Anthropos: Anthropos, 100.2005

Anthropos, 100.2005

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Strukturtyp:: Zeitschrift

Werks-URN (URL):: https://digi.evifa.de/viewer/resolver?urn=urn:nbn:de:kobv:11-714820

URN:: urn:nbn:de:kobv:11-714820

Persistenter Identifier:: BV043334262

Titel:: Anthropos

Untertitel:: internationale Zeitschrift für Völker- u. Sprachenkunde

Erscheinungsort:: Fribourg

Verlag:: Ed. St. Paul

Erscheinungsjahr:: 1906

Sammlung:: Zeitschriften und Zeitungen > Zeitschriften zur Ethnologie

Wissensgebiet:: Sozial- und Kulturanthropologie > Allgemeines

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Strukturtyp:: Zeitschriftenband

Werks-URN (URL):: https://digi.evifa.de/viewer/resolver?urn=urn:nbn:de:kobv:11-711755

URN:: urn:nbn:de:kobv:11-711755

Persistenter Identifier:: 1510223378432

Titel:: Anthropos, 100.2005

Erscheinungsjahr:: 2005

Signatur:: LA 1118

Sammlung:: Zeitschriften und Zeitungen > Zeitschriften zur Ethnologie

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Strukturtyp:: Zeitschriftenheft

Titel:: Bd. 100, 2005, Heft 1

Sammlung:: Zeitschriften und Zeitungen > Zeitschriften zur Ethnologie

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Strukturtyp:: Zeitschriftenartikel

Titel:: [Berichte und Kommentare] Reflections on Meaning and Myth. Claude Lévi-Strauss Revisited

Sonstige Person:: Philen, Robert C.

Sammlung:: Zeitschriften und Zeitungen > Zeitschriften zur Ethnologie

222 Berichte und Kommentare Anthropos 100.2005 ther, though there may be “natural” connections between twins, harelips, and those born feetfirst, as explained in “Myth and Meaning” (that is, there may be connections that follow from Native American conceptions of twinhood in terms of split persons and difficult childbirth, and hence the respective connections with harelips [partially split persons] and breech births [difficult childbirthl), there is no necessary reason why these particular mythic elements should receive so much empha sis. While on one level these are impressively Pan-American mythic associations or mythemes (the minimal meaningful constituent elements of myth), at another, they are only Pan-American and not universal. There’s no necessary reason for the conceptualization of twinhood upon which the associations are made, and hence no necessary reason for the Pan-American equivalence between harelips, twins, and those born feetfirst. So, for Lévi-Strauss, the mind provides a basic structur ing mechanism independent of material exigencies - setting him apart from materialist explanations of myth, but mythic content is culturally transmit ted and diffused - even if potentially over quite broad areas - setting him also apart from Carl Jung or Joseph Campbell, for whom the inherent archetypal content of myth is often quite specific. Mythic thought is arbitrary. (It may address environmental context or the material needs of the culture in question - as in the myth of the skate defeating the South Wind - but in no way need it do so.) But it is not random. Rather it is patterned with its elements arranged in structural relation to one another. Myth means the way language means, and of course it is ultimately built through language (and in Lévi-Strauss’ work, upon language as understood by Saussure) - though in a particular way that, drawing upon the French personage of the “bricoleur,” a sort of jack-of-all- trades or odds and ends man, Lévi-Strauss called “bricolage” (1966: 21): Mythical thought builds structured sets by means of a structured set, namely language. But it is not at the structural level that it makes use of it: it builds ideological castles out of the debris of what was once a social discourse. So, myth is work of the mind, but using cultural codes. Elsewhere, Lévi-Strauss discusses the dif ficulty of pinning down the meaning of “mean ing” (1979), a quest which should have been (and largely was) abandoned long ago, if by meaning is meant some sort of inherent and always self present essence. For example, C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards state in “The Meaning of Meaning” (1946: 248 f.; parenthetical note added): One interesting effect of such an exposition [of philo sophical discourse on meaning] is that it forces us for the time being to abandon the term “meaning” itself, and to substitute either other terms, such as “intention,” “value,” “referent,” “emotion” for which it is being used as a synonym, or the expanded symbol which, contrary to expectation, emerges after a little trouble. Meaning as an inherent term is abandoned in favor of terms which simply signify or refer, a situation which for a time left some, such as the early Wittgenstein, with the sense that there was nothing to say, or rather nothing that could be said (1922: 183; Proposition 6.41): The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value - and if there were, it would be of no value. If there is a value which is of value, it must lie outside all happening and being-so. For all happening and being-so is accidental. What makes it non-accidental cannot lie in the world, for otherwise this would again be accidental. This is followed a bit later by the more famous final propositions of the “Tractatus Logico-Philo- sophicus” (1922: 189; Propositions 6.54 and 7): My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. Lévi-Strauss (1979) posits that meaning is to be found in terms of translatability, wherein things are transposed or related in terms of one anoth er, an activity dependent upon code or structure providing order through which such transposition or relation may take place. It is clear then that for Lévi-Strauss, “meaning” is not the meaning of inherent self-presence, and hence it is not bound by the ultimate shortcomings of Wittgenstein’s correspondence theory of truth wherein the atom ic constituents of propositions must correspond one-to-one with atomic constituents of the world to be deemed meaningful and further wherein one can ultimately speak of very little. Rather, though Lévi-Strauss hasn’t abandoned “meaning” altogether (as Ogden and Richards suggest one

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