: 'when, as is so often the case,
Levi-Strauss compares two myths from different cultures and
claims to derive their meaning from the relations between them,
his analysis may become very problematic indeed. There is no a
Priori reason to think that the myths have anything to do with one
another.' No a Priori reason, that is, other than Levi-Strauss' con­
viction that his method allows him to reveal structures which
derive from the basic categories of human thought.
What Levi-Strauss is doing in his myth analysis is offering com­
plex, conjunctive readings of networks of texts with a view to
establishing the set of elements of which they are all transforma­
tions. The appeal of such a strategy to the youthful cultural studies
of the late 1960s and early 1970s will be immediately apparent,
especially where popular cultural genres could be directly likened
to myths, and for a brief period Levi-Straussian structuralist

Copyrighted Material